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Forcepoint Secure Web Gateway vs Fortinet FortiProxy comparison

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Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Dec 4, 2024

Review summaries and opinions

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:
 

Categories and Ranking

iboss
Sponsored
Ranking in Secure Web Gateways (SWG)
6th
Average Rating
8.4
Reviews Sentiment
7.1
Number of Reviews
23
Ranking in other categories
Internet Security (3rd), Web Content Filtering (1st), Cloud Access Security Brokers (CASB) (6th), ZTNA as a Service (6th), Secure Access Service Edge (SASE) (6th)
Forcepoint Secure Web Gateway
Ranking in Secure Web Gateways (SWG)
10th
Average Rating
7.8
Reviews Sentiment
6.5
Number of Reviews
56
Ranking in other categories
Internet Security (4th), Web Content Filtering (5th)
Fortinet FortiProxy
Ranking in Secure Web Gateways (SWG)
14th
Average Rating
8.0
Reviews Sentiment
6.3
Number of Reviews
11
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
 

Mindshare comparison

As of September 2026, in the Secure Web Gateways (SWG) category, the mindshare of iboss is 3.4%, up from 2.2% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Forcepoint Secure Web Gateway is 2.7%, down from 4.0% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Fortinet FortiProxy is 2.1%, down from 5.1% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Secure Web Gateways (SWG) Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
iboss3.4%
Forcepoint Secure Web Gateway2.7%
Fortinet FortiProxy2.1%
Other91.8%
Secure Web Gateways (SWG)
 

Featured Reviews

Ashok Ananthula - PeerSpot reviewer
Senior Consultant Proxy Engineering at a financial services firm with 10,001+ employees
Cloud gateway has strengthened remote web security and now needs better Mac and ISP support
The problem our organization had is that iboss failed for the Mac devices. It is not able to give a successful agent for the Mac agents. That is where in 2025, we had to migrate to the Palo Alto-based platform. If your use case is for just Windows laptops,you can consider this platform as an option One issue is the data center resiliency part. In India especially, they are not tied up with the Tier 1 ISPs like Tata or Airtel; they were having Tier 2 ISPs and encountered many issues reaching few major sites that my organization depends on, and they were having problems that they could not fix quickly. They also lack a mechanism to route that traffic within their data center; rather, they ask customers to make a pac file change to route it to Singapore explicitly. It would be better if they route from their backend , i mean even if I send it to India DC, they should be able to route it internally to make that work; however, they fail to do that and ask the customer to route it in the pac file. Another suggestion is that in China, they do not have the proper setup; they used to have numerous problems with slowness and lack of premium circuits in China as well. That leads to multiple sites working slowly with latency-related issues. So the main issue is the ISP-related problems that need to be solved.
reviewer1047669 - PeerSpot reviewer
PS & Technical Manager at a tech services company with 11-50 employees
Has faced usability challenges while managing integrated components
We are working with web gateway and full endpoint security. URL filter is a notable feature. While it is not specifically related to Forcepoint Secure Web Gateway alone, if you have the complete Forcepoint solution, it can integrate with other Forcepoint products, such as DLP solution and email gateway. The URL filter of Forcepoint Secure Web Gateway is good for web gateway. Clients and consumers do not prefer it because the interface is not good. When using FSM with DLP, web gateway, and email gateway, upgrades cannot be performed simultaneously since Forcepoint Secure Web Gateway might need an upgrade while email gateway does not, despite having the same manager controlling them. Forcepoint Secure Web Gateway works well with banking and small companies. Email gateway is less needed as everything is moving to the cloud.
Emmanuel Dasho - PeerSpot reviewer
Cyber Security Engineer | Network/Security at GCET
Ease of configuration and seamless integration enhance operational efficiency
The App Control feature in the Fortinet FortiProx * Deep Packet Inspection (DPI): FortiProxy analyzes traffic at the application layer to detect applications even if they use non-standard ports or are encrypted. * Application Signatures: Uses FortiGuard’s application signature database (constantly updated) to recognize thousands of applications. * Policy Enforcement: You can create policies to Allow, Block, Monitor, or Shape (QoS) based on application type, category, or specific apps.

Quotes from Members

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:
 

Pros

"The security aspect of the solution, particularly the malware behind it, is excellent. That's something that really helped us out. It's not just a simple proxy that just blocks the insights of potential threats that come on behind it. They do malware detection and that helps us a lot."
"iboss has significantly lowered the number of security incidents. It is crazy how much it blocks and how much it is aware of the outside danger."
"It was a very easy product to install. It can be deployed very fast."
"From a use-case scenario, what I like the most is the plug-in. I like the fact that we can do the filtering of these devices offsite independent of the network they are connected to, and we do not have to have traffic coming back inside our network."
"I would definitely recommend iboss for web filtering purposes to other organizations or individuals."
"This product is solid, fairly easy to use, and reliable."
"iboss is among the few products providing inline filtering where no application is needed on the device. It operates on the network side and is not device-based. This feature was one of the main reasons why we stayed with them for so long."
"We were impressed by the solution's mental health function, which can detect if someone needs help. It scans what users are browsing and flags warning signs so we can check to see if they are okay. We've had to use it a couple of times."
"Forcepoint Secure Web Gateway has improved our organization through its ease of use."
"The most valuable feature of Forcepoint Web Security is creating the easy to install further policies that are deployed through the Forcepoint security manual at some stage. Just drag and drop and the policies are there."
"The critical role is web URL filtering."
"The Sandbox is a very useful solution for sand-boxing malware / phishing etc. from corporate email accounts."
"The most valuable feature is the ability to allow or block sites by category."
"It efficiently categorizes which sites should not be accessed during work hours."
"The spam filter is very effective."
"In terms of performance, Forcepoint stands out because it is more scalable than any other solution. It can extend to different types of boxes and integrate well with other platforms and vendors. And it doesn't need to have the same kind of box or throughput to have high availability."
"It helps to secure the networks at the DNA level and ensure proper identification and filtering of DNS traffic."
"It is a really stable solution."
"The most valuable features of Fortinet FortiProxy are its simplicity and performance."
"We can use Fortinet FortiProxy configuration for your network."
"The tool's most valuable feature is traffic inspections."
"The solution's stability is good."
"I liked the tool's ability to provide detailed access control. For example, we could allow users to watch YouTube videos but not post comments. This level of control wasn't available in FortiGate."
"The most valuable feature is intrusion prevention (IPS) and antivirus profiles. These features help control user activity, ensuring that they access only permitted websites and protects from downloading viruses."
 

Cons

"iboss can be improved because the integration could be better; you need to import all the sites that you access today, and there are a few problems whenever you import thousands of websites, making the integration process messy for the users."
"File integrity monitoring would be very advantageous as an additional feature."
"The dashboards for local use could be better."
"I appreciate that iboss's single pane of glass console gives centralized visibility into web traffic, user activity, security policies, and alerts from one dashboard, allowing us to quickly investigate incidents and monitor policy violations without switching between multiple tools, improving operational efficiency; however, the dashboard customization and reporting could be more flexible."
"Sometimes the agent stops working in iboss, and we have to reinstall the agent."
"I am currently doing a PoC of the zero trust aspect of it. Compared to other similar solutions, it is hard to get around each feature. It takes a while to get used to it."
"If they could implement an extra security layer preventing access to iboss from the open internet, it would be great."
"Sometimes, obviously, there are bugs."
"The performance issues in the product are an area of concern where improvements are required."
"I would suggest focusing on improving the GUI's stability, especially when implementing new filters or patches."
"We are using a V10000 G3 appliance. It is just a proxy. It is just HTTP, FTP, and HTTPS. Now, as our website has developed and we are using rich time-connectivity protocols, the proxy doesn't have the ability to work with these protocols. It would be nice if the UDP feature was there for it to filter UDP traffic. It needs firewall capabilities for UDP filtering. Its upgrades can be quite complex, and they don't always go as per the plan. Its reporting could be a bit more granular."
"The availability of clusters is limited, and the product is very unstable. The development team is slow as well."
"The latest deployment was a fairly smooth transition, but previous upgrades and hardware replacements have been very painful."
"Reports in the sand-boxing, ease of deployment of sensors to ready to go server with one click of a button."
"To access the root of the product for troubleshooting you must have a data engineer. This is the big issue with Forcepoint. The support community is not good."
"The technical support team's response time could be improved."
"The hardware version is stable, but the VM version is not stable and contains bugs that cause issues."
"Its power supply process for some of the proxies needs improvement."
"Fortinet FortiProxy should improve by adding more documentation and guides."
"For me it may be the wildcards for URLs whitelist or blacklist, somehow the page loads."
"Fortinet FortiProxy should integrate AI/ML technologies. Its pricing needs to be more flexible."
"Integration with existing infrastructure was generally easy, especially if you had tools like LDAP. However, I had to go through a lot of documentation as it was my first time working with a proxy server. We did experience some issues with certain web applications not working properly after implementing Fortinet FortiProxy."
"I see that the solution's interface is not in French...It would be good for our company if we could have the tool interface in French."
"Its web filtering capabilities could be improved."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"It is not expensive, and it is also not cheap. iboss is priced right in the sweet spot for the number of features it offers."
"We have not priced the solution recently, but they were competitive with other vendors in the past."
"It is probably in line with other solutions, but I do not deal with the financial side."
"We had the cost of purchasing a new appliance along with the implementation and licensing costs. However, the following year, the cost of just licensing was similar to what was paid the previous year for a new appliance along with the implementation and licensing costs."
"It is expensive compared to one of its competitors."
"The overall pricing for iboss is very competitive and transparent."
"Compared to the other products in the market, Forcepoint Secure Web Gateway can be a cost-effective tool."
"The pricing for Forcepoint Secure Web Gateway is expensive. You pay per user and functionality. I'd rate it a four on a scale of one to ten."
"The solution's pricing is competitive."
"The price of this product should be reduced to make it more competitive."
"The cost for Forcepoint Secure Web Gateway is lower than that for Zscaler and Netskope. It could be around $4 per user annually."
"It is a well-priced option."
"Licensing is flexible. License pricing information is based on the customer, their environment, and on the future approach."
"Expensive, but with a good reseller you can get a very good price."
"It can be considered expensive, with a limited lifespan and support that eventually requires updating to newer solutions."
"It is a cost-effective solution."
"Price-wise, Fortinet FortiProxy is moderate - not the highest among competitors, but not cheap either."
"It offers a more cost-effective solution than alternatives like FortiMail, FortiGate, and various Barracuda devices."
"The tool's pricing is in the middle."
"The solution is neither too expensive nor very cheap."
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911,602 professionals have used our research since 2012.
 

Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
11%
Manufacturing Company
9%
Computer Software Company
8%
Construction Company
7%
Financial Services Firm
10%
Comms Service Provider
10%
Construction Company
9%
Outsourcing Company
9%
Financial Services Firm
12%
Computer Software Company
11%
Government
7%
Construction Company
7%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business11
Midsize Enterprise8
Large Enterprise10
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business23
Midsize Enterprise6
Large Enterprise29
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business7
Midsize Enterprise1
Large Enterprise3
 

Questions from the Community

What needs improvement with iboss?
I think iboss could be improved by making reporting and dashboard customization more flexible, and simplifying troubl...
What is your primary use case for iboss?
I use iboss as a cloud-based secure web gateway to provide secure internet access, web filtering, and protect remote ...
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for iboss?
My experience with iboss's pricing structure, setup cost, and licensing model has been positive, straightforward, and...
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Forcepoint Secure Web Gateway?
I would rate pricing for Forcepoint Secure Web Gateway a two out of ten. It's really expensive.
What needs improvement with Forcepoint Secure Web Gateway?
Forcepoint Secure Web Gateway is not endpoint security. If we have a chance to change, we would change it because it ...
What is your primary use case for Forcepoint Secure Web Gateway?
We have no big project, but we are trying to sell it in the market here. We are working with Forcepoint because there...
What needs improvement with Fortinet FortiProxy?
For me it may be the wildcards for urls whitelist or blacklist, somehow the page loads. Aside from that there no other..
What advice do you have for others considering Fortinet FortiProxy?
My advice to others who are considering Fortinet FortiProxy is that it is seamless, easy to use, and quite straightfo...
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Fortinet FortiProxy?
Fortinet FortiProxy is much cheaper compared to other products like Cisco, Palo Alto, and others. It is reasonably pr...
 

Also Known As

iBoss Cloud Platform
Forcepoint SWG, Websense Web Security, Forcepoint TRITON
FortiProxy
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

More than 4,000 global enterprises trust the iboss Cloud Platform to support their modern workforces, including a large number of Fortune 50 companies.
Adventist Health, Alphawest, Amadori, Anoka County, Compartamos Banco, Davies Turner, EverBank, iGATE, Karlstad Municipality, Lake Michigan Credit Union, Scavolini, Smurfit Kappa, Toyota
Information Not Available
Find out what your peers are saying about Forcepoint Secure Web Gateway vs. Fortinet FortiProxy and other solutions. Updated: August 2026.
911,602 professionals have used our research since 2012.