Varonis Platform vs Zscaler Zero Trust Exchange Platform comparison

Varonis and Zscaler are both solutions in the Data Loss Prevention (DLP) category. Varonis is ranked #9 with an average rating of 8.0, while Zscaler is ranked #3 with an average rating of 8.4. Additionally, 92% of Varonis users are willing to recommend the solution, compared to 98% of Zscaler users who would recommend it.

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Executive SummaryUpdated on Jan 12, 2025

Zscaler Zero Trust Exchange Platform and Varonis Platform compete in the realm of cloud security and data management. Zscaler appears to have an edge with features such as cloud integration and user-friendly deployment, while Varonis focuses heavily on data monitoring and compliance.

Features: Zscaler offers seamless cloud integration with single-side logon, automatic VPN connections, and comprehensive security controls. Its ease of deployment with minimal setup requirements is notable. Varonis specializes in monitoring sensitive data, preventing overexposure, and provides enhanced compliance and data management features with in-depth reporting and sensitivity analysis.

Room for Improvement: Zscaler could improve in speed, bandwidth, and legacy system support, as well as increase granularity in SSL inspection. Varonis could enhance its remediation processes and streamline its interface. Users have reported slow calculation speeds with large datasets and desire tighter DLP integration.

Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: Zscaler supports adaptable deployment across public, private, and hybrid clouds; however, its technical support receives mixed reviews about responsiveness. Varonis favors on-premises and hybrid deployments, praised for effective infrastructure support and professional, responsive technical support.

Pricing and ROI: Zscaler is known for higher pricing based on user count and location, with mixed opinions on cost justification. Varonis offers detailed modular pricing that can be costly depending on feature selection. Both platforms provide positive ROI by addressing crucial security needs, with Varonis catering more toward larger enterprises with complex data requirements.

To learn more, read our detailed Varonis Platform vs. Zscaler Zero Trust Exchange Platform Report (Updated: April 2025).

Buyer's Guide

Varonis Platform vs. Zscaler Zero Trust Exchange Platform

April 2025

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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

Cloudflare

Featured Reviews

Spencer Malmad

Owner at Tech Exchange

It's easy to set up because you point the DNS to it, and it's working in under 15 minutes

Cloudflare is highly scalable. Cloudflare is a system with a web portal that the end users like me see. It's a console where we can adjust the DNS, caching, and security features all in that console. Cloudflare owns thousands of servers across the world that cache the data. It's a powerful solution. When clients sign up for Cloudflare, they're getting this monster content delivery network, security, and a web application firewall in one. It's all rolled into one, and it's massive. Unless you have your website hosted on a massive hosting provider, there's no way that you can deliver the amount of data that Cloudflare can provide to the end users. If you have static content, there's no way that you can ever match what Cloudflare can do. Obviously, there are competitors to Cloudflare that do the same, but I'm saying other types of solutions. Let's say you go with F5. Great, that's on-prem. That's in your colo. You can't deliver as much data to the internet as you can with a CDN. You don't have to spend $20,000 on a net scaler, F5, or whatever Cisco's selling now. You don't have to buy that. You pay them $50 a month or $150 a month. It's totally worth it because even in five years, you'll never get the performance value, not just the actual ROI. You have to consider how much throughput you can get with Cloudflare.

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Frederic Delos

Senior Cloud Engineer at a financial services firm with 10,001+ employees

Offers the ability to identify sensitive areas, allowing you to drill down into the sensitive data

The most effective feature for me is its ability to identify sensitive areas, allowing you to drill down into the sensitive data, provided you have access, to determine whether it's a false positive or a true positive. That's the best thing for me, out of all of it. It's got everything, like other ones, but I like to be able to look at something if I'm doing forensics on the alert and say, "Okay, do I really need to do something with this?" For example, we don't want sensitive data in our OneDrive. So it identifies the sensitive data that's possibly in the OneDrive. And what I can do is look at it and identify whether it's actually sensitive data in Datalert or whether it looks like sensitive data, but I know it's a false positive. If it is a false positive, I can basically say ignore this pattern based on X, Y, and Z, you know, whether it's Redjax or keyword proximity. So I like that. With other tools, I gotta go through a whole process because it's a little bit more complex. Here, I can tag it and bag it in one shot. And the next good time I scan, it slips over it. So it helps in that.

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Sumit Bhanwala

architect at Tata Consultancy

Cloud-based platform simplifies device and data center management

I find it to be good. The solution is cloud-based with the latest inspection engines, which I find to be amazing. We are less dependent on data centers and device management, which reduces our efforts significantly. It improves our device management, data center management, and updating devices. We need fewer engineers for this management, and it reduces time and efforts for data center management, device upgrades, and IT support.

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Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"DDoS attacks target unprotected machines. Cloudflare detects and stops these attacks using internal systems. It identifies incoming DDoS attacks, issuing challenges or blocking them immediately."

"The most valuable features of the solution are performance and security."

"The most valuable feature of Cloudflare DNS is its global reach and it is always evolving."

"The web application firewall brought us good security and a view of the accesses/blocks of the entire domain and subdomain that were accessed both by region (country) and IPs."

"The solution automatically detects and responds to certain types of traffic based on geolocation."

"Cloudflare allows us to self-host services such as Rocket.Chat and Node-RED, in high-availability mode, thanks to round robin DNS which allows us to share one hostname between our two locations."

"I like Cloudflare's application gateway and DDoS protection."

"When using services like Heroku, Cloudflare is very useful for CNAME flattening. I also use it for their end-to-end SSL with TLS authentication on nginx for securing servers."

More Cloudflare pros

"Technical support from Varonis is rated as nine out of ten."

"That alerting and reporting service is great."

"The solution's classification engine is highly configurable and efficient."

"The 24/7 support is the most valuable feature. They have been able to answer support questions pretty quickly."

"Varonis Platform is transparent and captures everything in the environment without impacting the performance. The tool helps us unify data feeds into a single reporting system."

"Varonis offers robust data access governance, allowing us to understand which sensitive data exists and who has access to it."

"The solution ensures that users have not accidentally shared sensitive information with the wrong people or too many people."

"It can easily identify unusual behavior or access patterns that may pose a potential threat, while operating as a unified reporting system."

More Varonis Platform pros

"The most valuable features of Zscaler Private Access are its ability to integrate with multiple IDPs and application segmentation."

"It has some good data security and WIP features, providing secure Internet access."

"The Live Logs are a cool feature. We can directly identify issues and divert user traffic."

"The most valuable feature is its ability to establish connectivity for remote users and remote endpoints. It offers a high level of granularity compared to typical VPNs, which also encapsulate a lot of I/O."

"It has been helpful in maintaining our infrastructure. The granular level control it offers allows us to set application policies per application for each user."

"Has a good zero trust feature."

"Zscaler Cloud DLP provides you with basic DLP features that you get out of the box such as keywords, regular expressions, and data identifiers, for example, your social security numbers, and credit card numbers, with everything built into the product, so you can directly use those features within the policies. You don't need to create it from scratch, and to me, this is the biggest benefit of Zscaler Cloud DLP. You have a lot of templates to choose from in the solution, rather than having to create templates from scratch or reinvent templates."

"The most valuable feature is the manageability of the micro tunnels."

More Zscaler Zero Trust Exchange Platform pros

Cons

"They lack a good way to manage DNS as a company, since everything is relegated to single account logins until you get to the higher levels. They have come out with a paid feature to remedy this, but I have not had a chance to fully review it yet to know if it fixes the access problem."

"We're facing challenges due to an upgrade in the machine learning model. The problem arises from some users abusing the APIs, resulting in an influx of suspicious traffic. Cloudflare's learning model mistakenly identifies this traffic as human. Consequently, it assigns it a higher trust score, akin to legitimate human traffic, causing complications in our architecture. Previously, such traffic would have been categorized as suspicious, enabling us to apply appropriate blocking rules. However, we encounter difficulties distinguishing between genuine and suspicious traffic with the new categorization. Despite these challenges, overall, Cloudflare remains the preferred solution compared to Azure, AWS CloudFront, and Google Cloud Armor."

"In the last two years, there has been a certain amount of downtime when using the VDM."

"Cloudflare could be improved by introducing a mid-tier pricing option."

"Areas like how assessment, discovery, and payload are dealt with and how it all comes into your organization can be considered when trying to make suggestions to Cloudflare for improvements."

"We have noticed multiple instances where Cloudflare falsely indicates that our servers are down, even when there is no actual load on them. This makes it challenging for us to identify the exact issue."

"Sometimes their more advanced caching tools can cause higher first-byte times and problems with JavaScript."

"Latencies are always a problem."

More Cloudflare cons

"We have Microsoft Office 365. I just saw an article today which says that they're actually getting integrated with Microsoft Office 365, which would be a useful feature. For user-based reports, log on activity, and stuff like that, it doesn't seem to really be present like Log360. That could just be my inexperience with it. I've been dealing with it for only about two and a half months."

"For unstructured data monitoring, it's one of the top ones, if not the top one, due to its usability."

"Varonis requires more access permissions for its core functions compared to competitors, which can be a concern for companies about data safety."

"The remediation process can be improved. There will be no existing permission group for the McAfee channel domains. We can create a new permissions group for the required folder."

"There is one thing that if I add something manually, I get so many alerts. That's the biggest bad thing."

"The GUI should be more functional. There should be a process for connecting through Chrome, Internet Explorer, etc."

"The solution's interface is a little complicated with regard to setting up filters and reports."

"The solution's areas of improvement are the interface and the dependency on on-premises deployment for some components."

More Varonis Platform cons

"The product is not reliable."

"Setup is a bit complex because there are many steps that need to be taken before onboarding and activating the solution."

"It needs to offer SSO, single sign-on, and items of that nature."

"There is some issue while accessing the portal. It takes too long."

"The pre-defined dictionaries could be improved."

"More on-prem infrastructure is required when Zscaler Private Access is to be implemented as a single point of entry."

"What could be improved in Zscaler Private Access is its notification. For example, if there's a speed issue, there should be a pop-up that alerts the user about it. If there is a network quality issue, for example, it isn't good enough to connect to, or the network quality is bad, there should be a notification from the solution. Zscaler Private Access also needs improvement in terms of its interface and security."

"The connectivity monitoring part should be included in the core license without any extra charges."

More Zscaler Zero Trust Exchange Platform cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The solution is expensive when compared to other products but offers unlimited bandwidth."

"The product's pricing is cheap."

"There are no additional costs beyond the standard licensing fees."

"The pricing for the service is reasonable, neither excessively cheap nor prohibitively expensive. It aligns well with the value of their solution."

"The pricing depends on the usage, but the cheapest would be around 5,000 USD a month."

"The solution has many features but there are ones that you need to pay for. Sometimes you have to find out which is available for free and which you have to pay for."

"The product's pricing is minimal compared to other products."

"When you compare Cloudflare DNS to other solutions, such as Akamai, the price is reasonable."

More Cloudflare pricing and cost advice

"I would rate the pricing an eight out of ten, with ten being the most expensive."

"You could do a subscription, where you pay yearly, or you could purchase it outright. The licensing cost is based on the number of users on the system that you are monitoring."

"The platform is expensive. I rate the pricing a nine out of ten."

"Licensing is on an annual basis. Maintenance and renewal fees are separate. Varonis Datalert is quite expensive."

"Varonis Platform wasn't certainly the cheapest solution."

"The pricing is good. It neither expensive nor cheap. It is average."

"It's expensive, kind of, really expensive."

"The pricing is quite high, especially when it comes to the gateway."

"The pricing is expensive and on the higher end. Honestly, in my opinion, it is not worth the price."

"The solution is expensive."

"It's expensive currently. But when purchasing for a large number of users, there's room to negotiate. It's really up to the procurement team."

"It is an auto-renewal subscription service."

"As per industry leads, Zscaler CASB is an expensive solution."

"The product has reasonable pricing."

"Zscaler SASE software is quite expensive compared to other solutions"

More Zscaler Zero Trust Exchange Platform pricing and cost advice

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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Educational Organization

19%

Computer Software Company

13%

Comms Service Provider

Financial Services Firm

16%

Computer Software Company

11%

Manufacturing Company

10%

Insurance Company

Computer Software Company

16%

Financial Services Firm

13%

Manufacturing Company

10%

Insurance Company

Company Size

By reviewers

Large Enterprise

Midsize Enterprise

Small Business

Questions from the Community

Which is the best DDoS protection solution for a big ISP for monitoring and mitigating?

Cloudflare. We are moving from Akamai prolexic to Cloudflare. Cloudflare anycast network outperforms Akamai static GR...

See all answers

Which would you choose - Cloudflare DNS or Quad9?

Cloudflare DNS is a very fast, very reliable public DNS resolver. It is an enterprise-grade authoritative DNS service...

See all answers

What do you like most about Cloudflare?

Cloudflare offers CDN and DDoS protection. We have the front end, API, and database in how you structure applications.

See all answers

What do you like most about Varonis Platform?

The solution has significantly improved data security and compliance posture by allowing us to track and monitor acti...

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What needs improvement with Varonis Platform?

Varonis started as an on-premises solution and is transitioning to cloud. It hasn't fully moved yet, which is an area...

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What is your primary use case for Varonis Platform?

The primary use case for Varonis Platform is data discovery, specifically for discovering sensitive data in our organ...

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What is the better solution - Prisma Access or Zscaler Private Access?

We looked into Prisma Access before choosing Zscaler Private Access (ZPA). Palo Alto’s Prisma Access is a secure ac...

See all answers

What do you like most about Zscaler SASE?

The most valuable features of Zscaler Private Access are reliability, scalability, and availability.

See all answers

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Zscaler SASE?

Zscaler SASE is quite expensive compared to other solutions. The price is not fixed and it does not include all of th...

See all answers

Comparisons

Quad9 vs Cloudflare

Compared 50% of the time

Akamai vs Cloudflare

Compared 4% of the time

Azure Front Door vs Cloudflare

Compared 4% of the time

Azure DNS vs Cloudflare

Compared 3% of the time

Amazon Route 53 vs Cloudflare

Compared 2% of the time

More Cloudflare Competitors

Microsoft Purview Data Governance vs Varonis Platform

Compared 17% of the time

BigID vs Varonis Platform

Compared 12% of the time

Cyera vs Varonis Platform

Compared 12% of the time

Wiz vs Varonis Platform

Compared 6% of the time

CrowdStrike Falcon vs Varonis Platform

Compared 3% of the time

More Varonis Platform Competitors

Cato SASE Cloud Platform vs Zscaler Zero Trust Exchange Platform

Compared 11% of the time

Microsoft Purview Data Loss Prevention vs Zscaler Zero Trust Exchange Platform

Compared 10% of the time

Prisma Access by Palo Alto Networks vs Zscaler Zero Trust Exchange Platform

Compared 7% of the time

FortiSASE vs Zscaler Zero Trust Exchange Platform

Compared 6% of the time

Netskope Private Access vs Zscaler Zero Trust Exchange Platform

Compared 5% of the time

More Zscaler Zero Trust Exchange Platform Competitors

Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

Cloudflare

April 2025

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Buyer's Guide

Varonis Platform

March 2025

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Buyer's Guide

Zscaler Zero Trust Exchange Platform

March 2025

Zscaler Zero Trust Exchange Platform report

Download Zscaler Zero Trust Exchange Platform product report

Also Known As

Cloudflare DNS

No data available

Zscaler SASE, Zscaler DLP, Zscaler CASB, Zscaler CSPM, Zscaler Browser Isolation, Zscaler Posture Control

Overview

Cloudflare is a highly-regarded Content Delivery Network (CDN) and a Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) protection solution. The robust global connectivity cloud platform that is Cloudflare ensures users are able to connect to the Internet quickly, securely, and reliably. Cloudflare is one of the world's largest networks in the marketplace today. Using Cloudflare, businesses, educational entities, NGOs, vloggers, bloggers, and anyone else with an internet presence can experience more secure, faster websites and applications.

Currently, there are millions of Internet locations on Cloudflare, and the Cloudflare network
continues to grow every day by the thousands. The solution is able to fulfill the requests for
millions of websites seamlessly and serves on average 45 million HTTP requests per second.

Cloudflare has safe, secure data centers in close to 300 cities worldwide to ensure every
client request is filled as quickly as possible. It is Cloudflare’s edge network that makes this
possible by keeping content and other services as close to each client as possible, so the
information requests are always only seconds away.

Many organizations that work in democracy, civil society, human rights, or the arts are able to
access Cloudflare's highest levels of protection for free via Project Galileo. Additionally, official
election websites can be secured from hacking and fraud through Cloudflare’s Project
Athenian, also at no additional cost.

Cloudflare can also help organizations of all sizes develop a robust zero-trust strategy to
ensure the highest levels of productivity and profitability. Employees, stakeholders, and end users have a greater level of satisfaction and overall improved user experience, which can, in
turn, result in higher revenues and overall ROI. Zero-trust and BYOD (bring your own device)
access ensure end users and employees always have the best resources and technology
available to them at all times.

Cloudflare benefits

Cloudflare has many benefits. Some of its most valuable benefits include:

- Faster load times

- Robust DNS security

- Intuitive cloud Web Application Firewall (WAF)

- Free universal SSL

- Image enhancement

- Automatic browser caching

- Next-generation cloud load balancer

- Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP)

- Rate limiting

- Minification

- Zero-trust capabilities

- Cost-effective

- Reduced carbon footprint

Reviews from real users

“Many websites require an SSL certificate because they sell stuff and want SSL. Cloudflare
comes with an SSL certificate built in. It's automatic. You sign yourself up for Cloudflare, and
an SSL certificate automatically protects your website. If you have a connection between your
website and your host, the server, Cloudflare, and the host, you don't necessarily need a
certificate.” Spencer M., Owner at Tech Exchange

“What I like best about Cloudflare is that my company can use it to trace and manage
applications and monitor traffic. The solution tells you if there's a spike in traffic. Cloudflare
also sends you a link to check your equipment and deployment and track it through peering,
so it's a valuable tool.” Daniel P., Network Engineer at Ufinet

“The most valuable feature of Cloudflare is the GUI. You are able to control the solution very
well through the interface. There is a lot of functionality that is embedded in the service.” PeerSpot user, Competence Center Manager at a tech services company

Cloudflare

Varonis Platform specializes in network security and data monitoring with modules for alerting, data classification, and access management, benefiting environments like Microsoft 365.

Varonis is designed to secure data by auditing and tracking data movement. It leverages data alert and classification modules to identify and manage sensitive information. The platform enhances network security by alerting users to unexpected data modifications and deletions, crucial for effective data loss prevention. It supports unstructured data management, ensuring proper data access and permission controls. Known for its 24/7 support, Varonis offers comprehensive analytics and unified reporting, helping prevent data overexposure and facilitating compliance efforts.

What are the key features of Varonis Platform?

24/7 Support: Provides round-the-clock assistance.
Data Monitoring: Tracks data activities efficiently.
Unified Reporting: Consolidates data access reports.
Data Classification: Identifies sensitive data effectively.
Permission Management: Simplifies managing access rights.
Behavior Analytics: Detects abnormal behavior patterns.

What benefits should be highlighted in user reviews?

Enhanced Security: Improves data protection measures.
Compliance Support: Assists in meeting compliance standards.
Data Transparency: Offers clarity in data access activities.
Access Control: Ensures proper access to data.
Centralized Remediation: Eases remediation procedures.

Varonis Platform is widely utilized in industries needing stringent data confidentiality and management, such as finance and healthcare, for tracking data modifications and unauthorized access. Enterprises deploy it to manage permissions within large datasets, benefiting Microsoft 365 environments. While Varonis requires enhancements in cloud integration, the current deployment is often based on-premises, with attention to addressing the security needs and effective data handling for critical infrastructure.

Varonis

Zscaler Zero Trust Exchange Platform acts as a VPN alternative for secure remote access, cloud protection, and zero-trust strategies. It enables secure data transmission, supports remote work, and enhances compliance through a cloud-based architecture, offering improved performance and simplified management.

Designed for organizations seeking secure application access and robust data protection, Zscaler Zero Trust Exchange Platform delivers a comprehensive solution through seamless VPN connectivity, data loss prevention, and SSL inspection. Its cloud integration ensures scalability and reliability, while its interface provides intuitive management. Companies benefit from automatic secure access, minimizing constant authentication needs, and safeguarding sensitive data. The platform allows easy deployment and integration with diverse identity providers, granting granular control for access and application segmentation. Despite powerful capabilities, enhancements are needed in speed, bandwidth, and legacy support, with users noting interface and configuration challenges.

What are the key features of Zscaler Zero Trust Exchange Platform?

Seamless VPN Connectivity: Provides automatic secure access without repetitive authentication.
Strong Security Measures: Offers DLP and SSL inspection for data protection.
Cloud Integration: Ensures scalability and performance optimization.
Granular Access Control: Manages access with application-specific segmentation.

What benefits should companies look for in reviews when evaluating this platform?

Performance: Enhanced connectivity and reduced latency.
Data Protection: Comprehensive DLP and encryption capabilities.
Scalability: Efficient handling of growing organizational demands.
Ease of Deployment: Quick setup and integration with IDPs.

In specific industries, Zscaler Zero Trust Exchange has been implemented to enhance security protocols in fields like finance and healthcare. By prioritizing data protection and compliance, it assists companies in safely managing sensitive information and meeting regulatory requirements. Organizations leverage its features to ensure secure operations across remote and cloud environments, adapting to industry-specific needs with customizable access and security controls.

Zscaler

Sample Customers

Trusted by over 9,000,000 Internet Applications and APIs, including Nasdaq, Zendesk, Crunchbase, Steve Madden, OkCupid, Cisco, Quizlet, Discord and more.

Nottingham Building Society

Siemens, AutoNation, GE, NOV

Buyer's Guide

Varonis Platform vs. Zscaler Zero Trust Exchange Platform

April 2025

Free Report: Varonis Platform vs. Zscaler Zero Trust Exchange Platform

Find out what your peers are saying about Varonis Platform vs. Zscaler Zero Trust Exchange Platform and other solutions. Updated: April 2025.

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