About CurrentWare’s Internet Security Features
With CurrentWare’s web filtering and monitoring solutions, blocking websites and auditing user browsing history is as easy as a few clicks.
CurrentWare extends your organization’s on-site internet usage policies to laptops and computers running outside the corporate network, allowing you to enforce internet use policies for remote workers.
URL Filtering—Block/Allow Specific Sites
- Block users from accessing specific websites
- Set exceptions for websites you would like to allow or only allow access to specific websites
- Create unique internet restriction policies for each group of users or computers
Category Filtering—Swiftly Block Millions of Websites
Use the web content categorization database to block millions of websites across 100+ URL categories.
Easily block users from accessing social media, porn, games, known virus-infected websites, and more!
This software was easy to install and customize to our needs. Category Filtering is such a time saver and of course saving time is saving money!
Scott S, Senior Systems Engineer
Keep a Pulse on Real-Time Team Activity
View the real-time productivity, active website/application, and availability status of individuals and teams via an at-a-glance dashboard.
- Get high-level views of the activity and productivity of individual users and teams
- Easily see who is online now, who has gone idle, and who hasn’t logged in today
- Dig deeper into user activity with insights into bandwidth usage, web browsing, software usage, and more
Learn More About CurrentWare
Find a Web Security Solution For Your Needs
| When to Use CurrentWare’s Alternatives to Zscaler | When to Use Zscaler Internet Access |
|---|---|
| You’re searching for a cost-effective and easy-to-use filtering solution for blocking and monitoring internet access | You have a large distributed workforce and dedicated system administration staff that will deploy and manage the solution |
| You’d like an intuitive and flexible solution for controlling internet access, protecting sensitive data, and monitoring employee computer use | You want to consolidate multiple advanced network security tools & cloud security software (IPS, CASB, SWG, etc.) into a single Secure Access Service Edge (SASE) |
| You’d benefit from more granular insights into user activity, including file transfers, internet browsing habits, and software usage trends | You are prepared to allocate considerable budget to a cloud security solution with comprehensive protection against cyber threats for your entire network beyond the benefits of a web filter |
Compare CurrentWare vs. Zscaler Features
Compare the key Data Loss Prevention, Web Filtering, and User Activity Monitoring features of Zscaler Internet Access & Zscaler Data Protection vs CurrentWare’s Zscaler alternatives to choose the right fit for your organization
Note: This section compares the employee monitoring and internet security features of Zscaler Internet Access (ZIA) & Zscaler Data Protection (CASB/DLP) to CurrentWare’s alternatives to Zscaler. It will not cover their end-user-experience monitoring tool Zscaler Digital Experience (ZDX) or their zero-trust network access tool Zscaler Secure Private Access (ZPA), which provides secure remote access to private applications.
Last updated June 2024
MSP CASE STUDY
Wild West to Whitelisted— CurrentWare Tames Web Browsing for MSPs
MSP business leaders face a mix of competing priorities. They’re expected to meet increasingly complex client needs, all while working with the pressure to do more with less.
CurrentWare’s simple-to-use, fairly priced, and reliable web filtering, user activity monitoring, and data loss prevention solutions provide MSPs with the critical security controls they need to keep their clients safe from insider data theft, common cybersecurity threats, and time theft.
Read our case study with Fluid Helix to learn how they improved security and productivity for their clients across 150+ locations!
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What customers say about CurrentWare
Across the whole CurrentWare Suite.
90% of reviewers would recommend BrowseReporter (average likelihood to recommend: 9 out of 10).
90% of reviewers would recommend BrowseControl (average likelihood to recommend: 9 out of 10).
90% of reviewers would recommend AccessPatrol (average likelihood to recommend: 9 out of 10).
Zscaler Reviews
Cons of Zscaler
Costs & Sales Practices
Many Zscaler customers have expressed frustration with how expensive their solutions are. This concern is compounded by reports of questionable sales practices.
Zscaler has been consistently screwing their customers recently, and has been caught inflating the number of licenses on multiple occasions… ZScaler has been losing customers and their sales teams have been aggressively pushing customers to buy more licenses… Management over there at ZScaler does not give a single crap about screwing their customers, and it’s only about the numbers for them.
Source: Comment on /r/Zscaler, 2023
The Zscaler sales team was an absolute nightmare to deal with. They were incredibly pushy, didn’t listen to what we asked, tried going around myself and my boss when we said we were also evaluating Netskope, and then tried to dictate to us what we should/could evaluate in the POC. Getting pricing and even a demo out of them was difficult. The whole experience just left a sour taste in my mouth, and I’m glad I don’t have to deal with them anymore.
Source: Comment on /r/cybersecurity, 2022
Zscaler Internet Access is a complex structured product, with many features hidden behind various subscription paywalls. To get all the features your company needs, you may be paying for features it doesn’t as well.
Source: G2 Review, 2023
Complexity, Bugs & Conflicts
Zscaler’s integration into existing IT infrastructure can pose challenges, especially for organizations with complex systems.
ZCC [Zscaler Client Connector] is trash, it was a disaster, our daily work is always about ZScaler. Sometimes it just doesn’t work. The SSL Inspection of ZScaler ZCC is a nightmare to troubleshoot; Telephony Tool/voice app doesn’t work as expected, having a lot of intermittent issues.
Source: Comment on /r/sysadmin, 2024
If you are a company in the business of making software, keep this product away from your software developers. Far, far away. It does not play nice with many software development tools, even once you go through the pain of adding their root certificate in all the right places. I have spent hours and even days interacting with ZScaler support, often with no solution ever found. After spending months fighting frequent issues that came up, I finally threw my hands in the air and left my company. It probably works fine if you’re just doing “regular” stuff with your network, like browsing, file uploads/downloads, etc. If you’re doing anything more advanced, keep away from ZScaler.
Source: Capterra Review, 2021
Works if you’re very cloud focused, tons of other companies doing ZTNA way better without a reliance on a vendor data center/PoP.
SWG is decent if you’re okay with agents. Support is seriously lacking. Don’t even think about ZS if you’re running anything OT/ICS.
I mostly hear complaints around performance since you’re sharing a PoP [Point of Presence] with thousands of other customers.
When I used ZS previously I’d lose 500Mbps of bandwidth due to their processing, just trying to hit a SaaS app that ZS “directly peers with”.
Recently, one of [my] customers told me that once they rolled out ZS to their manufacturing lines, they saw thousands of IPs start to hit their previously airgapped systems, all from the shared PoP.
Source: Comment on /r/sysadmin, 2024
Customer Support
Zscaler’s documentation is complex and challenging to comprehend. Unfortunately, reviews have noted that their customer support is lacking as well.
I have spent hours and even days interacting with Zscaler support, often with no solution ever found.
After spending months fighting frequent issues that came up, I finally threw my hands in the air and left my company.
Source: Capterra Review, 2021
Support is incredibly terrible. Unhelpful and wastes a lot of time. I really can’t emphasize enough how frustrating the support was. I ended up just finding my own workarounds 90% of the time, after spending hours and hours on the line with support…
Source: Capterra Review, 2021
We’ve had nothing but problems, it’s been months and they haven’t fixed them.
All routing works, but not to M365 or Azure AD?
Support has you generate the same logs every call and they say they review them, but they don’t.
Maybe we’re a 1 off, but I would avoid in the future.
Source: Comment on /r/sysadmin, 2020
Mixed Reviews
As an end user of it, I hate it.
For the first year or so that we had it, HTTP connections would just time out a few times an hour.
That problem seems to be solved but it slows things down so much that sometimes I google problems on my phone’s cell connection because it’s faster.
Source: Comment on /r/sysadmin/, 2020
I don’t manage or administer Zscaler, we have a dedicated team but as an end user I’ve had 0 issues.
Source: Comment on /r/sysadmin/, 2020
From the end user perspective, I don’t think there is anything great about Zscaler. It sometimes can completely hinder your ability to do work.
If you’re an employer looking at this for an option, know that because of Zscaler, your team may not be able to access their work without IT support for long periods of time.
Source: G2 Review, 2023
Zscaler works in the background and does not interfere with normal user operations. It does so consistently, wherever the individual works in the world
Source: Trust Radius Review, 2018
Breadth of Capabilities
This is by far the best option for security for a company that is 100% remote and using cloud infrastructure to run their business.
Source: Capterra Review, 2023
Sysadmin perspective: It’s pretty great, a bit of work to roll out and tweak things and hopefully you have a good setup resource from Zscaler.
If set up correctly, it’s more secure than a VPN and provides more security for your users and insight into issues they may be having.
Source: Comment on /r/sysadmin, 2024
Zscaler helps me browse the internet safely, without having me worry whether a particular website may be malicious or not.
It has helped me prevent data loss and data theft due to the blacklisting of potentially dangerous websites and also provided me warnings in case of suspicious websites.
Source: Capterra Review, 2024
It can integrate with a lot of products as per the need like we can Integrate it with SIEM solution for exporting logs, or can integrate with IDPs to authenticate users.
Source: Capterra Review, 2023