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    Overview
    ProductRatingMost Used ByProduct SummaryStarting Price

    Cisco ThousandEyes

    Score9.1 out of 10
    N/ACisco ThousandEyes empowers organizations to assure every digital experience across every network, everywhere, every time.N/A

    Zscaler Internet Access

    Score8.9 out of 10
    N/AZscaler Internet Access™ (ZIA) is a secure web gateway (SWG), delivering cloud native cyberthreat protection and zero trust access to the internet and SaaS apps.N/A
    Pricing
    Cisco ThousandEyesZscaler Internet Access
    Editions & Modules
    No answers on this topic
    No answers on this topic
    Offerings
    Pricing Offerings
    Cisco ThousandEyesZscaler Internet Access
    Free Trial
    YesNo
    Free/Freemium Version
    NoNo
    Premium Consulting/Integration Services
    YesYes
    Entry-level Setup FeeOptionalNo setup fee
    Additional Details——
    More Pricing Information
    Community Pulse
    Cisco ThousandEyesZscaler Internet Access
    Considered Both Products
    Cisco
    No answer on this topic
    Zscaler
    No answer on this topic
    Key User Insights
    Would buy again
    96%
    Would buy again
    118 Answers
    99%
    Would buy again
    284 Answers
    Delivers good value for the price
    95%
    Delivers good value for the price
    96 Answers
    98%
    Delivers good value for the price
    245 Answers
    Happy with the feature set
    97%
    Happy with the feature set
    119 Answers
    99%
    Happy with the feature set
    284 Answers
    Lived up to sales and marketing promises
    94%
    Lived up to sales and marketing promises
    89 Answers
    97%
    Lived up to sales and marketing promises
    207 Answers
    Implementation went as expected
    88%
    Implementation went as expected
    92 Answers
    93%
    Implementation went as expected
    227 Answers
    Features
    Cisco ThousandEyesZscaler Internet Access
    Identity Management
    Comparison of Identity Management features of Cisco ThousandEyes and Zscaler Internet Access
    Feature
    Cisco ThousandEyes
    -
    Ratings
    Zscaler Internet Access
    5.0
    2 Ratings
    55% below category average
    Multi-Factor Authentication00 Ratings5.02 Ratings
    Endpoint Security
    Comparison of Endpoint Security features of Cisco ThousandEyes and Zscaler Internet Access
    Feature
    Cisco ThousandEyes
    -
    Ratings
    Zscaler Internet Access
    10.0
    2 Ratings
    11% above category average
    Endpoint Detection and Response (EDR)00 Ratings10.02 Ratings
    Threat Intelligence
    Comparison of Threat Intelligence features of Cisco ThousandEyes and Zscaler Internet Access
    Feature
    Cisco ThousandEyes
    -
    Ratings
    Zscaler Internet Access
    8.5
    216 Ratings
    7% above category average
    Network Analytics00 Ratings8.7217 Ratings
    Threat Recognition00 Ratings8.3214 Ratings
    Vulnerability Classification00 Ratings8.5191 Ratings
    Automated Alerts and Reporting00 Ratings8.2205 Ratings
    Threat Analysis00 Ratings8.8203 Ratings
    Threat Intelligence Reporting00 Ratings8.5199 Ratings
    Automated Threat Identification00 Ratings8.5192 Ratings
    Zero Trust Security
    Comparison of Zero Trust Security features of Cisco ThousandEyes and Zscaler Internet Access
    Feature
    Cisco ThousandEyes
    -
    Ratings
    Zscaler Internet Access
    8.9
    262 Ratings
    4% above category average
    Continuous Verification00 Ratings8.7245 Ratings
    Secure Web Gateways00 Ratings9.0236 Ratings
    Network Flow Control00 Ratings8.1217 Ratings
    Network Traffic Analysis00 Ratings8.8219 Ratings
    Segmentation Leveraging00 Ratings8.6194 Ratings
    Admin Access Control00 Ratings9.1230 Ratings
    Network Data Encryption00 Ratings8.8207 Ratings
    Network Topology Mapping00 Ratings10.02 Ratings
    Best Alternatives
    Cisco ThousandEyesZscaler Internet Access
    Small Businesses
    No answers on this topic
    No answers on this topic
    Medium-sized Companies
    Catchpoint
    Score8.5 out of 10
    No answers on this topic
    Enterprises
    Nexthink
    Score7.3 out of 10
    Forescout Vistaro Platform
    Score6.6 out of 10
    All AlternativesView all alternativesView all alternatives
    User Ratings
    Cisco ThousandEyesZscaler Internet Access
    Likelihood to Recommend
    9.1
    (126 ratings)
    9.0
    (295 ratings)
    Likelihood to Renew
    8.6
    (6 ratings)
    8.4
    (6 ratings)
    Usability
    8.6
    (7 ratings)
    8.8
    (279 ratings)
    Availability
    7.3
    (1 ratings)
    7.3
    (1 ratings)
    Performance
    7.3
    (1 ratings)
    5.5
    (1 ratings)
    Support Rating
    6.7
    (6 ratings)
    7.1
    (10 ratings)
    In-Person Training
    8.2
    (1 ratings)
    -
    (0 ratings)
    Online Training
    -
    (0 ratings)
    7.3
    (1 ratings)
    Implementation Rating
    6.4
    (1 ratings)
    8.4
    (2 ratings)
    Configurability
    8.2
    (1 ratings)
    8.4
    (2 ratings)
    Contract Terms and Pricing Model
    6.4
    (1 ratings)
    -
    (0 ratings)
    Ease of integration
    6.4
    (1 ratings)
    -
    (0 ratings)
    Product Scalability
    7.3
    (1 ratings)
    7.3
    (1 ratings)
    Vendor post-sale
    9.1
    (1 ratings)
    8.4
    (3 ratings)
    Vendor pre-sale
    9.1
    (1 ratings)
    7.3
    (2 ratings)
    User Testimonials
    Cisco ThousandEyesZscaler Internet Access
    Likelihood to Recommend
    Cisco
    Unified communications real-time analysis is one of the biggest points of the solution. You can see your traffic path and find issues before, during and after the calls. This is very useful for analyzing VoIP and video conferencing problems like in WebEx, Microsoft Teams and Zoom. It helps to see network issues like packet loss, jitter, or latency that can make call quality bad. Another good use case is checking cloud apps and SaaS services. Many companies use external platforms like Microsoft Azure, 365, Salesforce, or AWS. It lets Networking teams see the network path from users to these services so they can find if problems come from the company network, the internet provider, or the cloud service. Also, it is good for companies using mix of on-prem and cloud. It shows how traffic moves between different parts of the network, so IT teams can see where a problem happens and fix it faster. There are different types of agents that we can use in Cisco ThousandEyes. Enterprise agents can be use for a relative big amount of synthetic test. Endpoint agents are install in user PC or MAC laptops to check network quality from the client side. WebEx devices also have built-in agents that help to see performance problems in meetings, making it easy to find what is causing a bad call. Maybe it's not the best solution if what you want to measure is not HTTPs based or hasn't an API. Also if your scenario is Zoom Rooms, you won't have the same level of integration that it has for WebEx and Microsoft solutions.
    Incentivized
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    Zscaler
    I feel the product is very good to set up basic standards and go beyond that in many aspects. However, due to being sometimes too simple, it limits the ability to do some other complex changes. Having the ability to do both would be ideal for some, if not all, of the products within Zscaler Internet Access. A simple setup to have it stand-up, and more advanced settings for those more experienced.
    Incentivized
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    Pros
    Cisco
    • Cisco ThousandEyes does the holistic discovery of the end components, the network components, and it's really fast at identifying where the issue is, which is not normally identified by the classic monitoring tools. So it's quite a fast identifying the issue of the networks and Cisco ThousandEyes also provides a very good real user end user monitoring experience for the end customers. So those are the two real life and also very good examples for Cisco ThousandEyes.
    Incentivized
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    Zscaler
    • Provides a secure VPN connection point for endpoint connectivity.
    • Provides the VPN connectivity in a fast and reliable connection state.
    • Very dependable, once connected the connection stays up and there's no fuss.
    • Very good at letting you know when you are not authenticated.
    • Very easy to authenticate and regain access when your session times out.
    Incentivized
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    Cons
    Cisco
    • The elephant in the room is going to be cost. ThousandEyes is a great tool, but you will pay for it. There are other services that do a good job at providing a smaller subset of features compared to ThousandEyes. If all you need is that particular subset of features, ThousandEyes may not make fiscal sense for your organization.
    • As a subset of the cost issue, within the last 18 months or so the pricing on enterprise (local) agents has been modified in a way that seems not to benefit the customer. Previously enterprise agents had a flat monthly cost associated with them with unlimited test usage (the only limit on test usage was based on concurrent tests running at any given point in time). This meant that instead of using a cloud agent and paying per-test, you had the option of spinning up an cheap Digital Ocean droplet and creating your own cloud agent for external testing without using Cloud Agents. When the change was made they eliminated the flat per-agent cost and instead treated the pricing the same as that of the cloud agents but cutting the number of "cloud units" per test in half for tests run from enterprise agents. For organizations with under-utilized enterprise agents, this may be helpful financially, but for organizations that push their local agents to the limit, the cost skyrocketed.
    • BGP monitor peering sessions have been less than reliable. The data doesn't seem to be an issue, but the sessions seem to bounce or fail altogether on a fairly consistent basis. The routers or servers with which your routers peer sit behind some firewalls that have caused issues in the past.
    Incentivized
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    Zscaler
    • ZS CLI support to turn off ZIA and ZDX service specifically on mac.
    • Better visibility into failed posture devices, including a timeline and the reason the posture failed (This is about the Zscaler mobile portal: Enrolled devices --> Failed posture devices).
    Incentivized
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    Likelihood to Renew
    Cisco
    The software does it's job extremely well and the system makes it very user friendly to get into. When looking for software I prefer to not need a PHD to operate it. Having a great UI and simple setup makes it easy to include more members of our team to get more value out of the platform.
    Incentivized
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    Zscaler
    While Zscaler Internet Access (ZIA) delivers critical value in cloud security and RBI compliance, I rate renewal likelihood 7/10 due to evolving needs versus platform limitations. Below is my rationale:
    Key Gaps:
    1. Advanced Threat Costs:
    ZIA’s add-ons (e.g., Advanced DLP, Sandboxing) incur 35%+ cost premiums – straining budgets as transaction volumes (UPI/iMobile) grow 50% YoY.
    2. API Banking Scalability:
    ZIA’s API rate limits throttle real-time policy sync during UPI peaks (10K+ TPS), forcing workarounds for finacle integrations.
    3. RBI Future-Proofing:
    Limited native support for upcoming digital rupee (CBDC) security rules requires custom development, increasing compliance overhead.
    Incentivized
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    Usability
    Cisco
    There is definitely a learning curve to ThousandEyes, but once you understand how the client deployment works and how to set up monitoring, things go pretty smoothly. I think the initial setting up of clients on endpoints can be a little tricky though.
    Incentivized
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    Zscaler
    Getting started was pretty straightforward. We can tell the product is way more robust than we are using it. It started as a replacement for previous DNS-blocking content filtering, but we're exploring how this will add value with an upcoming DLP redesign and with traffic optimization at some of our remote sites with severe bandwidth limits.
    Incentivized
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    Reliability and Availability
    Cisco
    Being cloud hosted means that you are at the mercy of Cisco web services, but we've had absolutely no issues with its availability.
    Incentivized
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    Zscaler
    No answers on this topic
    Performance
    Cisco
    The client is very lightweight on endpoints and the user interface is very fast and fluid.
    Incentivized
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    Zscaler
    There are often performance issues reported
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    Support Rating
    Cisco
    You have online support from the tool itself 24/7 and they are very responsive. We also have a specific account manager and specific engineer assigned to help us with very specific questions for our environment. The level of response to our requirements is always super high. We have requested specific features to be added and these have been developed and introduced very quick tot he product (within weeks). Their DevOps and agile approach seems to pay off.
    Incentivized
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    Zscaler
    Zscaler's ZIA support is quick and knowledgable. They respond within 1-2 hours of you submitting your ticket. They are very thorough and are typically ready to jump on a live troubleshooting session. Our ZIA platform and how we use is it unique so at times tickets can be open for weeks but we alway get quality support compared to other unrelated product support in our enterprise
    Incentivized
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    In-Person Training
    Cisco
    Our Cisco reps actually had someone teach us a few things about the functionality of ThousandEyes, and it helped a lot. The training was good and we had follow-up assistance as well when we had questions about the monitoring and reporting functions. Overall, we were satisfied with the training and support.
    Incentivized
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    Zscaler
    No answers on this topic
    Implementation Rating
    Cisco
    Our implementation was pretty straightforward, with some issues loading clients on endpoints. We didn't have any notable issues, and I don't really have any additional insights.
    Incentivized
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    Zscaler
    good the engineer give excellent support and eplanation
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    Alternatives Considered
    Cisco
    No one is better than the other. I can get different data and sometimes similar data, it's important to compare values and verify the data between the tools. Additionally, there are other functionalities that ThousandEyes has that the others don't, but it is also the other way around. I will always recommend to have available not 1 or 2, all possible available for your job.
    Incentivized
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    Zscaler
    The overall user community and scope of supportability outweighed the others on our short list. Netskope was a close second, but the risk, though small, was greater than that of bringing Zscaler aboard. We were looking for a mature, well-supported, highly functional, and fine-grained solution that met all our user and information security requirements.
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    Contract Terms and Pricing Model
    Cisco
    The contract was fair and rolled up into some of our other contracts, so it was no big deal getting it up and running.
    Incentivized
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    Zscaler
    No answers on this topic
    Scalability
    Cisco
    I think this product would be infinitely scalable since it's all cloud hosted and can support thousands of endpoints if needed. We are only using it for a limited number of endpoints, so we never really considered scalability.
    Incentivized
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    Zscaler
    No answers on this topic
    Return on Investment
    Cisco
    • Building the trust from our Merchants is core when you come to renewal time. Trust builds partnerships, builds stickiness and allows for easier upsells or contract renewals.
    • Having a champion in IT that touts your service is important to the business, it removes a large portion of friction in the business to get services implemented and working to its peak.
    • Flexibility in pricing can be better. How they measure the number of agents being used can get thorny. When you build and tear down virtual servers a lot it can appear there are more agents running than there are. Once we understood how they measure we were able to better utilize the product efficiently.
    Incentivized
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    Zscaler
    • I would say it has a very good ROI, as whenever someone can't access something, they submit a ticket to our network engineer, and within minutes, the site is safely added to ZIA with best-practice configurations. After seeing a little of the UI from the Zenith event, it seems very user-friendly to control these policies.
    Incentivized
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    ScreenShots

    Cisco ThousandEyes Screenshots

    Screenshot of Global availability issues for users trying to use Slack application.Screenshot of The path visibility feature pinpointing where in the transit path an outage or event is occurring.Screenshot of ThousandEyes Internet Insights™, which combines a massive data set with algorithmic outage detection to provide near real-time insights into a business's SaaS applications.  and networks. Internet Insights can be used to manage digital experience at Internet scale.Screenshot of ThousandEyes Event Detection diagnosing events as server or network issue.

    Zscaler Internet Access Screenshots

    Screenshot of an overview of Zscaler Internet Access (ZIA), a cloud native security service edge (SSE) solution that builds on a decade of secure web gateway leadership. Offered as a scalable SaaS platform through Zscaler's security cloud, it replaces legacy network security solutions, preventing advanced attacks and data loss with a comprehensive zero trust approach. ZIA is integrated into the Zscaler Zero Trust Exchange™ to provide superior defense-in-depth, secure connectivity, end user experience, and administrative visibility and control.