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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 Private Access

    Score9.4 out of 10
    N/AZscaler Private Access™ (ZPA) gives users secure access to private apps and OT devices while enabling zero trust connectivity for workloads.N/A
    Pricing
    Cisco ThousandEyesZscaler Private Access
    Editions & Modules
    No answers on this topic
    No answers on this topic
    Offerings
    Pricing Offerings
    Cisco ThousandEyesZscaler Private 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 Private 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
    84 Answers
    Delivers good value for the price
    95%
    Delivers good value for the price
    96 Answers
    100%
    Delivers good value for the price
    67 Answers
    Happy with the feature set
    97%
    Happy with the feature set
    119 Answers
    99%
    Happy with the feature set
    84 Answers
    Lived up to sales and marketing promises
    94%
    Lived up to sales and marketing promises
    89 Answers
    95%
    Lived up to sales and marketing promises
    59 Answers
    Implementation went as expected
    88%
    Implementation went as expected
    92 Answers
    91%
    Implementation went as expected
    68 Answers
    Features
    Cisco ThousandEyesZscaler Private Access
    Identity Management
    Comparison of Identity Management features of Cisco ThousandEyes and Zscaler Private Access
    Feature
    Cisco ThousandEyes
    -
    Ratings
    Zscaler Private Access
    9.2
    58 Ratings
    5% above category average
    Multi-Factor Authentication00 Ratings9.258 Ratings
    Endpoint Security
    Comparison of Endpoint Security features of Cisco ThousandEyes and Zscaler Private Access
    Feature
    Cisco ThousandEyes
    -
    Ratings
    Zscaler Private Access
    8.8
    27 Ratings
    2% below category average
    Endpoint Detection and Response (EDR)00 Ratings8.827 Ratings
    Threat Intelligence
    Comparison of Threat Intelligence features of Cisco ThousandEyes and Zscaler Private Access
    Feature
    Cisco ThousandEyes
    -
    Ratings
    Zscaler Private Access
    8.6
    65 Ratings
    8% above category average
    Network Analytics00 Ratings8.961 Ratings
    Threat Recognition00 Ratings9.053 Ratings
    Vulnerability Classification00 Ratings8.442 Ratings
    Automated Alerts and Reporting00 Ratings8.255 Ratings
    Threat Analysis00 Ratings8.748 Ratings
    Threat Intelligence Reporting00 Ratings8.245 Ratings
    Automated Threat Identification00 Ratings8.643 Ratings
    Zero Trust Security
    Comparison of Zero Trust Security features of Cisco ThousandEyes and Zscaler Private Access
    Feature
    Cisco ThousandEyes
    -
    Ratings
    Zscaler Private Access
    9.1
    78 Ratings
    6% above category average
    Continuous Verification00 Ratings9.171 Ratings
    Secure Web Gateways00 Ratings9.353 Ratings
    Network Flow Control00 Ratings9.158 Ratings
    Network Traffic Analysis00 Ratings9.165 Ratings
    Segmentation Leveraging00 Ratings9.264 Ratings
    Admin Access Control00 Ratings9.368 Ratings
    Network Data Encryption00 Ratings9.260 Ratings
    Network Topology Mapping00 Ratings8.752 Ratings
    Best Alternatives
    Cisco ThousandEyesZscaler Private 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 Private Access
    Likelihood to Recommend
    9.1
    (126 ratings)
    9.4
    (85 ratings)
    Likelihood to Renew
    8.6
    (6 ratings)
    8.4
    (2 ratings)
    Usability
    8.6
    (7 ratings)
    9.0
    (80 ratings)
    Availability
    7.3
    (1 ratings)
    -
    (0 ratings)
    Performance
    7.3
    (1 ratings)
    -
    (0 ratings)
    Support Rating
    6.7
    (6 ratings)
    -
    (0 ratings)
    In-Person Training
    8.2
    (1 ratings)
    -
    (0 ratings)
    Implementation Rating
    6.4
    (1 ratings)
    -
    (0 ratings)
    Configurability
    8.2
    (1 ratings)
    -
    (0 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)
    -
    (0 ratings)
    Vendor post-sale
    9.1
    (1 ratings)
    -
    (0 ratings)
    Vendor pre-sale
    9.1
    (1 ratings)
    -
    (0 ratings)
    User Testimonials
    Cisco ThousandEyesZscaler Private 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
    Zscaler Private Access works really well in environments setup for FQDNs and where you know what users should/shouldn't be accessing on what ports. You can use Zscaler Private Access to figure out these kinds of features but that doesn't always mean you'll be correct. It also provides a consistent experience for users as they can access their materials anywhere. It also makes the user the last line of defense. If a user's account is compromised then the attacker has access to everything they already did. It doesn't work great in OT environments or Server based environments. Flows have to be initiated from the client and not the server for stuff to behave properly.
    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
    • Connecting users remotely with a secure connection. I am a service desk agent who works with end users, and if there is an issue due to ZPA, it's most likely due to configuration. A really good service.
    • Logging, I believe, works well as I troubleshoot end users and can gather extra details for my network admin. IP.zscaler.com, and the debug logs are nice. Additionally, I like how it shows the App policy assigned to the user's machine ECT.
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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.
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    Zscaler
    • Needs an interface for Support Desk/Help Desk to more easily understand that the problem is a lack of an FQDN or access is not allowed due to policy, not because of a technical shortcoming in ZPA.
    • Documentation of the BC solution is not well-detailed.
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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
    When it works - it works incredibly slick. It's only L4 which seems like a downgrade of security from solutions that promote L7.
    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.
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    Zscaler
    The environment feels more secure, and we are seeing that users are adapting to it fast. The fact that we have tools to assist the users with their day-to-day access helps, as we can hand it off to the helpdesk without any escalations to the Network team. It is a work in progress for our agency, but we are seeing the benefits from the solution.
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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.
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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.
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    Zscaler
    No answers on this topic
    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.
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    Zscaler
    No answers on this topic
    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.
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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.
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    Zscaler
    No answers on this topic
    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.
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    Zscaler
    ZPA is where the bulk of zero-trust access is found. While the functionality for ZIA is excellent, the policy we implement for internet access is more focused on threat prevention and not narrowly scoped access.
    Incentivized
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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.
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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
    • We used to get anywhere from 30 to 50 tickets surrounding our previous VPN solution every month. We now average 3-5 tickets regarding remote connectivity, and of those, only 1 or 2 are actual issues with ZPA.
    • Using ZPA Access Policies, we can now block endpoints that have outdated security software from ever connecting to our environment. This was simply not possible with our previous solution.
    • Some of our employee base skews older and had a harder time understanding the change from VPN to Zscaler.
    • There is significantly less downtime with ZPA when compared to other VPN solutions.
    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 Private Access Screenshots

    Screenshot of how ZPA provides access for all users while minimizing the attack surface, eliminating lateral movement, and stopping zero day threats. A cloud native service, ZPA can be deployed in just hours to replace legacy remote access tools like VPNs and VDIs.