Cloudflare Access vs. Smoothwall SWG

I wanted to securely connect to my servers without getting tracked by malicious attackers, even though I was on public Wi-Fi. Security was my top priority, and I also wanted a setup that was easy and quick to start and provided great network performance. Cloudflare's Zero trust matches my criteria for becoming my first choice.

Incentivized

Smoothwall SWG is very suitable in companies where there is a lot of staff and power to distribute the bandwidth by areas and give priority to the staff that requires better service. It's also well suited for business that require protection of their data and services as it is constantly monitoring the network and does not let them enter dangerous sites.

Incentivized

• Block access to known bad, risky, or unwanted destinations at the DNS or HTTP level.
• Excellent protection for remote users.
• Best in class browser isolation techniques.

Incentivized

• Real-time IP filtering is very favorable. That helps limit and restrict prohibited content.
• Elaboration of personalized reports of the activities or pages that users visit to make new blocking rules to the pages most visited by users that may damage the functioning of the servers.

Incentivized

• Cloudflare picks the nearest device location to route the traffic, but It would be great if we could select any particular location.
• Cloudflare enables monitoring for all the connected clients; it would be great if we could monitor any individual client device while keeping some client devices private.
• Sometimes, its DNS is not able to resolve a few project websites; we have to manually purge the cache and even disable the Security to get the work done. So, it would be better if we could manually provide a DNS list or whitelist some websites.

Incentivized

• It is necessary for them to have more material or a community that can help expand knowledge about this software so users can use 100% of their tools.

Incentivized

Within a few hours, new engineers are trained in basic tasks and are quite happy they are able to resolve issues independently. After SSO is configured, onboarding is as simple as signing into m365 via a web browser popup.

Incentivized

Good chat support from the portal for basic questions and minor issues. The enterprise support line is provided as well.

As long as all Cloudflare products and services rely on anycast technology, in a complex approach Cloudflare is faster and more relevant for cloud applications. The balance between security and performance is fully established. Also, Cloudflare has quite a good stack for API connection protection, like the API Shield example, which makes it more effective compared to F5 for example. Warp as a ZTNA agent gives better visibility and device posture information than FortiClient does.

Incentivized

Smoothwall SWG has many tools similar to pfSense but in my opinion I like the graphical environment of smoothwall swg more. It is more didactic and simple to use for new users. Also pfSense lacks the tools for monitoring in real time and the elaboration of reports that helps to perform statistics on sites visited.

Incentivized

• Cloudflare has provided us with 100% uptime even during planned maintenance
• Cloudflare has reduced time for engineering fixes from hours (or days) to minutes in some cases (primarily through Workers)

Incentivized

• This software helps a lot and is very economical, since it is free and it can be installed in equipment with low performance. That is of importance to companies with little budget or who are just starting out in the market.

Incentivized