Forcepoint SWG Reviews & Insights

Score8.1 out of 10

139 Reviews and Ratings

Community insights

TrustRadius Insights for Forcepoint Secure Web Gateway are summaries of user sentiment data from TrustRadius reviews and, when necessary, third party data sources.

Pros

Helpful and Clear Help Articles: Reviewers have praised the clear and helpful help articles provided by Forcepoint Secure Web Gateway. These articles were found to be a valuable resource in understanding and utilizing the software effectively, with some users mentioning that they served as a comprehensive reference point for various tasks and functionalities. The availability of these detailed and informative articles not only contributed to a smoother learning curve but also helped troubleshoot issues independently, reducing the reliance on customer service support.

Time-saving Feature: Users appreciate the time-saving aspect of Forcepoint Secure Web Gateway's clear and easily accessible help articles. With these resources readily available, reviewers mentioned being able to find answers to their questions quickly, allowing them to continue working without interruptions. This feature has been particularly useful in minimizing downtime caused by seeking support from customer service or navigating complex user manuals.

Commitment to Customer Satisfaction: The inclusion of clear help articles demonstrates Forcepoint Secure Web Gateway's commitment to customer satisfaction. Reviewers highlighted how this comprehensive resource eliminates unnecessary back-and-forth communication with customer support, as it provides extensive information upfront. By offering detailed guidance through these articles, Forcepoint Secure Web Gateway ensures users have access to reliable self-help options, enhancing overall user experience.

Reviews

76 Reviews

Forcepoint Web Security Review

Rating: 8 out of 10

July 30, 2025

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

-Securing internal clients to access malicious external sites
-Granular user access controls
-Managing access to business related application only
-Differentiates access to internal server and clients

Pros

Wide range of external application categories
Implementation of policies are so effective for gateways
Exceptions have a lot of controls as well
Investigation reports section displays a lot of helpful data
Hybrid implementation

Cons

Single FSM should to be able to enforce policy to a single gateway rather than enforcing to all the gateways
Gateway level control should be there for allowing specific clients
Some sort of security still should be there for tunneling
Implementation with DLP is bit tedious as sometimes installing agents throw a lot manual burden

Likelihood to Recommend

-Banking sectors and enterprise companies where internal client restrictions are required
-Companies require protection for their remote employees
-Small companies where client side protection is required for any sort of data leakage

Verified User

Engineer in Information Technology (10,001+ employees)

Vetted Review

1 year of experience

Forcepoint is a force to reckon with!

Rating: 8 out of 10

Incentivized

January 16, 2023

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

Force point is used at EWS for monitoring and DLP policies of the organization. For more effectivity, we’ve defined dictionary clearly to be used for monitoring by enabling EWS_Keywords as the dictionary traveling over outgoing communication and over internet through USB storage, FTP, chat applications, HTTP, HTTPS through browser, including plaintext and printing document and constantly enhancing it

Pros

DLP protection via keywords identified
Multiple mediums coverage like Outgoing emails, USB storage, FTP, Chat applications etc.
Constantly learning interface by enhancing the keywords

Cons

Restricted to keywords entered by the client. Could do well with giving suggestions based on industry trends
Needs to be used in conjunction with other security tools like Crowdstrike to block external devices connecting with laptop
Deep document level indexing & monitoring capabilities would be great to have in Forcepoint

Likelihood to Recommend

Key word monitoring
Multiple medium support like Outgoing mails, chat applications, FTP, HTTP, HTTPS through browser, USB Storage, Plaintext format, Printing document

Anjum Arora

Group ICT Head - Technology & Applications in Information Technology at East-West Seed (1001-5000 employees)

Vetted Review

3 years of experience

View profile

WebSecurity

Rating: 7 out of 10

December 15, 2021

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

PIL is using Forcepoint Web Security throughout the whole organization; it addresses surf content filtering and prevents malicious infection.

Pros

Hybrid mode deployment —cloud.
Able enforce web content filtering at home.
Implement for both office and remote users.

Cons

In recent hybrid mode deployment, it was discovered that quota time was not able to apply for the remote user.
The existing office encountered a challenge to deploying Forcepoint Web Security.
To consider price competitive for global deployment.

Likelihood to Recommend

Scenario: Hybrid mode for home and remote users scenarios Out china office is not able to deploy force point due to Forcepoint Web Security moving out of the China market.

Boon Leng David Aw

Deputy General Manager - Technical(ISD) in Information Technology at PIL (501-1000 employees)

Vetted Review

10 years of experience

View profile

Decent product with poor support

Rating: 5 out of 10

Incentivized

November 30, 2021

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

Used to help prevent users from accessing malicious sites and sites considered counterproductive to work.

Pros

Quota Time.
Somewhat easy redirection of web traffic.

Cons

Enforcement is inconsistent at times.
Seems to cause connection timeouts with certain websites.
Very poor product support.

Likelihood to Recommend

It is well suited to on-premises web filtering. We have recently attempted to implement the agent for remote users and have had issues with it interfering with our VPN software.

Verified User

Engineer in Information Technology (201-500 employees)

Vetted Review

6 years of experience

Meets requirements but in our experience does not lend itself well to remote workers

Rating: 3 out of 10

Incentivized

October 18, 2021

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

Forcepoint Web Security is used as the secure web gateway across our entire organization. It is used to provide access to the Internet securely, performing SSL inspection of websites, applying real-time web page analysis, and blocking access to dangerous sites. It is also used to enforce organizational policy with regard to what sites can and cannot be accessed, which is important for us as a public-sector organization.

Pros

Forcepoint Web Security met our requirements for a scalable on-premises secure web gateway solution.
Forcepoint Web Security met our requirements for providing flexible policy assignments for users.

Cons

Our largest challenge with Forcepoint Web Security is the difficulty of performing version upgrades.

Likelihood to Recommend

Over the years, [in our experience], the maintenance of the Forcepoint Web Security solution proved to be more cumbersome and troublesome with each version upgrade. In addition, it did not transition well to support the large increase of remote workers. We also experienced weird incompatibilities with the client. We have since replaced this solution with Zscaler Internet Access, a cloud-based secure web gateway solution with a client that behaves as expected, is more flexible, and requires significantly less administration.

Verified User

Strategist in Information Technology (5001-10,000 employees)

Vetted Review

6 years of experience

Forcepoint Web Security: Content security for SMB, which is good enough for even large enterprises

Rating: 7 out of 10

Incentivized

October 15, 2021

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

We had too many issues concerning employees' productivity, wasting precious bandwidth and time, and then above all, security concerns like malware entering into our infra from infected websites, phishing attacks, targeted attacks, or just about anything from the cyber threat perspective. We had a squid proxy, but it [could not] match up with the changing times. We started deploying [Forcepoint Web Security] location-wise and [could] cover 100,000 employees in around 1.5 years, including the roaming client. The ACE engine on which [Forcepoint Web Security] runs really helped us in identifying the real threats, and with their hybrid cloud, we were able to test the best of both cloud and on-premises models. We also started the SSL interception on the boxes, which worked fine but brought down the performance of the boxes significantly, and would suggest [doing] SSLi on [a] dedicated solution. The DLP integration also worked well for both network and endpoint. With SSLi, DLP really gave us [an] inside view of what data is getting exfiltrated.

Pros

Full SASE suite for threat and data security
Robust ACE engine
DLP integration
Sandboxing

Cons

Control and visibility for non-web protocol
Application visibility and CASB

Likelihood to Recommend

If you are looking for web security with DLP, it works well, but if you are more interested in application-level visibility and granular control and CASB integration, then it has some scope to improve. For roaming users, DNS and non-web protocol control [are] not of industry standard.

Verified User

General Manager in Information Technology (10,001+ employees)

Vetted Review

4 years of experience

Forcepoint Web Security: Secures Your Browsing Traffic

Rating: 7 out of 10

Incentivized

October 15, 2021

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

We use it for our entire organization. With Forcepoint Web Security, we can be certain that the web traffic from users’ browsers will be scanned. Both plain and encrypted communications can be scanned, malware and executable programs can be filtered out, and it works transparently for the users. We have selected a number of "forbidden" categories; if they try to visit a site from that category, they will receive either a block page or a warning page.

Pros

Customization of configuration and block pages
Performance for web browsing is very good
Easy to troubleshoot with logging
Supports high available configurations (clustered setup) and virtual servers

Cons

Does not support web sockets, used by (e.g., WhatsApp Web, Spotify, call/video apps) unless you install client software
Learning curve can be steep
Sometimes lagging behind modern browsers (e.g., when SAN in SSL became a requirement)
May not support TLS 1.3 decryption fully

Likelihood to Recommend

It can be used as [an] explicit proxy, especially when combined with a proxy PAC file that lists the exceptions, and we have a lot of them (e.g., Microsoft apps like Teams). Then the exceptions will bypass the proxy and need to be able to pass through the firewall. A transparent setup should be possible, but we never got it to work reliably, [...] because this depends on [a] redirection by switches or firewalls, for which no modern protocol is being supported.

Verified User

Professional in Information Technology (51-200 employees)

Vetted Review

2 years of experience

Extend content and threat protection to off-premises EUC

Rating: 7 out of 10

Incentivized

September 26, 2021

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

We are currently utilizing Forcepoint Web Security to provide proxy and content filtering services to end-user compute devices on our corporate network. The solution is deployed across all corporate managed devices and managed centrally by the IT team to enforce acceptable usage policies and protect devices from other malicious web content.

Pros

Policy enforcement
Content filtering
Threat detection

Cons

Mobile device protection
Failover capability
Vendor support

Likelihood to Recommend

Forcepoint Web Security is well suited to tightly controlled corporate environments where policy enforcement, centralized management, and off-network protection of end-user compute devices is important. On mixed-use networks, loosely controlled environments, and environments with a mixture of mobile, BYOD, and guest devices, it is less well suited.

Verified User

Manager in Information Technology (1001-5000 employees)

Vetted Review

1 year of experience

Protects the organization

Rating: 7 out of 10

Incentivized

September 14, 2021

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

Forcepoint Web Security is being used across the whole organization. It helps us solve problems if we need to restrict users from gaining access to the internet sites so that they don't click or browse sites that contain malicious links which would affect the entire organization. We use web security as a hybrid module [that] allows us to block access even when the user is outside of the organization.

Pros

It can be integrated with the DLP module
Hybrid capabilities
Can be integrated with Forcepoint AMD for sandboxing
Helps us to restrict access of unwanted sites

Cons

The hybrid agent should get updated automatically
Some sites are not proxy friendly, which causes issues
Time taken for the policy to sync in cloud

Likelihood to Recommend

Forcepoint Web Security is well suited because it provides on-premises as well as cloud functionality, so instead of fully migrating to cloud we can have a few users on on-prem and few on cloud. It gets easy to identify which users should be on cloud or on-prem. It is always better to use a generic policy for everyone, otherwise it can cause issues while creating exceptions. The scenario where it is less appropriate is when there is a function where the agent can automatically get updated but when we do that, the agent does not get updated properly, which causes a lot of trouble as we need to uninstall the agent and then re-install it.

Verified User

Consultant in Information Technology (10,001+ employees)

Vetted Review

3 years of experience

Forcepoint Web Security: An application that does what we expect it to do

Rating: 8 out of 10

Incentivized

August 15, 2021

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

Forcepoint Web Security is being used across the whole organization on our servers and our PCs, including laptops. We use it to filter websites and protect us from accessing URLs that may be harmful. It addresses the need to have protection on our devices, even when users are out of the office.

Pros

It prevents users from accessing websites that may have recently been created for the purpose of distributing malware.
It prevents users from accidentally or intentionally accessing websites that are considered inappropriate for a work environment.
It allows us to create different policies for different teams in our organization.

Cons

Forcepoint Web Security can be improved by making the setup less bloated. We have two proxy servers clustered together for each environment, and we currently have environments for our campus, server, DMZ, and external networks. The setup and maintenance of the application can be cumbersome.
Updating the agent needs to be implemented better. Instead of having to create and push out updates for the agents, there should be a way agents can get software updates directly from Forcepoint Web Security.
Accessing the web content gateway to make changes is also not as streamlined as I would like and it should be improved.

Likelihood to Recommend

[Forcepoint Web Security is well suited] if you have an organization where there are quite a few servers and PCs that access the internet. If a user's internet usage logging is needed, then this product is well suited for your environment. If you have a smaller organization, Forcepoint Web Security may be overkill for your establishment.

Verified User

Engineer in Information Technology (201-500 employees)

Vetted Review

9 years of experience

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