1. Home
  2. Secure Web Gateway
  3. Forcepoint SWG Reviews
  4. User Review of Forcepoint SWG
Forcepoint Web Secruity that can be used by any and all
December 21, 2019

Forcepoint Web Secruity that can be used by any and all

Allan Eisenhauer | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User

Overall Satisfaction with Forcepoint Web Security

We are a non-profit that works with the local unemployment agency to assist the public with filing unemployment for their benefits. We also offer services, if they are eligible, for the opportunity for them to get retrained for a different job industry. This program allows us to make sure that users and staff are not going anywhere on the internet that does not align with our mission goals. Currently, this package is used agency-wide between all 6 of our locations and filters about 550 computers.
  • This package is one of the few that offers a category, quota time, that allows us to limit certain categories and or websites for staff that would normally be blocked for customers and may not be something that is needed in their day to day job duties. We allow staff one hour a day, broken down into six 10 min increments, to visit sites for shopping, travel arrangement and other areas that are more of a personal need than a business need.
  • Forcepoint has a wide selection of categories that can be enabled, quota timed or restricted at a top-level or you can go more granular and drill down to subcategories to allow for only partial access.
  • It would be nice if the endpoint would allow admin users to temporarily bypass the restrictions. There are times when a user or group of users may only need to temporarily need access to websites and this feature would be nice instead of the admin having to unblock the website for the specified time period just to have to go back in and restrict it again.
  • Some of the reporting options that allowed us to see minute by minute activity on a user would be nice to have back. We had it on the server-based version we were running but when we switched to cloud we have not been able to find it.
  • Being a non-profit the cost is a bit higher than some competitors so our ROI takes a bit longer to recoup. I would really like to see better non-profit pricing.
  • The ease of doing a report on someone cuts down on the IT man-hours to do website tracking for managers as we can do it from a central point whereas in the past (prior to Forcepoint/Websense) we would have to ghost their machine to look for activity as well as their local servers.

We currently took a look at SolarWinds MSP, WebTitan and VIPRE. I use SolarWinds Help Desk and their web filtering could integrate within that but they are unrestricted or restricted only and do not offer a feature like quota time. Their cost was about 1/3 of Forcepoint but our staff has grown to like that we offer the quota time option so they can do things non-work related on their lunch breaks. WebTitan had a very nice and easy to use interface but also did not offer a quota time option. From a pricing standpoint, they were more in line with the pricing of SolarWinds. We had used VIPRE antivirus a couple of years ago and they were only looked at because I need to have 3 options when presenting for approval. We had a bad experience with their AV product that they were not going to b considered at all. Their pricing was lower than Forcepoint but was higher than the other vendors. During the demo, the presenter had issues with an aspect of their cloud package which just helped to solidify the option for excluding them from consideration.


I feel that this is one of the better options out there that offers more flexibility than some of their competitors. This solution can be used if you are looking to offer a singular filtration for all systems or it can be configured to offer a variety of filtering options depending upon groups and user's rights and needs. I am not sure of a scenario where this would be less appropriate.