Make Sure to Evaluate Your Alternatives to Pulse Secure First
August 10, 2021

Make Sure to Evaluate Your Alternatives to Pulse Secure First

Anonymous | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 5 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User

Modules Used

  • Pulse Client

Overall Satisfaction with Pulse Secure Unified Client

It is being used as the defacto VPN service for internal development. Necessary to connect off-site to internal databases. It's also used by sales staff on-site to connect to virtual machines.
  • Provides what any VPN should provide
  • Works on many OSs, though I will relay my Mac OS experience in another section of the review
  • Their clientless VPN offering could be interesting, depending on your needs
  • Their Mac OS testing needs a lot of work. I upgraded to Big Sur, and on a managed machine, Pulse Secure caused a Kernel crash that forced the machine to reboot endlessly. This took months to be fixed, and I wasn't able to use it until then.
  • It's very difficult to add some advanced policies to the administrative aspect of the client. For example, to check if a machine is managed by the company, or owned by the user (in order to block certain resources), it's basically impossible, or incredibly convoluted and requires a stack of 3rd party tools
  • The pulse secure client collects more information than you might know about. Be aware of this: “[Pulse Secure] may have access to personal information, but does not collect it”
  • The host checker is very slow, and has to be reinvoked on every reconnect.
  • Sometimes the Application Launcher doesn't even detect itself running and forces you to reinstall.
  • Policy settings for managed machines offer enough granularity for most common cases.
  • No more java dependency for the web client. This was a great change from them.
  • Works on most common machines with matured OSs. We use mac, windows, Linux, and mobile.
  • Negative impact when using the latest OSs (in the case of Mac OS), as we had to basically not use Pulse Secure for a while until the kernel crashes were fixed.
  • Positive overall as it provided basic VPN needs for remote machines, and access to specific databases internally.
I wasn't a part of the decision process to use Pulse Secure. I believe NordVPN Teams and ExpressVPN are both far superior products. Modern UI (Pulse Secure's UI is incredibly outdated), less reconnects, cheaper, less hacks (On April 20, 2021, CISA issued an "Emergency Directive on Pulse Connect Secure"), and simply faster overall connection speeds.

Do you think Ivanti Secure Unified Client delivers good value for the price?

No

Are you happy with Ivanti Secure Unified Client's feature set?

Yes

Did Ivanti Secure Unified Client live up to sales and marketing promises?

I wasn't involved with the selection/purchase process

Did implementation of Ivanti Secure Unified Client go as expected?

I wasn't involved with the implementation phase

Would you buy Ivanti Secure Unified Client again?

No

It offers what most VPNs offer for companies in a managed environment, so you can be sure you'll get a VPN that functions properly. But if you need special policies, faster reconnects (or fewer reconnects overall), more compatibility with new OSs, and a more strict privacy policy, opt for an alternative.