These are the top 20 cybersecurity companies today, according to reviews from IT professionals

Market Cap: $6 billion

Rating: 4.4 / 5 stars

Product: Okta Identity Cloud

RankingScore: 87

Category: Single Sign-On (SSO)

Most Compared to: OneLogin (52%), Auth0 (11%), Microsoft Azure Active Directory Premium (6%)

The good:

• “We are able to deploy solutions rapidly and also have a better idea on licensing as we can easily see who has access, who has been accessing and also who is not using an app.”
• “One of the best features it has is the provisioning and deprovisioning, which makes management way easier. You don't need to be too technical to understand how it works.”

What needs improvement:

• “We still had to write several internal scripts to complete the user-provisioning process. Okta does not have the ability to provision mailbox accounts for on-premise Exchange or in a hybrid O365 environment. The Group Push function from Okta to Active Directory did not work reliably in our environment.”

Market Cap: $2 billion

Rating: 4.3 / 5 stars

Product: CyberArk Privileged Access Security

RankingScore: 96

Category: Privileged Identity Management

Most Compared to: BeyondTrust PowerBroker (14%), Cisco Identity Services Engine (8%), Oracle Identity Manager (7%)

The good:

• “We are maintaining compliance in PCI, SOX and HIPPA, which is a big thing. Auditors really like it, and it has made us stay compliant.”
• “We have two-factor authenticated and vaulted our important accounts, so people can't just steal stuff from us.”

What needs improvement:

• “It is not a cheap solution. It is expensive as compared with other solutions.”

Funding: $118 million

Rating: 4.3 / 5 stars

RankingScore: 80

Category: Security Information and Event Management (SIEM)

Most Compared to: Splunk (33%), LogRhythm (17%), IBM QRadar (11%)

The good:

• “It’s a workhorse -- no matter what devices or the number of logs we throw at it, the system processes them in real time, correlates the events, and alerts on only events that need human review.”
• “The best thing about AlienVault USM is it being a “Jack-of-All Trades” solution. It provides SIEM, HIDS/NIDS, FIM, NetFlow, Asset Management, Vulnerability Management, etc., under one platform.”

What needs improvement:

“The reporting aspect could be improved. While there are a lot of different options available, there are still pieces which are missing. The views are also very static and do not give you a lot of options on how the data is presented.”

Funding: $126 million

Rating: 4.3 / 5 stars

Product: LogRhythm NextGen SIEM

RankingScore: 96

Category: Security Information and Event Management (SIEM)

Most Compared to: Splunk (47%), IBM QRadar (14%), AlienVault (12%)

The good:

• “Favorite feature of the product is the ease of administration. There's not a lot of overhead. We don't need a FTE dedicated just to admin the product. That was one of the biggest selling features for us.”
• “It’s able to deliver actionable intelligence to the security engineers and analysts.”

What needs improvement:

• “Focus on open source, long sources like Linux and Docker, and those kind of things. More help and assistance with some of the open source products, everything seems to be focused on Windows versus giving some guidance and some documentation on how to use it.”

Funding: $192 million

Rating: 4.8 / 5 stars

Product: Carbon Black Cb Defense

RankingScore: 73

Category: Endpoint Protection

Most Compared to: Cylance (19%), CrowdStrike (12%), SentinelOne (8%)

The good:

• “It helped to identify endpoint and infrastructure loopholes.”
• “The software uses very few resources; it is almost invisible to the end user.”

What needs improvement:

• “It would be a better solution if Carbon Black Cb Defense had an on-premise solution and a virus auto delete or quarantine.”

Market Cap: $20 billion

Rating: 4.6 / 5 stars

Product: Palo Alto Networks WildFire

RankingScore: 70

Category: Advanced Threat Protection

Most Compared to: Fortinet FortiGate (32%), Cisco ASA (15%), Cisco Sourcefire Firewalls (9%)

The good:

• “You can see everything that's going on in your network. It constantly updates their signatures and new anti-spyware signatures. That is updated daily.”
• “When Wannacry first came out, WildFire was detecting it and dropping incoming threats within seconds. We were dropping over 10,000 files per day with no additional firewall load at all.”

What needs improvement:

• “They should make their user interface a little more user-friendly...Test it in your environment because everyone's environment is different.”

Market Cap: $206 billion

Rating: 4.2 / 5 stars

Product: Cisco Umbrella

RankingScore: 64

Category: Web Security Gateways

Most Compared to: Infoblox Secure DNS (32%), Zscaler Web Security (19%), Blue Coat Advanced Web & Cloud Security (9%)

The good:

• “It provides centralized, device-agnostic management, and has the ability to quickly block new threats.”
• “The customer support is exceptional. They have a wealth of articles in their knowledge base. This has given me the freedom to troubleshoot on my own time.”

What needs improvement:

• “It needs better integration with external threat feeds to improve scoring.”

Market Cap: $2 billion

Rating: 4.4 / 5 stars

Product: Imperva Incapsula

RankingScore: 91

Category: DDoS

Most Compared to: Cloudflare (26%), Sucuri (8%), Akamai (7%)

The good:

• “It gives us the ability to trace each connection, and to have logs to be able to differentiate between a positive and a false-positive intruder action.”
• “It provides anti-DDoS protection, as well as other protections like SQL injection, Cross-Site Scripting, and anti-scanner. Attacks on our portals often cannot be seen without a tool like this.”

What needs improvement:

• “It would be better if we were able to manage and apply changes to multiple websites/web applications, and search WAF logs for multiple websites, via the Incapsula dashboard.”

Market Cap: $62 billion

Rating: 4.5 / 5 stars

Product: VMware NSX

RankingScore: 94

Category: Cloud and Data Center Security

Most Compared to: Nuage Networks (40%), Cisco ACI (34%), Micro Focus Network Virtualization (5%)

The good:

• “It does have capabilities of micro-segmenting a network, being able to create smaller segments of various types of applications separated by various tiers. However, what it's mostly important for is being able to actually set security policies right at the interfacing virtual machine, which we haven't had the ability to do in the past.”
• “NSX has really become part of their ecosystem, especially for the tactical customers in the DoD. It's very important for them to have small footprints and have as much services in their servers, as possible. NSX has fit this role really well for them.”

What needs improvement:

• “Going through and getting more features sets from the routing protocols is definitely necessary for the future.”

Market Cap: $840 billion

Rating: 4.3 / 5 stars

Product: Microsoft BitLocker

RankingScore: 78

Category: Endpoint Encryption

Most Compared to: Symantec Endpoint Encryption (32%), Sophos SafeGuard (18%), McAfee MDP (12%)

The good:

• “With BitLocker I guarantee the protection of the disk and the configuration is transparent to the user.”
• “Whole Disk Encryption is great. BitLocker runs seamlessly during boot up. I also liked that it did not conflict with Windows.”

What needs improvement:

• “The implementation of BitLocker is not simple. There are many prerequisites and hours of study and testing.”

Market Cap: $18 billion

Rating: 4.1 / 5 stars

Product: CA Veracode

RankingScore: 82

Category: Application Security

Most Compared to: SonarQube (32%), Micro Focus Fortify on Demand (22%), Checkmarx (14%)

The good:

• “Veracode static analysis allows us to pinpoint issues - from a simple hard-coded test password, to more serious issues - and saves us lot of time.”
• “It is great to have such insight into code without having to upload the source code at all.”

What needs improvement:

• “It would help if there were a training module that would explain how to more effectively integrate the SAST product into the build tool, Jenkins or Bamboo.”

Market Cap: $134 billion

Rating: 4.3 / 5 stars

Product: IBM BigFix

RankingScore: 64

Category: Endpoint Protection

Most Compared to: SCCM (55%), Symantec Endpoint Protection (8%), Ivanti Endpoint Security for Endpoint Manager (8%)

The good:

• “The architecture for patching and the 100% correct reporting makes BigFix stand apart from other solutions.”
• “In terms of vulnerability management, it gives tough competition by providing a single management console with multiple benefits. Customization as per the requirements is one of of best it offers and almost any form of scripts and any OS can be supported for those customization.”

What needs improvement:

• “The levels of permissions are too complex to share the product with other teams. The technician must have all permissions to work easily.”

Market Cap: $12 billion

Rating: 4.2 / 5 stars

Product: Fortinet FortiGate

RankingScore: 85

Category: Firewalls

Most Compared to: Cisco ASA (18%), Sophos UTM (15%), Palo Alto Networks WildFire (13%)

The good:

• “The CLI is robust and powerful, enabling rapid, consistent changes via SSH. The device identification is very flexible, facilitating the creation of rules to regulate all sorts of devices that might spring up on a network, especially via WiFi.”
• “The CLI and GUI do a good job of putting a lot at your fingertips. Their proxy-based inspection is responsive and secure.”

What needs improvement:

• “It would be nice if backups could more easily migrate between different models.”

Funding: $18 million

Rating: 4.3 / 5 stars

Product: Forcepoint Web Security

RankingScore: 93

Category: Web Security Gateways

Most Compared to: Cisco IronPort (27%), Zscaler Web Security (23%), Barracuda Web Filter (23%)

The good:

• “Forcepoint Web Security is a complete web security solution, not just a web filter...The customization and control of URL filtering and the integration with other Forcepoint solutions are great features.”
• “Multiple customization options to allow or block a specific content within the web pages has allowed us to simplify the user experience without loss of productivity.”

What needs improvement:

• “The latest deployment was a fairly smooth transition, but previous upgrades and hardware replacements have been painful.”

Market Cap: $11 billion

Rating: 4.0 / 5 stars

Product: F5 BIG-IP

RankingScore: 93

Category: Application Delivery Controllers

Most Compared to: Citrix NetScaler ADC (14%), A10 Networks Thunder ADC (13%), HAProxy (11%)

The good:

• “It provides first-tier firewalling for you application. And it provides server load-balancing, optimization, and a proxy feature where your users cannot directly access your server. It acts as a fully proxy architecture.”
• “It helps us recognize sessions from certain IPs that are authorized to manage the application. This is a function we haven't found anywhere else.”

What needs improvement:

• “The synchronization does work fairly well. However, I would make it easier to start the sync process.”

Market Cap: $2 billion

Rating: 4.4 / 5 stars

Product: Sophos UTM

RankingScore: 60

Category: Firewalls

Most Compared to: Fortinet FortiGate (31%), pfSense (25%), WatchGuard XTM (6%)

The good:

• “If a computer gets infected Sophos lets us know, so we can get a much faster response time.
• “It has allowed us to design a bespoke cloud space for our clients, while still having an excellent level of protection.”

What needs improvement:

• “​This product could use some improvement with web filtering. It takes a lot of time and effort to set up and maintain.​”

Funding: $182 million

Rating: 4.3 / 5 stars

RankingScore: 80

Category: DDoS

Most Compared to: Imperva Incapsula (18%), Sucuri (15%), SiteLock (14%)

The good:

• “It helps me manage DNS records for more than 100 domains with ease. It helps in web page optimization & helps keep the website secure. If it was not for CloudFlare, I would have to hire a dedicated resource to manage all this for me.”
• “In addition to a reliable and easy-to-use DNS service, Cloudflare enables us to host websites on hardware in-house, by protecting us against DDoS attacks as well as from our slightly unreliable ISP.”

What needs improvement:

• “I think the APIs are a little bit hard for us to work with. The APIs could be more open so that we could integrate better with our SolarWinds or our monitoring solution.”

Market Cap: $12 billion

Rating: 4.1 / 5 stars

Product: Symantec Endpoint Protection

RankingScore: 92

Category: Endpoint Protection

Most Compared to: Microsoft Windows Defender (25%), McAfee Complete Endpoint Protection (12%), ESET Endpoint Security (7%)

The good:

• “I think the key thing for me, is interoperability, in that you can deploy it to Windows, Mac, and Linux... Now there's one management console to cover all three OSs.”
• “Device control in Symantec is not limited to only some devices. You can add any device you want, so that it can become a part of the policy you made.”

What needs improvement:

• “It would be nice to have customized reports integrated on the main console with no additional DB server or BI server.”

Funding: $250K

Rating: 4.8 / 5 stars

RankingScore: 95

Category: Enterprise Password Managers

Most Compared to: Dashlane (40%), LastPass Enterprise (26%), CyberArk Enterprise Password Vault (4%)

The good:

• “We can access our sign-ins and passwords on up to five devices per user. This means I can access a given site from my home and office computers, as well as my phone and iPad.”
• “It has a secure password generator that incorporates random creation tools and good security practices, which allows for an easy, quick, organized update and sharing with a work team.”

What needs improvement:

• “It would be nice to see this great tool integrate with other tools out there.”

IT Central Station computes a RankingScore for each product based on a composite of:

1. Number of reviews
2. Average star rating
3. Number of times the product has been compared with alternative solutions
4. Number of views of reviews
5. Number of followers on IT Central Station

The total ranking of a product, is based on a weighted aggregate score. The score is calculated as follows: The product with the highest count in each area gets the highest available score. (20 points for Reviews; 16 points for Views, Comparisons, and Followers.) Every other product gets assigned points based on its total in proportion to the #1 product in that area. For example, if a product has 80% of the number of reviews compared to the product with the most reviews then the product's score for reviews would be 20% (weighting factor) * 80% = 16. For Average Rating, the maximum score is 32 points awarded linearly based on our rating scale of 1-10. If a product has fewer than ten reviews, the point contribution for Average Rating is reduced (one-third reduction in points for products with 5-9 reviews; two-thirds reduction for products with fewer than five reviews). Reviews that are more than 24 months old, as well as those written by resellers, are completely excluded from the ranking algorithm.

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