Cato Networks Suite

RATING:

4.7

(38)

About Cato Networks Suite

Cato Networks Suite automatically connects data centers, networks, assets, userbase, cloud application and other assets across the organizations on a unified and secure network. It enables businesses to manage traffic optimization and routing for wide area networks (WAN) and cloud traffic to ensure maximum uptime. Cato Networks Suite allows enterprises to share and route data using a converged network of point of presence (PoP) access points to improve data access speed. The platform offers an integrated stack of security applications, which includes firewalls, secure web gateway with URL filtering (SWG), anti-malware protection, IPS-as-a-service (IPS) and managed threat detection and response (MDR) system. Additionally, administrators can track usage of various applic...

Awards and Recognition

FrontRunner 2023
Software Advice's FrontRunners report ranks top products based on user reviews, which helps businesses find the right software.

Cato Networks Suite Pricing

Starting price: 

$1.00 per year

Free trial: 

Available

Free version: 

Not Available

Cato Networks Suite editing network rules

Cato Networks Suite Reviews

Overall Rating

4.7

Ratings Breakdown

Secondary Ratings

Ease-of-use

4.5

Customer Support

4.5

Value for money

4.5

Functionality

4.5

Most Helpful Reviews for Cato Networks Suite

1 - 5 of 38 Reviews

Alexandra

11 - 50 employees

Used less than 2 years

Review Source: Capterra
This reviewer was invited by us to submit an honest review and offered a nominal incentive as a thank you.

OVERALL RATING:

4

Reviewed April 2023

The first SASE

Anonymous

501-1,000 employees

Used daily for less than 2 years

Review Source: Capterra
This reviewer was invited by us to submit an honest review and offered a nominal incentive as a thank you.

OVERALL RATING:

5

EASE OF USE

5

VALUE FOR MONEY

5

CUSTOMER SUPPORT

5

FUNCTIONALITY

5

Reviewed July 2021

Very Easy to Use and Install Software

PROS

Cato integrates very smoothly with Windows 10 and is non-intrusive. Users will barely know it is running, except that everything works. From an Admin perspective, it has easy to use dashboards to get an overview of your services. The support from Cato through all stages of set up and use are frankly excellent.

CONS

Nothing noticeably awry with this product.

Casey

Retail, 201-500 employees

Used daily for less than 6 months

Review Source: Capterra
This reviewer was invited by us to submit an honest review and offered a nominal incentive as a thank you.

OVERALL RATING:

5

EASE OF USE

3

VALUE FOR MONEY

5

CUSTOMER SUPPORT

4

FUNCTIONALITY

4

Reviewed July 2021

Great for admins, Learning Curve for end users

Overall the experience with Cato has been great. Our prior VPN and firewall solution were hosted on-perm and back-hauling some traffic while split tunneling other was a consent game of cat & mouse. It has also solved a bunch of communication issues we had with our Site2Stie VPN. Converting them to Cato Nodes really improved performance.

PROS

The solution was easy to install, configure, and deploy, from the administrators perspective. The ability to have it auto start when a user logs in to their endpoint has saved countless hours on my service desk troubleshooting the issues that arise when an endpoint is off the domain for too long.

CONS

Currently the feature that gives me the most grief is the re-authentication sequence for the VPN client. If a user is actively using their system and the client goes to re-authenticate it opens a the SSO portal in a background tab in their browser, and then users are not sure how to proceed and our service desk gets calls. It would be nice if either the SSO portal was opened in the foreground, or there was "captive portal" behavior where if they tried to open up another site, they would get redirected to the SSO portal. Really it comes down to user training, but its not exactly intuitive as it stands.

Reasons for switching to Cato Networks Suite

The ability to use a cloud firewall solution that with integrated VPN and supported Azure SSO with MFA was the biggest attraction.

michael

Computer Networking, 501-1,000 employees

Used daily for less than 2 years

Review Source: Capterra
This reviewer was invited by us to submit an honest review and offered a nominal incentive as a thank you.

OVERALL RATING:

1

EASE OF USE

2

VALUE FOR MONEY

1

CUSTOMER SUPPORT

2

FUNCTIONALITY

2

Reviewed July 2021

beware of cancelation policy they do not allow this to be done even if its their fault

i was not happy with the service. their NOC always has a downtime (for philippines, not sure with other countries) at least once a month there is some sort of network issue when connecting with their NOC aside from the weekly downtime mentioned for maintenance issues. this is a SD wan product, so if thier side is down then you will be down as well even if you have multiple internet connections. defeats the purpose of redundancy. though you can switch from one of their NOCs to another NOC, the switching itself is a downtime and has to be manually done. when i decided to cancel my 5 year contract because of said issues, they are insisting i pay in full for the 3 years of service despite the fact that they violated SLA due to numerous downtimes etc. not happy at all and im still stuck now trying to figure out what to do with this pending bill they insist i should pay despite me cancelling.

PROS

easy deployment and simple admin panel to learn.

CONS

you will have a weekly maintenance downtime of about 15 mins. they do update the software which is a good thing, but you will be down for that said period weekly which is a pain for operations who require 24/7.

Reason for choosing Cato Networks Suite

i thought they were a better solution depsite the higher price, turns out i made a huge mistake in engaging wtih this comapny.

Reasons for switching to Cato Networks Suite

reasons indicated above. not happy.

Andy

Machinery, 51-200 employees

Used daily for less than 6 months

Review Source: Capterra
This reviewer was invited by us to submit an honest review and offered a nominal incentive as a thank you.

OVERALL RATING:

5

EASE OF USE

5

VALUE FOR MONEY

5

CUSTOMER SUPPORT

5

FUNCTIONALITY

5

Reviewed July 2021

Cato Networks SASE

Implementing Cato Networks has increased our security baseline footing by moving traffic management farther away from our internal network, decreasing the attack surface. It also strengthened our remote user access restrictions and control, and increased our internet bandwidth and network availability.

PROS

- Edge firewall protection as a service rather than on-prem hardware that requires constant updating and lifecycle replacement/support. - Remote access methods that connects remote users directly to private backbone network and from there to resources. Lessens requirement for all traffic to flow through main office network for resource access, removes insecure split tunneling for internet access. - Ability to aggregate multiple WAN sources and software defined network QoS and traffic management, and redundancy should one WAN provider experience outage. - Local PoPs mean users connect to closest/fastest ingress to Cato Network, including Ashburn AWS PoP and MS data centers for our cloud-based resources. - AD directory sync to import VPN users and groups and also provide directory awareness (traffic can be labeled by specific AD user and/or machine).

CONS

Like any other change between vendor offerings, there is a learning curve on migrating existing policies and routes/uses to the new setup (for example, firewall setups and NAT/port forwarding were different than our Fortinet equipment). Frequent usage and help from deployment specialists have lessened this and increased our self-reliance and understanding for day-to-day use.

Reason for choosing Cato Networks Suite

Ease of use, value proposition for Komori America, full suite of product range in one purchase from one company (not add-on products to a separate vendor's offering, often lacking security component in SD-WAN), global private backbone.

Reasons for switching to Cato Networks Suite

Keeping the physical firewall updated with current firmware and need to replace models every 3 years was getting difficult to manage and costly to maintain. Firmware updates meant network downtime and sometimes major reconfiguration as features would be deprecated and have to be redeployed when the new firmware is installed. Also, as this hardware was directly connected to both the internet and our internal network, the chance of compromise was increased if bad actors could exploit any weakness in the physical firewall itself. Deploying MFA was an added expense with the Fortigate, plus the cost of maintaining a separate FortiAnalyzer instance for full reporting capability.