Securly or Senso?

[StephenPink]

Hi all,

 

Am in the process of looking for a new filtering/monitoring/reporting platform, to sit on top of a PaloAlto firewall. I've had calls with both Senso and Securly, as has my safeguarding lead, was just wondering if anyone out there had first-hand experience of either/both and would be willing to share their thoughts? Or if there's another that I've missed...

 

Specific requirements:

- 1:1 iPad school, using Jamf School and not wanting to change MDM

- Happy with the Palo for firewall, so it's specifically filtering/monitoring/reporting

- Driven by safeguarding mostly

 

So far they both seem very capable, and are similar costs!

 

Cheers,

Stephen

[Norphy]

I might be wrong about this but as far as I understand it, although the two products do have somewhat overlapping purposes, they're more complimentary products than they are direct competitors. Securly is more about web filtering, while Senso is classroom management and monitoring.

[jemal]

Agree with Norphy. We use Senso for classroom management and also for safeguard monitoring. Would say it's not that great at 'filtering' and that's where we use a separate cloud firewall service. We're looking at changing our firewall to securly in the near future as we're moving from windows devices to chromebooks, and in addition to securly being very google friendly and offering a portal for parents to monitor any concerns for their children, I believe for safeguarding purposes securly will tick a lot more boxes than senso. However I don't think securly covers the device and classroom management that senso does very well. For IT support and management on devices, Senso has lots of nice things to offer there, especially for Windows devices; being able to send powershell and command line scripts to online devices is nice, such as being able to tell straight away when the last reboot was etc.

 

I believe other schools in our trust are using a combination of Securly and Hapara to cover the range of needs discussed above. If your safeguarding team are going to be fairly proactive and independant on the IT side of things for both filtering and monitoring, securly is probably going to be a better unified platform for them; but I've never used securly myself.

[StephenPink]

Thanks both - yes, agreed Senso does do far more than just filtering/monitoring, but did seem to be coming from a classroom management side of things. Which is not what we are interested in; however they do have an interesting MS Teams monitoring functionality. Appreciate you both coming back to me, always good to get a bit of a sanity check!

 

Cheers

[Wave9_Lee]

Hi all,

 

Am in the process of looking for a new filtering/monitoring/reporting platform, to sit on top of a PaloAlto firewall. I've had calls with both Senso and Securly, as has my safeguarding lead, was just wondering if anyone out there had first-hand experience of either/both and would be willing to share their thoughts? Or if there's another that I've missed...

 

Specific requirements:

- 1:1 iPad school, using Jamf School and not wanting to change MDM

- Happy with the Palo for firewall, so it's specifically filtering/monitoring/reporting

- Driven by safeguarding mostly

 

So far they both seem very capable, and are similar costs!

 

Cheers,

Stephen

 

"Or if there's another that I've missed..."

 

Lightspeed are worth a look. I'd be happy to arrange a demo/trial if you'd like - drop me a note anytime

 

regards

 

Lee

[TheRobins]

Been using SENSO now for 2 years and just about to switch from Smoothwall to Securly, From what I can see they fit nicely together especially with SENSO being able to directly communicate with our safeguarding software CPOMS. But have to ditto about the tools in SENSO, been a god send during lockdown and remote learning and IT tasks,

[titch]

Been using SENSO now for 2 years and just about to switch from Smoothwall to Securly, From what I can see they fit nicely together especially with SENSO being able to directly communicate with our safeguarding software CPOMS. But have to ditto about the tools in SENSO, been a god send during lockdown and remote learning and IT tasks,

We are currently going down this route. Did you not find the filtering available enough on senso?

 

Also If you are using securely instead of senso what will you be using as your firewall?

[TheRobins]

TBH Securly comes with a bundle included with the connection so I didnt investigate senso for filtering. Firewall/router will be a baracuda device.

 

We are currently going down this route. Did you not find the filtering available enough on senso?

 

Also If you are using securely instead of senso what will you be using as your firewall?

[ChrisSpinkSecurly]

I'd recommend taking a look at Securly for Filtering. It is great for safeguarding leads with simplified reports and live email alerts for any flagged events. No client needs to be installed. https://www.securly.com/filter - Extension can be pushed to Edge and Chrome, SmartPac and DNS. It also has a great parent app for filtering at home on school owned devices. We also have classroom management for teachers at an affordable price.

[synaesthesia]

Indeed, Senso on it's own isn't enough (it's not even enough on it's own for classroom management/remote support, we have to dual run with Impero for it to be usable)