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Secure every web request.
On your own infrastructure.

EnforceGate vX is a self-hosted secure web gateway: URL filtering, network access control, SSL/TLS inspection and a captive portal. Enterprise-grade web security that runs inside your perimeter and deploys in minutes, with no cloud dependency: every request is decided on-box, with no backhaul to a vendor cloud.

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Live traffic enforcement
ClientsHTTP/HTTPS (SSL/TLS)
→
ProxyListen on tcp/3128
→
ConnectorDefendr Protocol
→
EngineAuthorization Verdicts
→
PortalAllow, Block or Warn

No cloud lookup, no telemetry, your own the data.

Deploys in minutes on Docker VMware KVM Hyper-V Nutanix AHV Bare metal Signed & integrity-checked builds Your data stays on-premises 🇨🇭 Engineered in Switzerland 🌿 Powered by solar energy
Command Line Interface

An operator CLI you already know.

If you run Cisco IOS or Juniper Junos, EnforceGate vX feels like home: a real interactive CLI with operational, privileged and configuration modes, show verbs and staged commits. No web console required.

ssh enforcegate@192.168.1.1
EnforceGate vX · interactive console — type ? for help Authenticated as `enforcegate` (privilege level 11). 127.0.0.1# show policy list ID Name Action Source File Type Match summary 0 allow-updates permit operator 10-egress.policy domain 38 domain hosts 1 deny-threats deny operator 20-threats.policy category category malware 2 deny-phishing deny operator 20-threats.policy category category phishing 3 deny-gambling deny operator 90-feed-test.policy category category gambling 4 warn-social warn operator warn-social.policy category category social Loaded: 5 rules (0 regex + 1 domain + 0 pin) Default action (no rule matched): permit 127.0.0.1# enable 127.0.0.1# conf t Entering configuration mode. Edits to .policy files are staged on disk and applied with `commit`. Use `rollback` to discard. 127.0.0.1(config)# edit policy warn-social Opening /etc/enforcegate/rules.d/warn-social.policy in vi... 127.0.0.1(config)# commit Reloading policy on engine — this can take 10-60s for multi-million-rule policies... Policy reload: success Parsed rules: 5 Snapshot taken: 20260728-153410.001 127.0.0.1(config)#
  • Cisco IOS & Juniper Junos, in one shell

    It works like the network gear you already run: the same command modes, inline ? help, and a safe staged workflow: you edit a change, commit it, and roll it back if needed. Know Cisco IOS or Juniper Junos? You're productive on day one.

  • Up to 150M rules, built for categories

    The engine loads up to ~150 million rules in memory and matches every request locally, which is large enough to run full URL-category filtering from your own lists, with no cloud lookup. Benchmarked in under 5 GiB with sub-microsecond decisions that stay flat as the rule set grows.

  • A scriptable toolbox

    Every verb is also a flat, scriptable command. Wrap them in your own shell scripts, cron jobs and CI: a sysadmin-friendly environment you can automate end to end, no SDK required.

the platform

One gateway: complete control

Take control of your web traffic to reduce your exposure to security threats, with no data ever shared with a vendor.

URL filtering

Allow or deny web traffic by URI, hostname, SNI, user-agent and client IP. Every request gets a per-URL verdict before it leaves your network.

$ egctl show-policy-match "https://…"

Network access control

Permit or deny by identity principal (users, groups), client posture, or network origin, matched on the same attributes as your URL policies.

$ eghost policy new 20-nac-eng

SSL/TLS inspection

Three modes: off, peek (SNI) and bump (full decryption), so you choose how much HTTPS visibility each deployment needs. The inspection CA is generated in seconds by our interactive installer.

$ eghost restart enforcegate

Captive portal

Block, warn and AUP verdicts redirect the visitor to an in-product explanation page in English, French, German and Italian, with an optional, recorded "Proceed anyway".

$ eghost links

Plain-text policies

Edit .policy files with the editor of your choice such as vi, or nano: domain lists, regex, SNI and user-agent matching. The engine saves a snapshot before every reload, so you can roll back to a previous version with a single command.

$ eghost policy edit 90-denyurlshort

Git-backed policies

Policies and domain/URL lists are plain-text files kept under git. Every change is versioned and attributed (who changed what, when and why), so you can diff, audit and roll back to any point, with the built-in commands or the git you already know.

# show policy log
solutions

Built for the jobs you actually have.

From acceptable-use enforcement to threat control and guest access: one engine, configured to your policy.

Every device is covered Laptops Servers Printers Tablets
Compliance

Acceptable use & compliance

Enforce what your organisation may browse: block or warn by category, with an Acceptable Use page users acknowledge.

  • Domain-list & regex policies
  • Audited acknowledgement
  • Default-permit or default-deny
Threat control

Malware, phishing & C2 egress

Stop outbound connections to known-bad destinations before they leave your network, with optional HTTPS inspection.

  • SSL/TLS inspection
  • Block phishing websites
  • Category-based filtering
Access

Guest, kiosks & BYOD

Give unmanaged devices safe, filtered access with a self-service CA install page and per-origin policy, no agent required.

  • Self-service CA install page
  • Multilingual captive portal
  • Available portal source code
how it works

From signed download to enforcing in three steps.

1

Verify & install

Download the cosign-signed bundle, verify it, and run the guided installer: it loads the images, starts the stack, and waits for the engine to be ready.

$ sudo ./install.sh
2

Point your clients

Point your hosts at the bundled proxy through a PAC/WPAD file, browser proxy settings, or AD group policy. The connector forwards every request to the engine over the encrypted Defendr protocol.

$ eghost status
3

Write policies & enforce

Edit plain-text .policy rules in the editor of your choice such as vi. Reload the engine policy engine with a single command: no restart, no dropped connections.

$ eghost policy new 90-denyurlshort

And the policy behind it is a plain-text, human-readable file: inline comments, unquoted keys, no rigid syntax. Save it in rules.d/ and it compiles & reloads live.

rules.d/40-web-policy.policy
# plain-text policy — comments and unquoted keys/values block-malware: { action: deny match-domain-list: lists/c2.txt # one domain per line description: Known C2 / malware domains } warn-social: { action: warn # soft-block + AUP notice match-domain-list: lists/social.txt time-window: Mon-Fri 09:00-17:00 # office hours only description: Social media during work hours }
see it in action

From a policy edit to an enforced block.

An operator defines a policy in the CLI - a matching request gets redirected to the captive portal to warn the user

why EnforceGate vX

The enterprise gateway, re-engineered for ownership.

Everything a secure web gateway should give you, without the cloud lock-in, the per-seat bill, or the expensive hardware. Shipped as signed, verifiable images you run and control: no outside telemetry and can run fully air-gapped. It scales, too: ~150 million rules matched on-box in sub-microsecond time (see the performance white paper).

Your data stays home

Traffic, policies and logs never leave your infrastructure. No backhaul through a vendor cloud, no data-residency headaches.

Predictable cost

A fraction of a cloud web gateway, priced by edition, not per seat, per Gbps, or per request. The price you sign up for is the price you renew at.

Verifiable supply chain

Hardware-anchored signing, in-image integrity checks, and a read-only root filesystem. Trust you can verify, not take on faith.

Swiss engineering & support

Built with passion in the Swiss Alps and supported by the same engineers who wrote the code.

how we compare

A secure web gateway you run, not a cloud you rent.

How EnforceGate vX stacks up against cloud secure-web-gateway services and on-prem proxy appliances, on the criteria that actually move the needle.

EnforceGate vX Cloud SWG / proxy appliance
Deployment Self-hosted container or virtual machine (VM) Proprietary appliance or forced cloud
Your data Stays inside your network Backhauled to the vendor cloud
Scale Up to 150 million rules in <5 GiB of RAM Cloud lookups, capped local lists
Management Cisco / Junos-style CLI Web GUI
Openness Signed, inspectable, adaptable Sealed, unverifiable appliance
Pricing Flat by edition, no usage metering Per-seat plus bandwidth tiers
Upgrades Live, seamless upgrades Required reloads, minutes long downtimes
Flat
Priced by edition, at a fraction of a comparable cloud secure web gateway or proxy appliance. Predictable cost: no throughput tiers, no price increases as your team grows, no renewal surprises.
editions

Editions that scale with your environment.

Coming soon

Business

$675 / year

per instance

For SMEs and MSPs: everything in Pro plus Active Directory integration and the user-aware advanced captive portal, the TLS connector that mirrors decrypted traffic to an IDS or DLP, and the daily threat-intelligence feed. Adds the full documentation set with integration and design guides, Advanced support, and 40 bundled connector sessions.

Coming soon

Enterprise

Ask us

For corporate, government and regulated fleets: unlimited scale with high availability, multi-tenant fleet management, directory integration with AD and RADIUS, TLS connector for IDS/IPS, SSO and RBAC, compliance exports, SLA support, real-time AI threat detection with a captive-portal AI assistant, and the NGFW modules on our roadmap.

Pro
Available
Business
Coming Soon
Enterprise
Coming Soon
Core SWG · CLI · git policy✓✓✓
No telemetry · verifiable offline ✓✓✓
Offline / air-gap activation ✓✓✓
Captive portal StandardAdvancedEnhanced
Blocklists Exosys Curated · 59 categoriesExosys Curated · 59 categoriesExosys Curated · 59 categories
Threat-intelligence feed Coming soon✓✓
AI anomaly & threat detection ✕✕✓
AI captive-portal assistant ✕✕✓
Directory integration ✕Active DirectoryAD + RADIUS
Multi-tenancy · fleet management✕✕✓
Bundled connector sessions 254050
TLS connector ✕✓✓
Automatic updatesOnline / AutomaticOnline / AutomaticOnline / Automatic
SupportDirectAdvancedPremium
Documentation User DocumentationIntegration & Design guidesIntegration & Design guides
SSO · SAML · RBAC✕✕✓
Compliance exports (CIPA / GDPR)BasicBasicFull + audit log
NGFW modules Add-onAdd-onIncluded
The Business and Enterprise editions are in development; their columns describe planned capabilities, not a commitment to dates or specifications. Prices are in USD per instance per year, excluding VAT; Enterprise is quote-based.
questions

Questions, answered.

The things security and IT teams check before they trial a gateway.

Is there a free trial?
Yes: 30 days of Pro, free. A card is required to start, but you are not charged until the trial ends and cancelling anytime during the trial costs nothing. Checkout is hosted by Stripe, your account is provisioned automatically, and you get an e-mail to set your password and download the verified images. When a trial ends without a subscription, EnforceGate keeps running and keeps enforcing your policy; it simply drops to a reduced level, limited to 10 connector sessions and without the curated domain lists. Nothing is deleted, and subscribing restores full capacity automatically on the same serial, with no reinstall. See what happens when a licence expires.
What is a secure web gateway?
A secure web gateway (SWG) sits between your users and the internet and decides what web traffic is allowed. In plain terms, it's how an organisation filters and controls internet access: blocking malicious, phishing and unwanted sites, allowing or denying websites by URL or category, and inspecting HTTPS. EnforceGate vX is a self-hosted secure web gateway: it does all of that on your own network, with no cloud.
How do I block or filter websites across my network?
EnforceGate includes a built-in proxy that decides whether to allow every request. Clients are pointed at that proxy rather than having their traffic silently intercepted: you add its address to the usual proxy settings, whether that is a PAC or WPAD file, your browser, your operating system, or group policy.

That covers anything that speaks HTTP through a proxy, not only workstations and laptops: printers, appliances and servers, which you can restrict to the destinations they legitimately need such as package mirrors and vendor update endpoints. Used that way it acts as an HTTP firewall for outbound web traffic.

You then define a policy of what to allow or block: by domain, URL, category (adult content, gambling, social media, malware and more), or by user, group and IP. Every request is decided on-box and can be blocked, warned or redirected to a captive portal, and plain-text policies reload live so you can change what's blocked without downtime. It's a self-hosted way to filter employee or student internet access, and to control whats your servers and devices may reach, without a cloud service.
Can I bring my own threat-intel and domain feeds, or am I locked into yours?

Yes, and being open to outside intelligence is a genuine difference from the big vendors. Cloud secure web gateways from the likes of Cisco, Palo Alto Networks and Zscaler are built around their category database and their cloud: you largely enforce the taxonomy they ship, decisions run through their service, and folding in large external feeds or your own intelligence is limited to what the platform chooses to allow.

EnforceGate is open by design. An optional, sandboxed toolbox sidecar ships a real scripting environment (bash, Python 3, curl, git, jq and pip), so you can pull any source on a schedule: the free UT1 category corpus, abuse.ch's ThreatFox and URLhaus threat feeds, a commercial feed you already subscribe to, or your own internal lists. A short script converts each source into an on-box list and reloads the engine live, and matching stays entirely local, with no per-request cloud lookup.

This works on every edition. Prefer not to assemble your own? The Pro, Business and Enterprise editions also bundle the Exosys Curated Domain Lists (59 AI-classified categories), but you can always add, replace or blend in your own sources.

Where does our traffic and data go?
Nowhere external. EnforceGate runs entirely inside your perimeter as a container or virtual appliance; traffic, policies and logs stay on your infrastructure. There is no cloud backhaul and no vendor telemetry on inspected traffic.
Can I just build this on Squid myself?
Squid is part of what we ship, but turning a bare proxy into a managed web gateway is the hard part, and the open-source add-ons people used to reach for to do it are largely unmaintained today. EnforceGate is the maintained, supported layer on top: a verdict engine that matches up to ~150 million rules in memory, the interactive Cisco IOS / Juniper Junos-style CLI and scriptable command-line tooling, a category-list workflow, signed and integrity-checked images, and a Swiss engineer to call. You get a product that stays current, not a pile of cron jobs and abandoned plugins to maintain. And because the gateway is built on Squid, you also get its caching: frequently-requested content is served straight from the on-box cache instead of being re-fetched, which can improve page-load times for your users. (If you're replacing the dead SquidGuard layer specifically, see our SquidGuard alternative page.)
How is EnforceGate vX licensed?
Per instance, per year, with no per-byte, per-user or per-endpoint metering. Three editions, Pro, Business and Enterprise, differ by the capabilities they unlock and the connector sessions they bundle. Pro is available today; the Business and Enterprise editions are in development. See the editions table for what each one includes and what it costs.

More questions? See the full FAQ.

get in touch

See EnforceGate vX in your own network.

Tell us about your environment and we'll come back with a tailored quote and a deployment plan.

Start free trial