Marketed as a cloud VPN for business teams, GoodAccess aims to bring the benefits of a zero-trust model for remote access purposes, no matter where you and your employees are. In the age of the ubiquitous business work ethic, companies are struggling to plug all the emerging holes in their security systems. GoodAccess promises to put your business applications and resources behind a robust virtual VPN moat, with speed of implementation being its hallmark.
In order to provide the static IP address to as many people as possible, GoodAccess plays the card of attractive prices associated with a free trial. Does it make it an ideal option for small and medium-sized businesses?
Let's see if he delivers on his bold promises.
packages and prices
First, the good news: GoodAccess gives you a full 14-day free trial that doesn't involve credit cards. In addition, you will surely appreciate the possibility of obtaining a significant discount of 20% by opting for annual billing.
Three main plans have the easily understandable names of Essential, Advanced, and Premium. They are available for €4, €8, €10 per user/month at the time of writing. In addition to price, these packages differ in the number of users and features supported. For example, 20 users and two gateways are included in the Premium plan, which is designed for enterprise-level users.
It's also worth noting that GoodAccess recently launched a new starter plan for businesses that gives them free access to their cloud VPN without any of the limitations imposed by other free VPNs.
Other users will be perfectly happy with the advanced option, which is tailor-made for cloud and multi-site businesses, while the cheapest plan still gives you access to a full cloud VPN for remote computers with a static IP address. for the white list.
All things considered, it is reasonable value for money when comparing GoodAccess to its more famous competitors.
Security features
The first thing to test is GoodAccess's ability to deliver what every customer is looking for first and foremost: old-school security. First, the good news: their Service Access Service Edge (SASE) implementation is more than capable and packed with security features tailored to the needs of the modern remote workforce.
Its 2-factor and multi-factor authentication will give you multi-layered security protection whenever a member of your staff requests access to any system. Identity theft and fraud are a real threat today and GoodAccess will not fear against them: their SSO is fully compatible with Azure AD, Google, Active Directory and similar technologies.
OpenVPN and IKEv2 are responsible for providing ironclad 256-bit encryption. To strengthen your defenses against DNS leaks and potential privacy breaches, all connections provided by GoodAccess are IPv4 level and combined with port forwarding and dedicated IP whitelisting for secure access to your valuable assets.
Now that matters less, unless you combine these security features with a watchful eye on what's going on with your staff. To support not only your security capacity, but also your productivity goals and compliance efforts, GoodAccess will record any instance where your employees have requested or gained access. Just consider the impact this can have on compliance with increasingly stringent regulations like GDPR.
Overall, GoodAccess delivers the goods when it comes to security features, putting you closer to more premium plans at a lower price.
Management functions
GoodAccess brings together various management tools built around the idea of usability and accessibility. To get started, you can manage gateways by instantly deploying a private gateway with a static IP address for your employees. You can choose them from more than 33 locations around the world. Using multiple gateways should help in situations where you need backup or faster connection speeds.
Access management is done by creating special access cards that can authorize you to specific resources and systems for individual employees or groups. You can easily assign them by departments, giving different access permissions, for example to your marketing team versus your IT staff.
GoodAccess is also big on integrations, so they will provide you with many plugins (like WordPress, Azure, and others). If you need help with any of these, please use the full documentation with instructions provided by GoodAccess on their website.
Interface
Helping both a layman and a professional to successfully manage everything that happens with GoodAccess is another benefit of the platform.
Its dashboard is dominated by a clean, accessible interface and a responsive dashboard that will help you get the most out of it in no time. Navigating its buttons and sections is quite easy, and more importantly, intuitive. This is no small thing when you consider that you don't want your staff to panic when presented with all the options this system has to offer.
From the access control panel, you can easily manage the gateways, computers, and individual systems that you need to grant access to at all times using easily searchable lists. These are made more manageable by giving you the ability to change the access level on the fly for any work resource your colleagues want to access.
All team members can be easily invited to become members of individual groups, with a tag-based system helping you filter them later based on changing circumstances on the ground.
The same level of usability is provided for the interface used to manage integrations and downloads.
Support and customer experience
Samohyb provides its address in the Contact section of the GoodAccess site. Alternatively, you can send the team a message by filling out a short form, which can be found below the address.
A more detailed way to receive guidance is to book a free online session with the GoodAccess Guru, which can be done on the website. It is especially useful for troubleshooting initial setup issues, such as whitelisting issues or system integration plugins.
There are also other means online. GoodAccess customers (but especially business customers) have access to 24/7 support via live chat or Samohyb's IT ticketing system.
On the Good Access site, Samohyb claims that its VPN solutions are used by more than 10.000 people and more than 1.000 computers. Despite this, it is difficult to find many customer reviews.
Good Access provides customer reviews on their website under References. There is praise for GoodAccess's easy-to-use control panel, low latency (ability to quickly process large amounts of data), strong encryption, and easy-to-use access control settings.
We received two customer reviews from Capterra and both were positive about GoodAccess's overall ease of use, affordability and reliability. Although an issue with the initial whitelist is mentioned, it is claimed that this issue was quickly resolved with the help of GoodAccess Guru.
Competition
Compared to NordLayer's starting price per user per month, the GoodAccess equivalent is cheaper. However, NordVPN's offering provides security features that GoodAccess lacks, such as a VPN kill switch and two-factor authentication.
Like GoodAccess, Encrypt.me is a VPN service suitable for small businesses. It's easy to use and offers similar features like a free trial and accessibility on all devices. That said, Encrypt.me offers noticeably more server locations – over 70 in 40 countries.
final verdict
GoodAccess is a great entry point for small and medium-sized businesses that want to improve their security and productivity with a business-focused VPN. At this price, there's almost nothing to write home about: you get the multi-user plan with perfectly competent interface, management, and security features.
Larger businesses would do well to check out more expensive VPN plans with stronger sets of advanced features.
For businesses on a shoestring budget or those who prefer to save on security, it's an affordable option that doesn't feel like it all the time.
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