Lightspeed Filter vs Linewize: Which is a better fit?

Andrew: I'm Andrew. I'm a Director of Family Ministries. I give Lightspeed Filter five out of five stars, and for more reviews like this, click below. Before we used Lightspeed, we were using a couple products from the Sophos family, and they were adequate as well, as far as software and hardware firewalls go. But Lightspeed really allowed us to narrow our focus to keeping our students safe, and the features that came along with that made a big difference. We went with Lightspeed Filter for a couple of reasons. The first and primary one is that it integrated with Google Classroom, so it was easy for us to roster Lightspeed with the different classes we had, with the different teachers and students. And for that reason, we were able to really drill down on the fact that middle school students were going to need access to more things to be able to do the kinds of research and tasks on the web that they needed to do. Lightspeed really helped us give granular control to, for instance, allow students to access certain products and web features in different grades, and also to really keep up with the constant onslaught of trying to keep our students safe. The custom whitelists and blacklists that Lightspeed offers makes it really easy for teachers to say, "Hey, I need access to this," and we can grant it. Or for teachers to come to us and say, "My students are really wasting a lot of time on this," and for us to blacklist it. The onboarding process for Lightspeed Filter was pretty seamless. Again, because of its integration with Google Classroom, we were able to get our classes and teachers and students into the correct organizational units and get off the ground pretty quickly. The one challenge we had was making sure that Lightspeed Filter also kept tabs with our Lightspeed Classroom monitoring software. They're from the same company, so they speak to each other pretty well, but getting them set up for the same school environment and working together took a little bit of enabling. If you're considering giving Lightspeed Filter and using it in your context, a couple things to keep in mind. The first is that Lightspeed is all software based. There's not going to be a hardware firewall that comes with it, so you may make different decisions about what kind of hardware firewall you have for your network, or if you're going to rely completely on the software. The second thing that you might take into consideration is whether or not you want some of the other Lightspeed family of products. In particular, their Classroom and monitoring tool in conjunction with the filtering really makes a pretty integrated experience of keeping students safe. Lastly, you might consider as well some of the different pricing options, particularly if you are part of a larger network of schools, a district, or a consortium. There's some significant savings to be had by bundling those Lightspeed products together at that district level, so consider that if you're thinking about using Lightspeed in your context.