We performed a comparison between Cisco Secure Firewall and Cisco Umbrella based on real PeerSpot user reviews.
Find out in this report how the two Cisco Security Portfolio solutions compare in terms of features, pricing, service and support, easy of deployment, and ROI."It is a very stable product. I've not had any issues with it. It is a super product, and I won't need to change it anytime soon."
"It is much better than most of the other firewalls that I have worked with."
"The most valuable feature is the Intrusion Prevention System."
"The primary benefits of using Cisco Secure solutions are time-saving, a robust API, and convenience for the security team."
"The solution's dashboard is fine, and in terms of support, Cisco is better than other OEMs in the market."
"The IPS (In-plane switching) is the most valuable feature."
"IPSec Tunnel and AnyConnect (of course), the context awareness was a good feature, but clumsy at the beginning. I think it's better now."
"The solution is used for the protection of the mobile data network. It is protecting 3G/4G Internet customers and the Private APN."
"The single-pane-of-glass management is very important. We have a very small team. We can't spend a lot of time going from product to product to product to either investigate or set up policy. We need to have one place that we can go to and set everything up."
"For us and for customers, it's the ease of integration with Meraki. It's just a couple of clicks. That allows us to deploy very fast, and it doesn't change the way a customer uses his service. It's just more secure."
"We like Cisco Umbrella because of DNS security. It's one step ahead of whatever we are using for regular web filtering. In that way, it's more secure than other web filtering products."
"The documentation is good, and we have been able to resolve any issues ourselves."
"Cisco Umbrella is easy to monitor, manage, and deploy."
"When we have laptops that leave the building, they could connect to public WiFi before they establish a VPN connection back into the company. For that duration or that period of time when they're not docked in the network or on a VPN, they effectively don't have that full layer of security that I provide inside the building. This tool stands in during that period of time, and we extend the security settings through their basic firewall or their cloud-based firewall at that time. So, we do content filtering and control access, but they also are looking at new domains, IP addresses, and bad requests. They're blocking them on my behalf when a laptop is not sitting behind our security appliances."
"The weekly reportings are great. The investigation is super and the application management is equally great."
"Overall, it is a very good solution. It is a simple solution and very easy to set up."
"Migration with other appliances is not easy. It has to be done manually, and this takes a long time."
"It is expensive."
"There used to be information displayed about the packets in a module called Packet Flow, but it is no longer there."
"Comparing Cisco solution to others, it is expensive, it would be better for it to be cheaper."
"It can probably provide a holistic view of different appliances because many customers do not have only one brand, besides the traditional SNMP protocols, to cover all their devices. There are some specific requirements in terms of configurations or actions that sometimes have to be done in a very manual way because of the different versions or brands in a customer's infrastructure. It could also have some additional analytics capabilities. It has some very interesting ways to monitor the traffic and identify false positives from the architecture and the environment. It would be good if there is a way to patch with some other industry-specific solutions and synchronize some of the information, such as what other customers experience in their operations and probably share some additional information that could be leveraged or shared among the industry. Such information would be something interesting to see. It could have AI capabilities related to how the appliances could benefit from learning the current environment and different exposures."
"The throughput highlighted on the datasheet (10Gbps) should be reviewed. This throughput is only for a UDP running environment, which you will never find in the real world. Rather consider a multiprotocol throughput."
"It seems very clunky and slow. I would like to be able to tune it to be a more efficient product."
"The SSL VPN is, and always has been, painful to configure and the Java plugin does not guarantee a uniform deployment."
"They need to improve analytics so they report on more of the specifics of user activity."
"Network connectivity was a bit of a challenge at the beginning, but we were able to get the right help from Cisco."
"Overall, I'm quite happy with Cisco products, but there could be one place where you can check what's going on. There could be one place where you get all the information about these products so that you don't need to look around. You get the status, information about what lately happened, and if there was anything on the machine in one single place."
"They can maybe simplify the configuration. For example, sometimes, the proxy part is quite difficult, and that's why we didn't deploy that."
"Something on our end that might make it better is alerting going to our ticketing system. It's not something that we have discussed, but that would be a proactive option for us to provide a learning experience for the staff."
"It would be better if there was a little bit of flexibility for organizations that don't have SD One in their environment. Because of the complexity of the environment, it's not easy to actually turn on the feature of the secure internet gateway for our users. We have not been able to explore that option yet."
"The firewall capabilities could be better. Cisco is starting to introduce some layer 7 capabilities now, but there's still some room to grow. They should continue with the development of Umbrella so that it is a full-blown cloud-managed firewall solution."
"I'd like to see this solution more closely integrate with other products Cisco has in its portfolio."
Cisco Secure Firewall is ranked 4th in Cisco Security Portfolio with 404 reviews while Cisco Umbrella is ranked 2nd in Cisco Security Portfolio with 108 reviews. Cisco Secure Firewall is rated 8.2, while Cisco Umbrella is rated 8.8. The top reviewer of Cisco Secure Firewall writes "Highlights and helps us catch Zero-day vulnerabilities traveling across our network". On the other hand, the top reviewer of Cisco Umbrella writes "Protects endpoints wherever they are, always pushing people to the right locations to avoid malicious intent". Cisco Secure Firewall is most compared with Fortinet FortiGate, Palo Alto Networks WildFire, Netgate pfSense, Meraki MX and Sophos XG, whereas Cisco Umbrella is most compared with Zscaler Internet Access, Microsoft Defender for Cloud Apps, Prisma Access by Palo Alto Networks, Palo Alto Networks DNS Security and Fortinet FortiGate SWG. See our Cisco Secure Firewall vs. Cisco Umbrella report.
See our list of best Cisco Security Portfolio vendors.
We monitor all Cisco Security Portfolio reviews to prevent fraudulent reviews and keep review quality high. We do not post reviews by company employees or direct competitors. We validate each review for authenticity via cross-reference with LinkedIn, and personal follow-up with the reviewer when necessary.