We compared Cisco Umbrella and Cloudflare DNS across several parameters based on our users' reviews. After reading the collected data, you can find our conclusion below:
Features: Cisco Umbrella is highly regarded for its seamless integration with existing infrastructure, extensive range of security features, and ability to centrally manage security. Cloudflare DNS excels in terms of performance and ease of registering domains. Users also like the solution's caching capabilities and API functionality.
Room for Improvement: Cisco Umbrella could enhance security by adding a transferring proxy feature and improving its Linux agent for Linux-based companies. Cloudflare DNS could improve API integration and dashboard analytics.
Ease of Deployment: Based on the feedback, Cisco Umbrella has a simple and user-friendly initial setup that can be completed quickly in around 30 minutes. Setting up Cloudflare DNS setup is also straightforward, but it may require more time, ranging from a few hours to a maximum of two weeks for inexperienced users.
Service and Support: Customers have praised Cisco Umbrella's support, describing it as excellent and superior to the customer service of other vendors. Most Cloudflare DNS customers perceive the support as dependable, although some feel that it could benefit from better responsiveness and more accurate responses.
Pricing: The cost of Cisco Umbrella differs based on the specific needs and approach of the customer, with flexible pricing and transparent charges. It is seen as reasonable and competitive by some, but a few perceive it as costly. Cloudflare DNS provides most of its core features at no cost, but customers can pay for additional services. Users consider the pricing for Cloudflare DNS to be minimal compared to other products.
ROI: Cisco Umbrella has proven to be a valuable investment by addressing maintenance concerns, reducing expenses associated with hardware updates, and effectively thwarting threats. It offers enhanced visibility and aids in remediation efforts. Quantifying the return on investment for Cloudflare DNS is difficult because it's challenging to estimate the potential financial impact of attacks.
Comparison Results: Cisco Umbrella integrates well with infrastructure and offers comprehensive security features, whereas Cloudflare DNS prioritizes speed, privacy, and global reach. Both products have user-friendly setups. Cisco Umbrella allows for easy deployment across multiple locations, while Cloudflare DNS can be set up quickly within a few hours. Cisco Umbrella could offer better Linux compatibility, while CloudFlare DNS should improve its dashboard analytics and API integration.
"The solution is stable."
"The most valuable features are the antivirus as a whole, the anti-malware, and all of the protection features that scan our enterprise devices."
"The protection offered by the product is the most valuable feature. It detects vulnerabilities or traps on our users' phones and then prompts them to clean up their devices. Tools we used previously would only discover, which required us to gather information on the backend, so Lookout is a welcome upgrade."
"On the outside, the main differentiation is because Lookout ingest. They have ingested basically all of the apps for the last ten years and all the versions of all the apps, and we have that in a corporate database that allows us to do very large-scale machine learning and analysis on that data set. That's not something that any of the competitors really have the capability to do because they don't have access to the data set. A lot of the apps you can no longer get them because that version of the app is five or six years old, and it just doesn't exist anywhere anymore, except within our infrastructure. So, the ability to have that very rich dataset and learn from that dataset is a real differentiator."
"We use Cisco Umbrella for DNS filtering and as a secure gateway."
"It enables us to go granular in the customization of blocking some categories on the DNS."
"One valuable feature is definitely its simplicity in terms of deployment. It is very easy to integrate it into the environment without any heavy lifting. Users didn't notice that we implemented it. You can start with a very low monitoring mode and start observing what Cisco Umbrella sees."
"It makes it really easy to accomplish content filtering. We don't have to do a lot of customization. You just click the box for the content category and it's up to date."
"I like that it integrates with the infrastructure. I also like the kind of data and intelligence that's built-in. It helps create innovative reports for security."
"It has helped reduce my unit's security events."
"It is a good cloud-based solution for DNS security."
"We are very new users of the solution and are still in the exploration stages, but we are happy with the product thus far."
"Its most significant benefit to date is the speed with which it refreshes DNS records on the internet once you change it. If you are changing a website or registering a new record, it is very quick."
"The most valuable feature of Cloudflare DNS is its global reach and it is always evolving."
"Cloudflare DNS is widely used, and it's good for websites. If we use Cloudflare DNS and update one record, it updates in their office instantly."
"Even when there is a high load on our servers, Cloudflare is able to cache the data and serve it to users, ensuring they can still access the website."
"I get a lot of value from Cloudflare's API because it enables you to build a separate environment inside the solution. You can create a domain for performing test requests before you move to the production environment and connect various domains."
"The attacker won't have details since my public IP is anonymous. It offers us good privacy."
"The most valuable features of the solution are performance and security."
"It is a stable solution. I rate the stability a ten out of ten...I rate the scalability a ten out of ten."
"We just submitted an enhancement request reflecting the main area we want to see improvement in; the APIs. Currently, we're able to build dashboards, but it's somewhat backward because we use our MDM API to create them. Lookout should provide API to customers so we can query our data and use it in our cloud, and this is the only outstanding area for improvement with the product right now."
"From the analysis that we've done, they do seem to be maybe a step behind in trying to enter the market with a new solution. But when they do pick up, they do come out with some good products."
"The stability depends on the service from where you access it. Because sometimes, the place you are in, you have Gateway. You don't have Gateway. The gateway is overutilized. At the end, you need to go through their gateways. And this is the key point here. You have a tracking point. If it's not well orchestrated, and it scales up as you add more to the existing team, you will suffer"
"Lookout was moving into the SSE space. And so their work on SecureWeb Gateway and SD-WAN is still sort of evolving."
"I'd like to see improvement in its overall integration with all the other platforms. There's some integration between Umbrella and Meraki, but an overall Cisco problem is that there are so many different tools, and finding easy, seamless ways of connecting everything together is always a challenge."
"The rule-making process for blocking sites or for blocking characteristics can use some simplification."
"If you wish to inspect all the traffic and it's integrated with Cisco AnyConnect, all the traffic basically goes through Cisco AnyConnect, which is not a good idea. That means you need to have more internet capacity as a data sampler, so in the case of a split tunnel, we cannot inspect the traffic that is being migrated through the local internet. I'm not sure whether there is a possibility wherein Cisco Umbrella can also inspect the traffic that is outside the AnyConnect tunnel."
"There is room for improvement in the dashboard. It could stand to be a bit more detailed. I would also like to be able to customize the dashboard to focus more on what is important for my company."
"With any Cisco product, it's the licensing side of things that needs improvement."
"This solution does not give us full, 360-degree protection."
"If we're trying to deploy it to a Mac through Meraki, it's impossible. The method of deployment for a Mac, and the features available in Meraki, are not compatible at all."
"It would be good to have more extensions to third-party products and a client for other device types."
"It would be helpful if the solution could continue evolving to compete with the other solutions on the market."
"Cloudflare doesn't have a reverse lookup. We can only do a DNS lookup to get the IP address from the hostname. It doesn't work if you want to look up the hostname from an IPA address."
"Cloudflare's free plan is limited to 5,000 records for their free plan. They should increase that. For example, if I create a domain called abc.com and a subdomain called a.abc.com, my record count will be two. I can make a maximum of 5,000 subdomains. However, if we use our own DNS hosted on another provider, there is no limit. Their free plan also lacks name server customization."
"Cloudflare should add more documentation and pricing to the cloud version."
"The documentation could improve for Cloudflare DNS."
"The analytics, basically the dashboard, doesn't have much to it."
"There might be helpful if there was some web application firewall feature."
"I believe they currently have this feature, but there will most likely be integration with APIs so we can control some features through API."
Cisco Umbrella is ranked 1st in Secure Web Gateways (SWG) with 108 reviews while Cloudflare DNS is ranked 1st in Managed DNS with 13 reviews. Cisco Umbrella is rated 8.8, while Cloudflare DNS is rated 8.6. The top reviewer of Cisco Umbrella writes "Protects endpoints wherever they are, always pushing people to the right locations to avoid malicious intent". On the other hand, the top reviewer of Cloudflare DNS writes "A tool that offers good performance that needs to improve in areas like assessment and payload". 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 Netskope , whereas Cloudflare DNS is most compared with Quad9, Azure DNS, Google Cloud DNS, Amazon Route 53 and Hurricane Electric Free DNS.
We monitor all Secure Web Gateways (SWG) 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.