We performed a comparison between Cisco Umbrella and Forescout Platform based on real PeerSpot user reviews.
Find out what your peers are saying about Cisco, Zscaler, Palo Alto Networks and others in Secure Web Gateways (SWG)."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 solution is stable."
"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."
"If it didn't have a single pane of glass, we would not be using it. The single pane of glass gives you a one-stop shop. It's like going to Home Depot. You find all your stuff there. You can see all your threats and your endpoints. It's a very important feature and makes things very simple."
"It will protect, give you more robustness, and faster responses, compared to any firewalls or any of the proxy web servers."
"For me, it's important that I get a connection to my corporate network in a secure and fast way. This product just runs in the background and doesn't need any attention. For me, as a user, it's perfect."
"Cisco Umbrella is absolutely stable."
"Cisco Umbrella's integration with other solutions has been a great feature in terms of ease of administration. Administration and troubleshooting are faster. The single pane of glass is great as well. Another great feature of Cisco Umbrella is remote browser isolation. With this feature, you open a virtual browser, and it's seamless to the user. If the user ends up going to a bad website that's passed a policy and something bad tries to download, it will not download into the machine because it is a virtual window somewhere in the cloud. You are protected by this feature."
"Any time someone went off the network, the AnyConnect client had the Umbrella agent built in, and it would realize when their computer connected that they were not on the corporate network. It would monitor and they would have pretty close to the same rules that they had to follow when they were in the office, regarding what kind of website browsing they could do."
"I like the DNS layer security."
"The user interface is great. It's very easy to tailor to our client's environment and needs."
"The most valuable features of the Forescout Platform are NAC for sharing, Network Access Control, and port sharing of the devices."
"Forescout is easy to integrate with a lot of end systems."
"The stability is amazing for the Forescout Platform. We have been using Forescout for four years, and no one complained about the stability."
"The initial setup is quite simple. It's not too complex or difficult to set up."
"Forescout Platform provides multiple features. They have a very effective device fingerprinting in their cloud. You do not need to add any devices manually, such as in Mac devices. Other solutions you have to add IoT devices and OT devices manually. This is one of the major areas that Forescout Platform is excelling in."
"Obtaining visibility into the network and connected devices is very simple with this tool. It takes me three minutes to do a base deployment when all the parameters are available."
"Ease of deployment There's a great support team that becomes actively engaged whenever we encounter issues. Their technical support is amazing. Good documentation is available. The product is stable. The solution is highly scalable. I recommend using the solution because it gives verified control over the environment. It has a great visibility feature."
"Forescout has a feature that blocks the endpoint at the point of collection. It sets preconditions and will block the system if those aren't met."
"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."
"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."
"I would like to have more applications being recorded."
"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."
"There are some situations where we would like to block things for specific user groups. I know that Umbrella does that, but it's not that easy.... when you want a specific task for specific rules and policies for user groups, you have to go three levels down in the menu, and it's hard to find where you do that task."
"The pricing is a bit high. Being outside of the USA, we have issues with the exchange rate."
"The design of the screens could be improved. Sometimes you're trying to look for information, for what you think is critical that should be on that first screen of the dashboard so that you can quickly take screenshots to have people help out, but you have to hop between screens to find little pieces of evidence."
"Its on-prem rollout is quite challenging. It needs better coordination with the Internet Service Provider. It is a cloud-based solution, and any endpoint that connects to it has to go through all the gateway ISPs, but some of the ISPs block HTTPS-based DNS. That's where the challenge occurs with Umbrella."
"I feel that the application needs other characteristics that are available with other applications in the market."
"The rule-making process for blocking sites or for blocking characteristics can use some simplification."
"When adding what is in scope to a policy, it would be nice if you could select multiple policies instead of one policy at a time to add what is in the scope for network segmentation. I have found that during the install and configuration of the policies that if you want to modify multiple policies or enable multiple policies that you need to define what is in the scope (IP range or segments) one rule at a time. This caused some slow downs when implementing policies."
"Search - needs boolean functionality (or pseudo operand now working)."
"It does not support the TACACS+ protocol."
"Regarding pricing, there is room for improvement to enhance competitiveness with other vendors and solutions."
"It's scalable, but not without a big investment. It doesn't do so well at the branch. At the home office, it does okay and not so well at the branch."
"Forescout needs to upgrade its development in the future."
"The solution could always improve by adding more features to make it more robust."
"They should improve features related to IT security. ForeScout should analyze behavior to see if the behavior is malicious behavior and block this device. They should develop the ability to analyze the behavior of the device in my environment."
Cisco Umbrella is ranked 1st in Secure Web Gateways (SWG) with 108 reviews while Forescout Platform is ranked 4th in Network Access Control (NAC) with 69 reviews. Cisco Umbrella is rated 8.8, while Forescout Platform is rated 8.4. 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 Forescout Platform writes "We can go granular on each endpoint, quarantine non-compliant machines, and target vulnerabilities through scripting". 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 Infoblox Advanced DNS Protection, whereas Forescout Platform is most compared with Cisco ISE (Identity Services Engine), Aruba ClearPass, Fortinet FortiNAC, Nozomi Networks and Armis.
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.