We compared Cisco Umbrella Zscaler Internet Access based on our users’ reviews in five categories. After reading the collected data, you can find our conclusion below.
Comparison Results: Cisco Umbrella offers more comprehensive features, including granular customization of DNS blocking, tenant lock content filtering, and support for hybrid work. It also has better integration with other products and more reliable technical support. Zscaler Internet Access has a competitive pricing model and a cloud-native proxy architecture, it lacks certain features such as VPN and client-to-client communication. Overall, Cisco Umbrella provides a more complete and user-friendly solution for organizations.
"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."
"The solution is stable."
"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."
"The most valuable features are the antivirus as a whole, the anti-malware, and all of the protection features that scan our enterprise devices."
"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."
"The most valuable features for us include tenant lock, content filtering, and DLP solutions, looking for PII and information being exfiltrated."
"Cisco Umbrella is a totally different solution. They are the first to come up with this idea of security. It's a totally new concept of security for everybody, for every time, real time, perfectionism."
"We are very new users of the solution and are still in the exploration stages, but we are happy with the product thus far."
"The most valuable feature is the website protection capabilities because it prevents end-users from entering bad sites that potentially have malware or could be used for phishing."
"Cisco's technical support is pretty good. When a solution is available, they will find it. On a scale from one to ten with ten being the best, I'd rate Cisco's technical support at nine."
"It has improved our organization from a security posture perspective. We feel more confident now knowing that we can block phishing attempts or any type of malware that is DNS-related. This is a very nice feature that provides peace of mind."
"Its simplicity is most valuable. I can install it and get it up and running, and it can be pervasive across my business within a business day. It is pretty simple and straightforward to install and configure. Its remit is reasonably clearly defined. When you look at solutions like Darktrace and Carbon Black, the mission objective isn't as clearly defined. Cisco Umbrella, Sophos Central, or some of the other solutions have a more standardized approach to antivirus, which includes enhanced response from the machine learning or deep learning perspective."
"The solution offers a distributed organization to master and to control all of the endpoints."
"The users are at different locations, and Zscaler helps us to put the organization's central security controls on these roaming users."
"Tech support is good."
"The solution replaces multiple vendor technologies with one which makes it worth the cost."
"The protection is most valuable."
"Zscaler covers all the features needed to replace a VPN or proxy solution. They are good. They've been on the market for 15 years now, so they are mature enough."
"SSL inspection is a valuable feature."
"The most valuable feature of the solution is SWG traffic."
"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."
"Lookout was moving into the SSE space. And so their work on SecureWeb Gateway and SD-WAN is still sort of evolving."
"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"
"Some countries don't have a DNS server leading to a domain resolution IP, not at a local level."
"Security, overall, can always be improved."
"The reporting could be improved by way of the information that's displayed. For example, when you pull a report, it shows an internal employee going to many websites, but you can spin that right down by saying a lot of it is being cached."
"There are a couple of different pieces that have different portals. I know they're working on getting them all into one portal, but that's probably the biggest thing that needs improvement right now. It's not a single pane of glass yet."
"Cisco Umbrella is difficult to manage and needs to include a dashboard. It needs to improve pricing as well."
"I feel that the application needs other characteristics that are available with other applications in the market."
"It's a very new product, so it's quite immature at the moment. It can be more user friendly."
"I'd like to see this solution more closely integrate with other products Cisco has in its portfolio."
"The reporting functionality could be a bit easier to use. There is a reporting function, but it's quite hard to do any good reporting, from a user-management perspective. For example, if a department manager wants to know how his department is using the web, there is a way to get the data, but it's quite cumbersome to get it and show it well. And that's true for comparing between departments."
"When you have appliances, SSL inspection is always a headache due to poor performance and/or lack of ciphers implemented. "
"They could provide more time for the onboarding the training of an IT person."
"The pricing is an issue. It is expensive if you have all of your users in the same location. It is expensive compared to other firewalls on the market."
"Zscaler Internet Access needs to integrate more ISPs. It is good to have more than three ISPs."
"The price of the solution could be improved."
"In terms of usage, here in the GCC, it's still growing a growing market, so the combination of DLP, data leak prevention, to a certain extent is fine. But what it requires is user-based access or role-based access. The solution needs to grow into that, which definitely takes time. There's not an easy way to integrate it, when you have a cloud-based solution."
"Cloud App’s database should be improved."
Cisco Umbrella is ranked 1st in Secure Web Gateways (SWG) with 108 reviews while Zscaler Internet Access is ranked 2nd in Secure Web Gateways (SWG) with 46 reviews. Cisco Umbrella is rated 8.8, while Zscaler Internet Access is rated 8.2. 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 Zscaler Internet Access writes "Provides integrated CASB and file sandboxing but could be less expensive ". Cisco Umbrella is most compared with Microsoft Defender for Cloud Apps, Prisma Access by Palo Alto Networks, Palo Alto Networks DNS Security, Fortinet FortiGate SWG and Infoblox Advanced DNS Protection, whereas Zscaler Internet Access is most compared with Microsoft Defender for Cloud Apps, Netskope , Prisma Access by Palo Alto Networks, Forcepoint Secure Web Gateway and FortiSASE . See our Cisco Umbrella vs. Zscaler Internet Access report.
See our list of best Secure Web Gateways (SWG) vendors and best Internet Security vendors.
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