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Amazon Route 53 vs Cisco Umbrella comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive Summary

Review summaries and opinions

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:
 

ROI

Sentiment score
6.1
Amazon Route 53 provides ROI through downtime prevention, efficiency improvements, security enhancements, and justifies its cost with quality.
Sentiment score
7.5
Cisco Umbrella improves security, reduces costs, and enhances productivity, offering quick ROI and increased efficiency with threat prevention.
The main factors are time-saving and security, even if the cost is slightly higher.
 

Customer Service

Sentiment score
8.1
Amazon Route 53 offers effective support, but premium plans improve experiences; basic plans might limit engagement and satisfaction.
Sentiment score
8.0
Cisco Umbrella is praised for efficient support and extensive resources, with minor delays in email and purchasing processes.
Amazon services are very stable, and there are few problems.
Amazon's customer support is very good with a quick response time.
They provide a normal developer level of support, and within twenty-four hours for non-critical issues, which is acceptable for us.
I would rate customer support ten out of ten due to the excellent assistance throughout the POC process.
Cisco's support is fantastic, providing assistance when needed, especially during the initial installation process.
The support channel isn't like the usual Cisco support where I could call instantly for a hardware issue like a router or switch.
 

Scalability Issues

Sentiment score
8.3
Amazon Route 53 is highly rated for its scalability, reliability, and efficient integration, though some find it costlier.
Sentiment score
8.1
Cisco Umbrella offers scalable, cloud-based infrastructure, enabling easy deployment and management across diverse organizational sizes globally.
We haven't faced any scalability issues, thanks to its integration with AWS services.
The scalability is maintained by AKS, and Route 53's scalability part is primarily involved with load balancing.
Amazon Route 53 is scalable as I use automation with YML files to handle scalability needs, and it works well.
Cisco Umbrella is scalable for our company.
It is a scalable solution but requires improvement in specific areas.
 

Stability Issues

Sentiment score
8.2
Amazon Route 53 is highly reliable, rated 99.99% stability, with rare downtime, enhanced by advanced routing features.
Sentiment score
8.3
Cisco Umbrella is praised for its excellent stability, high uptime, and reliability despite rare minor connectivity issues.
The solution is stable.
I have not encountered any stability issues.
I have not experienced any outages or downtime.
I have not experienced any major stability issues with Cisco Umbrella.
I will give stability a score of seven, as there are some glitches from time to time.
 

Room For Improvement

Users seek improvements in handling requests, logging, UI, security, pricing, support, configuration, integration, automation, and domain support in Route 53.
Cisco Umbrella needs improved integration, user experience, reporting, and regional data centers for better security and network performance.
There could be improvements in the configuration process, particularly in the options provided during setup, such as subdomain configurations and certificate management.
In my project, everything is already configured, and we focus on monitoring and health checks.
There is room for improvement in restricting access through one website from S3 buckets.
Making it more flexible and easy to deploy, particularly when integrating with other technologies like Active Directory and proxies, would be beneficial.
I have to write an email to Umbrella support to get assistance, unlike the other products where I can call the Cisco technical assistance center and get an engineer.
The product can only shield a small area, making it less effective for larger spaces or multiple users.
 

Setup Cost

Amazon Route 53 offers scalable, usage-based pricing; considered reasonable for reliability but complex for high-demand sites.
Cisco Umbrella pricing is fair yet expensive, with flexible plans, negotiable discounts, and complex scalability for large enterprises.
Route 53 is more expensive.
The pricing of Route 53 is slightly higher compared to other services, however, it is justified by its high availability and reliability.
The only cost associated is the license cost unless additional solutions need to be integrated with Umbrella, which would incur extra costs.
The prices need to be lower as the current pricing is exceedingly high.
 

Valuable Features

Amazon Route 53 excels in scalable DNS management, traffic routing, AWS integration, security, cost-effectiveness, and global domain management.
Cisco Umbrella offers DNS-based protection, web filtering, and integration, enhancing security and productivity for hybrid work environments.
I find Amazon Route 53 valuable for its ability to manage DNS records and efficiently route traffic with features like failover routing and geolocation routing.
Route 53 is valued for its health check feature and reliability.
One of the best advantages is managed security.
The DNS layer security provided by Cisco Umbrella is very effective for our security posture, offering us vast improvements in visibility over DNS queries and potential threats.
The most valuable feature of Cisco Umbrella is its DNS security.
If a machine is attempting to access compromised sites, it can pinpoint the machine to prevent it, thus narrowing down the attack surface.
 

Categories and Ranking

Amazon Route 53
Average Rating
8.6
Reviews Sentiment
7.3
Number of Reviews
32
Ranking in other categories
Managed DNS (2nd)
Cisco Umbrella
Average Rating
8.8
Reviews Sentiment
7.3
Number of Reviews
113
Ranking in other categories
Secure Web Gateways (SWG) (1st), Internet Security (1st), Cloud Access Security Brokers (CASB) (2nd), Secure Access Service Edge (SASE) (3rd), Domain Name System (DNS) Security (1st), Cisco Security Portfolio (2nd)
 

Mindshare comparison

Amazon Route 53 and Cisco Umbrella aren’t in the same category and serve different purposes. Amazon Route 53 is designed for Managed DNS and holds a mindshare of 6.7%, down 9.3% compared to last year.
Cisco Umbrella, on the other hand, focuses on Domain Name System (DNS) Security, holds 22.4% mindshare, down 28.7% since last year.
Managed DNS
Domain Name System (DNS) Security
 

Featured Reviews

Jithin Scaria - PeerSpot reviewer
Provides clear documentation, easy to understand, simplifies management and efficiently handles our domain-related configurations and DNS records
For initial setup, we generally use provisioning tools for these kinds of DNS records. The choice often depends on the cloud provider and the Infrastructure as Code (IAC) tools the client prefers. We adapt our approach accordingly rather than focusing on a single method within Route 53. The documentation is very user-friendly. Even someone with no prior experience can easily understand it. It provides step-by-step instructions and explains things in a clear and concise way. You can find everything you need to know about Route 53 and its features in the documentation, including white papers. In addition to manual configuration, you can also use third-party tools like Terraform, Pulumi, or AWS CloudFormation templates to manage your Route 53 configurations.
Alessandro Braga - PeerSpot reviewer
Has comprehensive reporting and scales easily
The reports and notifications are the most useful part of the platform. As soon as you deploy the security layers, the reporting is very comprehensive. It helps you to have, at a glance, a clear view of what's going on. The integration between Cisco Secure solutions is pretty good. We have been able to deliver the solution in a few days. The integration of Umbrella and Meraki is literally one click away from the customer. One of the reasons why we chose Umbrella was its capability to perform end-to-end detection of malware and web traffic. In the last two years, we have been covered, detection has been faster, and we have been able to contain some potential threats along the way. We use the Umbrella stack from DNS protection to web and content protection. Our workforce is made up of 150 Macs; thus, we use Mac as a client. We have some PCs and integration with the network in our co-working spaces. Utilizing Cisco Secure has helped us save time. Being a nimble organization, we don't have IT staff who are fully dedicated to security. The maintenance is also not very time-consuming. In terms of the amount of time saved, it would be half an FTE a year, given the fact that we are informed and notified when threats arise. In terms of operating expenditures, we have been able to negotiate a better cyber insurance rate with our insurance company due to the fact that we are covered by Umbrella. Another benefit of using Cisco Umbrella is application scanning. We have been able to understand how many other applications we were consuming in the cloud, address them, and save money. Without Cisco Umbrella, we would not have realized that we had so many cloud applications in the company. We have been able to close at least four or five applications that were duplicates of others that we were already using in the company. We have realized approximately 10,000 to 12,000 euros a year of immediate savings in an organization of 150 people, which is quite significant.
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Educational Organization
22%
Computer Software Company
14%
Financial Services Firm
8%
Manufacturing Company
6%
Educational Organization
26%
Computer Software Company
17%
Financial Services Firm
7%
Manufacturing Company
6%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
 

Questions from the Community

Azure DNS or Amazon Route 53?
Azure DNS is a hosting service of DNS domains. It has excellent operating time and performance, resulting in fast resolution. We like the ability to view everything in the Azure portal - this makes...
What do you like most about Amazon Route 53?
The most valuable features of the solution are the DNS, routing, and traffic features.
What needs improvement with Amazon Route 53?
There is a need for technical knowledge to use Amazon Route 53 effectively. If a person without much technical background could use it, I would have rated it a ten out of ten.
Which is the better security solution - Cisco Umbrella or Zscaler?
Cisco Umbrella and Zscaler Internet Access are two broad-spectrum Internet security solutions that I have tried. Zscaler Internet Access is a good option for carrying out multiple security functi...
Which is the better security solution - Cisco Umbrella or Microsoft Cloud App Security?
Cisco Umbrella is an integral component of the Cisco SASE architecture. It integrates security in a single, cloud-native solution, unifying multiple features like DNS-layer security, threat intelli...
What do you like most about Cisco Umbrella?
Cisco Umbrella is easy to monitor, manage, and deploy.
 

Also Known As

Route 53
OpenDNS
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Hess, Expedia, Kelloggs, Philips, HyperTrack
Chart Industries, City of Aspen, Eastern Mountain Sports, FLEXcon, George Washington University, Jackson Municipal Airport Authority, Ohio Public Library Information Network, PTC, Richland Community College, Smart Motors, Tulane University, VeriClaim
Find out what your peers are saying about Cloudflare, Amazon Web Services (AWS), Quad9 DNS and others in Managed DNS. Updated: February 2025.
839,422 professionals have used our research since 2012.