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Bitsight 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:
 

Categories and Ranking

Bitsight
Average Rating
8.2
Reviews Sentiment
6.4
Number of Reviews
10
Ranking in other categories
IT Vendor Risk Management (3rd), Attack Surface Management (ASM) (5th)
Cisco Umbrella
Average Rating
8.8
Reviews Sentiment
7.2
Number of Reviews
125
Ranking in other categories
Secure Web Gateways (SWG) (1st), Internet Security (1st), Cloud Access Security Brokers (CASB) (2nd), Domain Name System (DNS) Security (1st), Cisco Security Portfolio (2nd)
 

Mindshare comparison

While both are Security Software solutions, they serve different purposes. Bitsight is designed for IT Vendor Risk Management and holds a mindshare of 6.1%, down 10.9% compared to last year.
Cisco Umbrella, on the other hand, focuses on Domain Name System (DNS) Security, holds 18.1% mindshare, down 25.5% since last year.
IT Vendor Risk Management Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
Bitsight6.1%
OneTrust GRC8.9%
RSA Archer7.2%
Other77.8%
IT Vendor Risk Management
Domain Name System (DNS) Security Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
Cisco Umbrella18.1%
Palo Alto Networks DNS Security8.7%
Infoblox Advanced DNS Protection8.4%
Other64.8%
Domain Name System (DNS) Security
 

Featured Reviews

SA
Senior AIML Engineer at a tech vendor with 1,001-5,000 employees
Continuous monitoring has strengthened external security and improved customer trust
There are areas for improvement; we do notice sometimes finding vulnerabilities which gives us visibility to find them quickly. However, there could be a mechanism they can build on top of that for validation as they identify the issues. What will the real risk be for that identifiable issue? Sometimes it could be open because of the traffic; how they detected it could be seen as vulnerable, but upon testing, it might not be a real issue. It could be a false positive because there could be a honeypot that we built. My thinking is about validation, so if they can build that validation part before they expose the risk to the specific asset, that would help. Additionally, based on their reporting, they could also build risk scores and prioritization, which would also aid us. I would suggest adding dashboards and custom reporting, which could help us by enabling rich custom reports with filters. That is especially for leadership because they will not look at each technical area, but overall they would be looking at the risk score and what the assets or critical exposure areas are. Customizable reporting based on requirements would be valuable. I chose 9 out of 10 because the reporting and dashboards would be the first thing I would consider for improvement, and then the second is about the validation part, which could probably improve to 10 out of 10. I cannot think of too much for additional improvements. Maybe some good automation with the API solutions that could be integrated with the CI/CD pipeline or DevOps tools we are running would also be automated and tested.
BB
Senior Network Engineer at Mintz, Levin, Cohn, Ferris, Glovsky and Popeo, P.C.
Ensures comprehensive protection with seamless threat logging and efficient policy management
My favorite feature of Cisco Umbrella is probably just the DNS and the fact that when a security threat happens, all of that gets logged in their Umbrella portal, and it's very easy to find who's been accessing the site and how many people have accessed it, so that we can go to them and make sure they're not compromised. The features of Cisco Umbrella benefit my company by providing less time to search for things through logs, to look for what we need. It's just one place to go, and we just search for it, and we find it really fast. The fact that there's a virtual database that has all that information is great on our portal.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"Its customer service team responds quickly."
"My advice to others looking into using Bitsight is that it provides a lot of information that was not available before, and it is especially good in recon as it can identify many things about an organization that have never been found earlier, making it a valuable tool."
"Bitsight has positively impacted my organization by improving security and customer trust, giving us continuous monitoring so we now find misconfigurations within hours instead of days or weeks, which directly improves our overall security posture and reduces risk as we catch high-risk exposures early, especially unexpected cloud assets or testing endpoints that accidentally went public."
"I prefer BitSight due to its patch management capabilities. The score is a valuable feature. I have contacted the customer support through e-mail and their response rate is fast. I rate the solution a nine out of ten."
"Bitsight gives me a holistic view of my entire security posture, which is something any organization would want to have after getting a tool such as Bitsight."
"BitSight provides information about the external servers, botnet infection and credential leaks, and also offers open ports from an external point of view, so we benefit before any adversary misuses the particular servers that are exposed externally."
"Offers open ports from an external point of view."
"The best thing about BitSight is the comprehensive list of risk vectors, covering compromised systems, diligence failures, and behavioral anomalies."
"Cisco Umbrella is absolutely stable."
"By using Cisco Umbrella, you are sure of inspecting all the traffic. Whenever the user machine is connected to your network, it is inspected. That's the best thing. It means you are sure that nothing is being exported or imported without your choice. That is the best feature."
"The insight into what our users are doing via Cisco Umbrella is valuable. Knowing that we're protecting our users as they leave our network is also valuable now because we've got more hybrid working."
"I think recently with many people working from home, Cisco Umbrella has been very useful. For example, we can manage the device and the network when the employee is not working on the local host. Cisco Umbrella is very valuable for this kind of infrastructure."
"Cisco Umbrella is absolutely stable."
"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."
"This product is very straightforward and simple to setup."
"The most valuable feature for us is the DNS-based protection."
 

Cons

"I chose 8 out of 10 because if we receive invites from clients every 45 days, our subscription ends, and we have to renew it."
"There are areas for improvement; we do notice sometimes finding vulnerabilities which gives us visibility to find them quickly. However, there could be a mechanism they can build on top of that for validation as they identify the issues."
"Since if the number of findings increases for a particular month, your overall risk score decreases, which can become a challenge for a team working on this particular issue."
"At the moment, when the vulnerability score decreases, it remains the same for quite a while, even though issues are resolved in 24 hours."
"BitSight could improve the classes and lower-level detections of anomalies that compound the information used to compute the rating."
"We found that some of the findings are clear false positives, but they still report that, and based on that, the rating goes down until we rectify them."
"There may be room for improvement in the methodology for identifying findings, as occasional errors occur on the technical side."
"There has been quite a bit of data discrepancy in BitSight."
"The solution's technical support is not very good."
"We need to work on integration as it is very complex."
"The prices need to go lower. The price of technology is just crazy."
"Although Cisco Umbrella has an excellent global network footprint, there is still room for improvement and growth in this area. Additionally, there are bandwidth limitations associated with the connectors that need to be addressed. To be a viable solution for larger offices, Cisco Umbrella must continue to expand and improve its capabilities in these areas."
"There are a couple of interface issues. I know that they say that there are feature enhancements that are noted. For example, we've got the Cisco Meraki security appliances, and there, we geofence our company to where we're allowed to send and receive traffic. So, in our case, by default, we only allow traffic to six different countries, which allows us to effectively prevent traffic for the majority of bad players in the world, but they don't give you an easy way to do that in Cisco Umbrella. With Cisco Meraki, I can specify or pick the countries. I can say that I want to only allow traffic from these six countries, and I'm done. With Cisco Umbrella, I have to rely on the fact that they're going to prevent traffic to other countries. They're going to decide if it's good or bad."
"I think it's a very basic solution, and because of that, Cisco Umbrella would not be a suitable solution for large companies."
"If a hardware platform were provided for Umbrella, that would definitely improve the market for it... Especially when we are addressing governmental customers, they hesitate to connect to the cloud. That is where we need a hardware platform so that the solution can be used on-premises as well."
"I would like to have the ability to prevent certain sites/data from showing on the reports."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The product has a reasonable price."
"The solution's price is average."
"The licensing part for Umbrella is really flexible."
"In the region I'm from, that of EMAR, Europe, the Middle East, Eastern Asia and Africa, our organizations do not have many liquid cash assets, so the price could be better."
"Cisco has a set price for a single license up to 100, but whenever we get over 100, we have to ask for a quote."
"Cisco solutions are generally perceived to be rather expensive. We have constant internal discussions as to whether we should offer lower-priced security solutions from some of the competitors."
"Its price for us is quite expensive because it's a subscription, and we just use it for the DNS log. So, for us, it's quite expensive."
"The pricing is great and very competitive with the rest of the market."
"There is a one-time cost of approximately $800 USD per user, and then a yearly support fee of about $50 per user."
"In terms of licensing, we're not able to be extremely clear with the customer because it's based on their reporting. It's not based on the actual traffic. If they say they have 50 users but they have 80, we'll just buy for 50 users. That's something where we'd like to have more flexibility."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
17%
Manufacturing Company
10%
Insurance Company
7%
Computer Software Company
6%
Computer Software Company
15%
Manufacturing Company
8%
Financial Services Firm
8%
Non Profit
7%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business3
Large Enterprise7
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business50
Midsize Enterprise31
Large Enterprise52
 

Questions from the Community

What needs improvement with BitSight?
There was one case scenario where a lot of parked domains were observed for a particular organization that we were monitoring via Bitsight. Bitsight flagged a missing web application header althoug...
What advice do you have for others considering BitSight?
If you are exactly looking for external attack surface monitoring, and you are exploring options, then Bitsight is a very good option that you can explore. I have not worked upon any other solution...
What is your primary use case for BitSight?
I was primarily using Bitsight for attack surface monitoring and external attack surface monitoring use case. I was monitoring all the alerts and the risk score that Bitsight provides. We mainly fo...
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 is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Cisco Umbrella?
The pricing for Cisco Umbrella is fair compared to other platforms out there for DNS security. We acquired it as a bundle with other Cisco purchases.
 

Also Known As

No data available
OpenDNS
 

Interactive Demo

Demo not available
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Cabela's, Belgium Center for Cybersecurity, Fordham University, RBC, Max Life Insurance, Schneider Electric
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 SecurityScorecard, OneTrust, BitSight and others in IT Vendor Risk Management. Updated: May 2026.
896,467 professionals have used our research since 2012.