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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
9
Ranking in other categories
IT Vendor Risk Management (3rd), Attack Surface Management (ASM) (5th)
Cisco Umbrella
Average Rating
8.8
Reviews Sentiment
7.3
Number of Reviews
123
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 6.9%, down 11.2% compared to last year.
Cisco Umbrella, on the other hand, focuses on Domain Name System (DNS) Security, holds 20.5% mindshare, down 25.2% since last year.
IT Vendor Risk Management Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
Bitsight6.9%
OneTrust GRC8.7%
SecurityScorecard7.5%
Other76.9%
IT Vendor Risk Management
Domain Name System (DNS) Security Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
Cisco Umbrella20.5%
Infoblox Advanced DNS Protection10.7%
Palo Alto Networks DNS Security8.1%
Other60.7%
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

"The best thing about BitSight is the comprehensive list of risk vectors, covering compromised systems, diligence failures, and behavioral anomalies."
"Offers open ports from an external point of view."
"Its customer service team responds quickly."
"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."
"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."
"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 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."
"The product helps us identify the vulnerabilities of internet-facing applications."
"Umbrella has helped my IT staff in two ways. First, our security team was able to get more insights into the users, their devices, and the sites they browse. Second, our system administration team was able to manage DNS resolutions in a way that is more accessible and less intrusive to our domain system."
"It has helped reduce my unit's security events."
"The customer service and technical support of Cisco Umbrella are great."
"The security and access control features."
"The features of Cisco Umbrella benefit my company by allowing us to do protective DNS instead of URL filtering, which lets us avoid having to backhaul traffic and run it through a firewall in a data center."
"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 run a real lean networking team, and cloud deployments are super easy."
"We use Cisco Umbrella for DNS filtering and as a secure gateway."
 

Cons

"There may be room for improvement in the methodology for identifying findings, as occasional errors occur on the technical side."
"BitSight could improve the classes and lower-level detections of anomalies that compound the information used to compute the rating."
"At the moment, when the vulnerability score decreases, it remains the same for quite a while, even though issues are resolved in 24 hours."
"Data enrichment is the major issue."
"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."
"The solution’s benchmarking should be improved."
"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."
"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."
"I don't have an answer for how Cisco Umbrella can be improved, as it has been some time since I've worked with it."
"Cisco Umbrella hasn't integrated customized reporting yet. With Cisco Secure Endpoint Hub, I can see a report on user downloads and set it up to constantly get an email alert. Based on my understanding, Cisco Umbrella can't do that. You can set it up with third parties, but it would be better if that were built into the platform."
"Something on our end that might make it better is alerting going to our ticketing system. It's not something that we have discussed, but that would be a proactive option for us to provide a learning experience for the staff."
"If the virtual appliances could also gather traffic bandwidth reports, that would be great."
"The pricing could always be a little bit better."
"In the next release, I would like to see the integration of VDI NSX with Cisco Umbrella."
"Cisco Umbrella should add some more documentation on proxies."
"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."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The solution's price is average."
"The product has a reasonable price."
"I think Cisco Umbrella is priced well. We have a mix of customers with different verticals such as education. We have clients in the commercial space as well. Umbrella is at a good price point for all of our customers."
"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."
"It has a reasonable price. It is certainly not as expensive as it used to be. It is in line with other offerings on the market. There are a number of different flavors of Umbrella. They could bring Umbrella SIG down a bit because its price is a little bit high for what it does, but I also understand why its price is high."
"The licensing part for Umbrella is really flexible."
"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."
"I am not sure, I don't have the numbers in front of me, but I think it's $1.00 or so per device/month."
"You get what you pay for."
"I think it's worth the money."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
15%
Manufacturing Company
10%
Computer Software Company
7%
Insurance Company
7%
Computer Software Company
14%
Manufacturing Company
9%
Financial Services Firm
8%
Comms Service Provider
6%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business3
Large Enterprise5
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business50
Midsize Enterprise30
Large Enterprise51
 

Questions from the Community

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for BitSight?
The product is a little expensive and very oriented to large companies.
What needs improvement with BitSight?
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...
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: February 2026.
884,656 professionals have used our research since 2012.