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Cisco Duo vs Cisco Umbrella comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Jul 23, 2024

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
7.7
Cisco Duo enhances security and adaptability, reducing costs and downtime, benefiting remote work and boosting employee morale.
Sentiment score
7.5
Cisco Umbrella improves security, reduces costs, and enhances productivity, offering quick ROI and increased efficiency with threat prevention.
I think Cisco Duo offers a good return on investment for startups, newer organizations, or those utilizing cloud-based applications.
 

Customer Service

Sentiment score
7.5
Cisco Duo's support is praised for responsiveness and knowledge but critiqued for delays without service agreements and contact difficulties.
Sentiment score
8.0
Cisco Umbrella is praised for efficient support and extensive resources, with minor delays in email and purchasing processes.
However, the response time could be faster.
I find Cisco's technical support to be good but not excellent.
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.
Sometimes, it takes a while to get a response, and the team can be very rigid.
 

Scalability Issues

Sentiment score
7.9
Cisco Duo's cloud-based design enables seamless scalability and integration, making it ideal for various organizational sizes and requirements.
Sentiment score
8.1
Cisco Umbrella offers scalable, cloud-based infrastructure, enabling easy deployment and management across diverse organizational sizes globally.
I believe Cisco Duo is very scalable because it is cloud-based.
Cisco Umbrella is scalable for our company.
It is a scalable solution but requires improvement in specific areas.
 

Stability Issues

Sentiment score
8.5
Cisco Duo is praised for stability, seamless integration, proactive support, with most users rating its reliability highly.
Sentiment score
8.3
Cisco Umbrella is praised for its excellent stability, high uptime, and reliability despite rare minor connectivity issues.
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

Cisco Duo users seek improvements in telephony, integration, user experience, device management, customization, pricing, licensing, and technical support.
Cisco Umbrella needs improved integration, user experience, reporting, and regional data centers for better security and network performance.
Cisco Duo is a modern product that does not support older applications, lacking backward compatibility.
The product can only shield a small area, making it less effective for larger spaces or multiple users.
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.
Making it more flexible and easy to deploy, particularly when integrating with other technologies like Active Directory and proxies, would be beneficial.
 

Setup Cost

Cisco Duo provides flexible, user-based pricing suitable for any business, with additional costs for premium support and benefits from initial free trials.
Cisco Umbrella pricing is fair yet expensive, with flexible plans, negotiable discounts, and complex scalability for large enterprises.
I find the pricing of Cisco Duo to be reasonable.
The setup cost is reasonable, estimated at around six euros per month.
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

Cisco Duo provides seamless integration, robust security, and ease of use, enhancing operational efficiency and user experience for hybrid environments.
Cisco Umbrella offers DNS-based protection, web filtering, and integration, enhancing security and productivity for hybrid work environments.
This setup makes it scalable, as the deployment section is in the cloud, allowing the installation of agents according to needs.
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

Cisco Duo
Ranking in Cisco Security Portfolio
6th
Average Rating
8.8
Reviews Sentiment
7.9
Number of Reviews
60
Ranking in other categories
Single Sign-On (SSO) (2nd), Authentication Systems (2nd), ZTNA as a Service (6th), Multi-Factor Authentication (MFA) (1st)
Cisco Umbrella
Ranking in Cisco Security Portfolio
2nd
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)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of April 2025, in the Cisco Security Portfolio category, the mindshare of Cisco Duo is 6.0%, up from 3.5% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Cisco Umbrella is 12.0%, down from 15.9% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Cisco Security Portfolio
 

Featured Reviews

RyanDeppe - PeerSpot reviewer
Helps reduce the risk of a breach and is easy to deploy and onboard
For our customers, Duo Security is a significant advantage because it provides them with a straightforward method to implement MFA across their entire environment. Moreover, once we delve into the more advanced features of Duo Security, it enables us as a partner to engage in ongoing discussions regarding security strategies with our customers. Initially, we may only introduce them to MFA during the onboarding process. However, as their security strategy evolves, we can leverage Duo to perform additional tasks such as risk-based assessments and deployments, thereby assisting in the development of their security measures. Duo Security helps secure our infrastructure. It serves as our gateway layer of protection, allowing us to understand who is logging in and why. We conduct risk-based assessments on each user to determine whether their actions are appropriate or not. Duo Security is not a comprehensive security solution, but it is undoubtedly a crucial component, a critical layer of security. This aspect resonates with our customers consistently. Their ability to reduce the risk of a breach is of utmost importance. It serves as the primary line of defense. Currently, credential gathering and leaks are widespread in the market. By implementing an MFA solution like Duo Security, we can effectively prevent these issues. When we put a stop to credential harvesting, it becomes much harder for attackers to infiltrate and navigate our network. Therefore, Duo Security acts as an excellent first line of defense. User authentication and device verification are the methods through which we envision our customers navigating in order to prevent identity-based attacks. Initially, when we employ Duo Security, it is a straightforward implementation of multi-factor authentication. As we progress, we enhance security measures by incorporating device risk assessment and potentially even regional assessment. This includes considerations such as whether the login is being attempted from a specific IP address. These gradual enhancements contribute to the establishment of an additional layer of protection. Thus, it is not necessary to implement a completely disruptive strategy right from the start. Instead, it is possible to gradually adopt and integrate this approach, following a crawl, walk, or run methodology. The Duo Security self-service portal helps free up our customers' IT staff time, allowing them to focus on other projects. As a Cisco partner, we have received feedback from our customers that the portal is highly interactive, enabling them to easily navigate and resolve issues. After setting up their Duo environment, we rarely receive callbacks for assistance, as the portal is intuitive and empowers users to handle everything they need on their own. The appealing aspect of Duo Security is its ability to establish trust for every access request, regardless of its origin. It is a cloud-based solution with excellent API integrations. It doesn't matter where or how a user logs in; Duo will be there to protect the user, whether it's through MFA, risk assessment, or similar methods. It is extremely beneficial to our customers that Duo Security considers all resources as external. Our customers frequently inquire about a zero-trust model, and this is a key component of it. Unfortunately, I would love to say that there is a simple solution for zero trust where we can just deploy this solution and be done with it. But that's not the case. It requires a layered approach, and that's what we convey to our customers. Duo Security is definitely a part of that. Duo Security has helped improve our customers' cybersecurity resilience. Internally, it protects our users from accessing sales operations-based environments. Additionally, our customers use it regularly to protect business-critical applications.
Rohan Singh - PeerSpot reviewer
Protects endpoints wherever they are, always pushing people to the right locations to avoid malicious intent
The most valuable thing is how easy it is to deploy. We did it with 9,000 users at my last job, and it took a week to get to all the endpoints. Doing that without having to physically touch all those endpoints was very simple. The single pane of glass management makes it very easy to manage your rollout. We get a lot of "single panes of glass" and, eventually, you need a pane of panes of glass. But it's always good to have a clear and graphical view, and Umbrella's is nice and easy to read. Definitely, of the panes of glass that we do have, it's one of the easiest to use. The single pane of glass is good to group users together and separate people out. Some people need different types of security. Some people are more vulnerable. Some have more highly valuable assets, like C-suite people. It's really good to be able to have end-users defined inside of that. You don't have to jump around. You don't have to figure out who's who. It's all done through one pane of glass. What most people don't realize is that it's running in the background, which is a really nice aspect when it comes to security. Often, when you deploy a security tool, it takes up CPU performance. Everything slows to a grind. But Umbrella is so simple and easy and it doesn't affect the end-user experience. It's the best of all worlds. It's nice when people realize that they're being protected when they go to the wrong site. I think people are happy that they're protected, but it's nice that they rarely notice it. It's generally easy to maintain network connectivity, but with Umbrella, the nice part is that whichever connectivity you're on, you're always secure. With Umbrella, as long as you're online, you're going to be protected.
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Computer Software Company
24%
Manufacturing Company
8%
Government
6%
Financial Services Firm
6%
Educational Organization
25%
Computer Software Company
17%
Financial Services Firm
7%
Manufacturing Company
7%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
 

Questions from the Community

How does Duo Security compare with Microsoft Authenticator?
We switched to Duo Security for identity verification. We’d been using a competitor but got the chance to evaluate Duo for 30 days, and we could not be happier. Duo Security is easy to configure a...
What do you like most about Duo Security?
They are users who, as mentioned before, utilize RDPAP and MDPAP. It includes functionalities related to finance, specifically in single sign-on.
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Duo Security?
The setup cost is reasonable, estimated at around six euros per month.
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

Duo Security
OpenDNS
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Information Not Available
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 Cisco Duo vs. Cisco Umbrella and other solutions. Updated: March 2025.
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