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Cisco SecureX [EOL] 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

Cisco SecureX [EOL]
Average Rating
9.0
Reviews Sentiment
8.2
Number of Reviews
13
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
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)
 

Featured Reviews

Dene Lewis - PeerSpot reviewer
Head of Technical Strategy and Direction CAE Technology Services Ltd at CAE Technology Services Limited
A scalable SaaS based platform that helps with cyber threat intelligence and automated hunting
I would rate Cisco SecureX a ten out of ten. I find the product to be a fantastic platform. If you are eligible, start using it straight away. The best way to evaluate it is to start using it and see where it fits within your organization. I think it helps our customers really deliver their SecOps goals, and I see it as a core foundation of CAE's own security strategy going forward. Our partnership with Cisco is one that was built on trust over a long period of time. This has enabled us to work together to be able to provide the solutions that our customers need to drive their organizations forward. The value we add as a reseller is being able to work closer with our customers, understand them, and get intimate with their organizations. That enables us to offer them the right solutions that will help them achieve their goals.
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

"SecureX enables us to have all the threat intelligence and threat event data in one place."
"The most valuable feature is its ability to manage all the applications and visibility. For example, if there is malware, spam, or another component that wants to attack the company in my servers, network, or applications, then SecureX will react to the problem."
"Our customers find the product's third-party integrations valuable. Our customers are also impressed with the tool's capability to pick up third-party threat feeds and use that as part of the decision-making process."
"I like that I don't have to jump around to five different products and log into five different places to view the data that it returns."
"The forensics are amazing because when you have enrichment, and the solutions talk with each other, when you need it, you have the ability to know everything in the organization: when, why, whatever."
"It has evolved a lot, just that monitoring piece to the current Orchestrator piece. The additional analytics are there. They now have something called Insight, which can basically take data from Microsoft Azure AD and Intune to give us information about our endpoints. This is detailed information about the endpoints, from Secure Endpoint and all these different products. So, it is just constantly evolving. Every time that it evolves, we have more information with more visibility. There are more features that we have that just make everything so much easier, and it is in one place. I don't have to keep going back and forth. I don't have to go to Secure Endpoint and ISE to get the data. I don't have to go to Intune on Microsoft to get the information. It is all in one place."
"SecureX takes all the separate pieces of security within your company, adds in intelligence from different sites and services on the internet, and makes them work together."
"Using SecureX, a tool provided by Cisco, we can easily integrate it with many of our other Cisco products such as Cisco ISE and many networking devices."
"Cisco Umbrella is the first layer of security that protects me while surfing the net, identifying untrusted websites to prevent access."
"It blocks malicious DNS queries daily which is very beneficial."
"The most valuable features are the dashboard, visibility, and reporting capabilities. Our customers can see how much Umbrella is protecting their organization. If you don't know what you've got, you can't protect it. With Umbrella, you get the visibility and see the protection that it's providing. We can get PDF reports on a weekly basis of any malware activities and any denial of service or command-and-control-type activities."
"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'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."
"With the Experience Insights feature of Cisco Secure Access, we've seen impacts on the management of user connectivity by allowing us to deliver safe connectivity."
"The feature I appreciate most about Cisco Umbrella is the dashboard and how easy it is to see the reporting, what is blocked and allowed, and it makes it very user-friendly."
"It is user-friendly. It is easy to manage the solution."
 

Cons

"The automation and orchestration could be simpler. It could be that all the other parts are that easy to use so that these stick out as a negative, but that's the trickiest part for us. The workflows within the orchestration are just a bit more difficult."
"The documentation can be improved and the on-prem integration. The set of applications that it was integrated with wasn't comprehensive."
"what's missing right now is the multi-tenant capability."
"I would like it to integrate with another solution, e.g., DNA. I would like it to connect to that solution, but not the security aspect."
"Remediation stuff could be integrated into the product's automation."
"One of the improvements the product needs is more integration with collaboration platforms."
"If they could make the Cisco Umbrella piece a little bit more advanced or easier to manage, that would help. We use it for filtering and when you compare it to a normal content filter, it lacks some functionality."
"Enhancing automation capabilities could further improve the product."
"Cisco Umbrella can be improved in terms of limited coverage and wind vulnerability. The product can only shield a small area, making it less effective for larger spaces or multiple users."
"I would like them to make some videos, practical videos, the kind with steps that people can use to learn and deploy"
"It would be good if the more complex versions of Umbrella are simplified so that we can offer them in a more standardized way. We, as a telco, do not operate the same as a traditional integration partner would, who can sell all its services. We try to have a standardized approach as much as we can so that we can sell the solution with as many services added to it as possible. If you look at the structure of businesses in Switzerland, 95% of them have 10 persons or less, and they do not have a security specialist. Therefore, the higher the automated and standardized features, the better it is for them."
"We need to work on integration as it is very complex."
"The firewall capabilities could be better. Cisco is starting to introduce some layer 7 capabilities now, but there's still some room to grow. They should continue with the development of Umbrella so that it is a full-blown cloud-managed firewall solution."
"Sometimes there are some lags, and I have to refresh multiple times to access parts of the dashboards. Sometimes the dashboard pages crash and I'm not sure why, so that's one area for improvement."
"For us, as an MSP, the initial licensing changes were a roadblock, and they still could be a lot clearer. Specifically, it's an honor-based licensing system. We'd like it to be more specific to our traffic or our users so that we can make sure that the customer is paying for all their licensing."
"My biggest concern, and I'm sure everyone's biggest gripe with TAC, is just turnaround time. If you open a case in the evening, you might get an agent in another region, and then your ticket cycle only goes from 5:00 PM to 10:00 PM when you're out of work."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"It would be nice if they had a different pricing model. Most of our budget for projects goes towards Cisco."
"The pricing is competitive, especially for education institutions. Licensing can be a little bit difficult to navigate, especially with resellers with Cisco, but for us it has been pretty easy."
"Cisco SecureX is more expensive than Trend Micro. However, considering the integration capabilities with other solutions and the quality of technical support, I believe there's justification for the price difference."
"You can spend less money for another solution, but if you really want to have a good solution you have to pay. We are happy that we are getting such a good solution for what we are spending."
"It is free. It can't get any better than that."
"It comes free with all Cisco products. So, it is a good price."
"For the value you get, the pricing of the solution is excellent."
"The product is absolutely free to any customer. As such, the only thing one must keep in mind is that as long as he already has one Cisco security product, irregardless of what that product is, SecureX is available for free."
"Cisco Umbrella is not a cheap product. However, it's not a matter of the cost; it's more a matter of the value of security. It is easy to measure this value when you have a security incident. I think the price is a good trade-off for a product that can help you avoid security threats."
"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."
"It was a little bit expensive on a per seat basis, but the company I was running was only a midsize Australian company, and it was a reasonable budget per computer for that system. It started off being a free product, and then Cisco bought it, and it went to a reasonable price. I was using Cisco AMP as well. So, my per computer cost was reasonably high, but for a small company, it was within an acceptable level."
"The price is fair, and the licensing cost is based on the number of users. We have seen a good ROI."
"Licensing fees are paid on a yearly basis."
"Cisco has a model called ELA. With ELA, if you buy the solution you will have the complete security portfolio and you can pay it yearly or after three years, it depends on the contract."
"Our costs were negotiated, and they are okay."
"The pricing is pretty fair. It's good."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Computer Software Company
19%
Marketing Services Firm
11%
Government
8%
Outsourcing 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 Business4
Midsize Enterprise7
Large Enterprise3
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business50
Midsize Enterprise30
Large Enterprise51
 

Questions from the Community

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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

Kenna.AppSec, Kenna.VI
OpenDNS
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

NHS, Rackspace, UNC Pembroke, University of North Carolina at Charlotte, Missing Piece
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 and others in Cisco Security Portfolio. Updated: February 2026.
884,696 professionals have used our research since 2012.