Cloudflare and Cisco Umbrella compete in the security solutions category. Cisco Umbrella seems to have the upper hand due to its extensive feature set and robust security measures.
Features: Cloudflare offers user-friendly DNS management, web performance optimization, and basic security features. Cisco Umbrella provides advanced threat detection, integration capabilities, and extensive threat protection.
Room for Improvement: Cloudflare could use better security analytics, reporting tools, and enhanced security depth. Cisco Umbrella could benefit from simpler initial configuration, a lower learning curve, and improved user-friendliness.
Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: Cloudflare is praised for straightforward deployment and responsive customer service. Cisco Umbrella offers comprehensive support, guiding users through the more complex deployment process.
Pricing and ROI: Cloudflare is cost-effective with lower setup costs and affordable subscriptions. Cisco Umbrella, while more expensive upfront, justifies its cost with advanced security benefits and long-term value.
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 representatives are knowledgeable and online documentation is great.
Enterprise support is amazing. It's 10 out of 10.
This would help us address issues promptly, especially during unforeseen events like DDoS attacks.
Making it more flexible and easy to deploy, particularly when integrating with other technologies like Active Directory and proxies, would be beneficial.
The product can only shield a small area, making it less effective for larger spaces or multiple users.
In CloudFlare's case, I need to get an external server, set up the redirection there using Apache or NGINX and put my own SSL certificates there.
The feature shows a cached version of your live site if your host is offline.
Hybrid deployments would be useful where you could move the traffic from the enterprise to the cloud.
Cisco Umbrella is scalable for our company.
It is a scalable solution but requires improvement in specific areas.
Unless you have your website hosted on a massive hosting provider, there's no way that you can deliver the amount of data that Cloudflare can provide to the end users.
Scalability is not a problem for CloudFlare since they are a cloud based solution.
They're expanding and have enough resources worldwide.
The only cost associated is the license cost unless additional solutions need to be integrated with Umbrella, which would incur extra costs.
currently we are using the $20 a month plan
The monthly cost is around $30 for three sites using the Business Cloudflare plan.
You can start at zero and work your way up to the enterprise model, which has a very high pricing level.
I have not experienced any major stability issues with Cisco Umbrella.
There were a few times when some of their CDN nodes would fail, creating serious speed issues with the site without any warning or notification from their side.
Once the webserver is installed with CloudFlare, it should work like a charm.
Since we switched to the business plan, we encounter no problems.
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.
Cisco Umbrella offers DNS layer security, a secure web gateway, and cloud access security broker functionality.
The aggressive caching and DDOS mitigation are the most valuable features offered by Cloudflare.
DDoS protection is what CloudFlare is known for.
Web optimization features such as ‘Automatic Content Caching’, ‘Rocket Loader’, and ‘AutoMinify’, which help to minimize the website loading time and increase the website response.
Cisco Umbrella offers flexible, cloud-delivered security according to users’ requirements Cisco Umbrella includes secure web gateway, firewall, and cloud access security broker (CASB) functionality all delivered from a single cloud security service. Cisco Umbrella’s protection is extended to devices, remote users, and distributed locations anywhere. As company employees work from many locations and devices, Cisco Umbrella is the easiest way to effectively protect users everywhere in minutes.
Cisco Umbrella uses machine learning to search for, identify, and even predict malicious domains. By learning from internet activity patterns, this DNS-layer security solution can automatically identify attacker infrastructure being staged for the next threat. These domains are then proactively blocked, protecting networks from potential compromise. Cisco Umbrella analyzes terabytes of data in real time across all markets, geographies, and protocols.
Cisco Umbrella works with leading IT companies to integrate its security enforcement and intelligence. Built with a bidirectional API, Cisco Umbrella makes it easy to extend protection from on-premises security appliances to cloud controlled devices and sites.
Cisco Umbrella is suitable for small businesses without dedicated security professionals, as well as for multinational enterprises with complex environments.
Why use Cisco Umbrella?
Reviews from Real Users
Cisco Umbrella stands out among its competitors for a number of reasons. Some of the major ones are its DNS-based protection, ability to protect users no matter where they are located, stability, and high performance.
Daniel B., a network specialist at Syswind Kft, writes, “We primarily use the solution as cloud security for our branches. It protects us from direct internet outbreaks. It makes for good flexibility. The solution is very easy to manage. We found the initial setup, for example, to be quite simple. Efficient protection on the DNS level and even higher. The sandboxing feature analyses and handles the complicated security risks.”
Victor M., SOC & Security Services Director at BEST, notes, “It provides security for the remote workers and it helps to improve enterprise security in a very easy way. We mainly enjoy web software protection capabilities. It prevents the end-users from getting into bad sites or sites that potentially could have malware or could be phishing. It helps end-users avoid the wrong sites. The solution works very smoothly. The user interface is good.”
OpenDNS is a part of Cisco providing a suite of consumer products aimed at making the internet faster, safer, and more reliable.
Cloudflare is a highly-regarded Content Delivery Network (CDN) and a Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) protection solution. The robust global connectivity cloud platform that is Cloudflare ensures users are able to connect to the Internet quickly, securely, and reliably. Cloudflare is one of the world's largest networks in the marketplace today. Using Cloudflare, businesses, educational entities, NGOs, vloggers, bloggers, and anyone else with an internet presence can experience more secure, faster websites and applications.
Currently, there are millions of Internet locations on Cloudflare, and the Cloudflare network
continues to grow every day by the thousands. The solution is able to fulfill the requests for
millions of websites seamlessly and serves on average 45 million HTTP requests per second.
Cloudflare has safe, secure data centers in close to 300 cities worldwide to ensure every
client request is filled as quickly as possible. It is Cloudflare’s edge network that makes this
possible by keeping content and other services as close to each client as possible, so the
information requests are always only seconds away.
Many organizations that work in democracy, civil society, human rights, or the arts are able to
access Cloudflare's highest levels of protection for free via Project Galileo. Additionally, official
election websites can be secured from hacking and fraud through Cloudflare’s Project
Athenian, also at no additional cost.
Cloudflare can also help organizations of all sizes develop a robust zero-trust strategy to
ensure the highest levels of productivity and profitability. Employees, stakeholders, and end users have a greater level of satisfaction and overall improved user experience, which can, in
turn, result in higher revenues and overall ROI. Zero-trust and BYOD (bring your own device)
access ensure end users and employees always have the best resources and technology
available to them at all times.
Cloudflare benefits
Cloudflare has many benefits. Some of its most valuable benefits include:
- Faster load times
- Robust DNS security
- Intuitive cloud Web Application Firewall (WAF)
- Free universal SSL
- Image enhancement
- Automatic browser caching
- Next-generation cloud load balancer
- Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP)
- Rate limiting
- Minification
- Zero-trust capabilities
- Cost-effective
- Reduced carbon footprint
Reviews from real users
“Many websites require an SSL certificate because they sell stuff and want SSL. Cloudflare
comes with an SSL certificate built in. It's automatic. You sign yourself up for Cloudflare, and
an SSL certificate automatically protects your website. If you have a connection between your
website and your host, the server, Cloudflare, and the host, you don't necessarily need a
certificate.” Spencer M., Owner at Tech Exchange
“What I like best about Cloudflare is that my company can use it to trace and manage
applications and monitor traffic. The solution tells you if there's a spike in traffic. Cloudflare
also sends you a link to check your equipment and deployment and track it through peering,
so it's a valuable tool.” Daniel P., Network Engineer at Ufinet
“The most valuable feature of Cloudflare is the GUI. You are able to control the solution very
well through the interface. There is a lot of functionality that is embedded in the service.” PeerSpot user, Competence Center Manager at a tech services company
We monitor all Domain Name System (DNS) Security reviews to prevent fraudulent reviews and keep review quality high. We do not post reviews by company employees or direct competitors. We validate each review for authenticity via cross-reference with LinkedIn, and personal follow-up with the reviewer when necessary.