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Cisco Umbrella vs Cloudflare comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Jul 30, 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
7.5
Cisco Umbrella improves security, reduces costs, and enhances productivity, offering quick ROI and increased efficiency with threat prevention.
Sentiment score
7.0
Cloudflare enhances performance, reduces operational costs, and boosts revenue, with reported benefits of $903,000 over three years.
WordPress security can be tricky, and that's where Cloudflare can be absolutely helpful for small businesses.
We have had ROI with the tool's use since it never gave us downtime and made us lose millions.
For the small project I was working on, using the basic tier provided a huge improvement at zero cost.
 

Customer Service

Sentiment score
8.0
Cisco Umbrella is praised for efficient support and extensive resources, with minor delays in email and purchasing processes.
Sentiment score
7.3
Cloudflare's service is praised for responsiveness, but some users face delays, often relying on extensive documentation for solutions.
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 support channel isn't like the usual Cisco support where I could call instantly for a hardware issue like a router or switch.
This would help us address issues promptly, especially during unforeseen events like DDoS attacks.
We'd like a dedicated account manager.
You can get a support engineer with the best qualifications.
 

Scalability Issues

Sentiment score
8.1
Cisco Umbrella offers scalable, cloud-based infrastructure, enabling easy deployment and management across diverse organizational sizes globally.
Sentiment score
8.2
Cloudflare's scalable architecture is praised for efficient traffic handling, seamless expansion, and meeting diverse enterprise needs globally.
Cisco Umbrella is scalable for our company.
It is a scalable solution but requires improvement in specific areas.
I would rate the solution's scalability a ten out of ten since I didn't encounter any issues with it.
I rate its scalability a ten out of ten because I had no issues with it.
I rate the scalability a ten out of ten.
 

Stability Issues

Sentiment score
8.3
Cisco Umbrella is praised for its excellent stability, high uptime, and reliability despite rare minor connectivity issues.
Sentiment score
7.7
Users praise Cloudflare for improved reliability, effective DDoS protection, and excellent DNS services despite initial configuration needs.
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.
For DDoS protection, I would not recommend Cloudflare.
I rate the solution’s stability an eight out of ten.
The service is very stable with no impacts during high-traffic periods.
 

Room For Improvement

Cisco Umbrella needs improved integration, user experience, reporting, and regional data centers for better security and network performance.
Cloudflare users seek better analytics, integration, support, pricing clarity, and enhanced features like caching and multi-user access.
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.
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.
There's a need for improvement in areas like AI-based DDoS attacks and Layer 7 WAF features.
Despite these challenges, overall, Cloudflare remains the preferred solution compared to Azure, AWS CloudFront, and Google Cloud Armor.
the ability to integrate with the on-site active directory instead of just AD through Azure AD
 

Setup Cost

Cisco Umbrella pricing is fair yet expensive, with flexible plans, negotiable discounts, and complex scalability for large enterprises.
Cloudflare offers flexible pricing plans from free to $1,500 monthly, ideal for businesses of different sizes and traffic needs.
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.
That's where Cloudflare shines for smaller businesses – it's ten times cheaper than Akamai.
I find it to be cheap.
It's cost-effective, but I think they should have a custom pricing model for enterprise customers based on the features you use.
 

Valuable Features

Cisco Umbrella offers DNS-based protection, web filtering, and integration, enhancing security and productivity for hybrid work environments.
Cloudflare enhances performance and security with CDN, caching, DDoS protection, easy DNS management, analytics, and intuitive interface.
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.
Cisco Umbrella offers DNS layer security, a secure web gateway, and cloud access security broker functionality.
Our scenario consisted of two web servers in different allocations to control access demands, and the load balancer did the job as expected, bringing security and stability to access points.
For me, the valuable feature is DDoS protection.
The most valuable features of the solution are performance and security.
 

Categories and Ranking

Cisco Umbrella
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), Cisco Security Portfolio (2nd)
Cloudflare
Average Rating
8.4
Reviews Sentiment
7.2
Number of Reviews
74
Ranking in other categories
CDN (1st), Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) Protection (1st), Managed DNS (1st), Cloud Security Posture Management (CSPM) (14th)
 

Mindshare comparison

While both are Security Software solutions, they serve different purposes. Cisco Umbrella is designed for Domain Name System (DNS) Security and holds a mindshare of 22.4%, down 27.9% compared to last year.
Cloudflare, on the other hand, focuses on Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) Protection, holds 19.4% mindshare, up 19.2% since last year.
Domain Name System (DNS) Security
Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) Protection
 

Featured Reviews

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.
Spencer Malmad - PeerSpot reviewer
It's easy to set up because you point the DNS to it, and it's working in under 15 minutes
Cloudflare is highly scalable. Cloudflare is a system with a web portal that the end users like me see. It's a console where we can adjust the DNS, caching, and security features all in that console. Cloudflare owns thousands of servers across the world that cache the data. It's a powerful solution. When clients sign up for Cloudflare, they're getting this monster content delivery network, security, and a web application firewall in one. It's all rolled into one, and it's massive. 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. If you have static content, there's no way that you can ever match what Cloudflare can do. Obviously, there are competitors to Cloudflare that do the same, but I'm saying other types of solutions. Let's say you go with F5. Great, that's on-prem. That's in your colo. You can't deliver as much data to the internet as you can with a CDN. You don't have to spend $20,000 on a net scaler, F5, or whatever Cisco's selling now. You don't have to buy that. You pay them $50 a month or $150 a month. It's totally worth it because even in five years, you'll never get the performance value, not just the actual ROI. You have to consider how much throughput you can get with Cloudflare.
report
Use our free recommendation engine to learn which Domain Name System (DNS) Security solutions are best for your needs.
847,862 professionals have used our research since 2012.
 

Comparison Review

it_user68487 - PeerSpot reviewer
Nov 6, 2013
CloudFlare vs Incapsula: Web Application Firewall
CloudFlare vs Incapsula: Round 2 Web Application Firewall Comparative Penetration Testing Analysis Report v1.0 Summary This document contains the results of a second comparative penetration test conducted by a team of security specialists at Zero Science Lab against two cloud-based Web…
 

Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Educational Organization
26%
Computer Software Company
17%
Financial Services Firm
7%
Manufacturing Company
7%
Educational Organization
19%
Computer Software Company
13%
Comms Service Provider
9%
Financial Services Firm
8%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
 

Questions from the Community

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.
Which is the best DDoS protection solution for a big ISP for monitoring and mitigating?
Cloudflare. We are moving from Akamai prolexic to Cloudflare. Cloudflare anycast network outperforms Akamai static GRE tunnels. We have decreased site load times on Mobile 3G from 8 to 1,6 seconds ...
Which would you choose - Cloudflare DNS or Quad9?
Cloudflare DNS is a very fast, very reliable public DNS resolver. It is an enterprise-grade authoritative DNS service that offers great redundancy and advanced security with built-in unmetered and ...
What do you like most about Cloudflare?
Cloudflare offers CDN and DDoS protection. We have the front end, API, and database in how you structure applications.
 

Also Known As

OpenDNS
Cloudflare DNS
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

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
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