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Cisco Umbrella vs Infoblox BloxOne Threat Defense comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Dec 28, 2025

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 Umbrella
Ranking in Domain Name System (DNS) Security
1st
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), Cisco Security Portfolio (1st)
Infoblox BloxOne Threat Def...
Ranking in Domain Name System (DNS) Security
7th
Average Rating
8.0
Reviews Sentiment
5.9
Number of Reviews
18
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
 

Mindshare comparison

As of February 2026, in the Domain Name System (DNS) Security category, the mindshare of Cisco Umbrella is 20.8%, down from 25.1% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Infoblox BloxOne Threat Defense is 4.8%, up from 4.6% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Domain Name System (DNS) Security Market Share Distribution
ProductMarket Share (%)
Cisco Umbrella20.8%
Infoblox BloxOne Threat Defense4.8%
Other74.4%
Domain Name System (DNS) Security
 

Featured Reviews

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.
reviewer2703357 - PeerSpot reviewer
Analyst at a educational organization with 10,001+ employees
Valuable analytics integration improves data insights but needs fewer restrictions
What is valuable about the Infoblox BloxOne Threat Defense is especially the monitoring and reporting, which provides valuable information. The integration with any SIEM is very valuable for getting DNS query analytics, and this is very important. The threat analytics tools in the Infoblox BloxOne Threat Defense improve security response through integration with another platform, allowing you to gain insights on your own data happening within your own Infoblox BloxOne.

Quotes from Members

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:
 

Pros

"One of the most important features is the security posture check which Umbrella offers when a user accesses any website. That is one of the most unique features that it offers."
"For us and for customers, it's the ease of integration with Meraki. It's just a couple of clicks. That allows us to deploy very fast, and it doesn't change the way a customer uses his service. It's just more secure."
"When it comes to hybrid work it's pretty effective. We've got the agents. We can protect people inside our building and, when they're using their laptops out in the field, they're still protected. It's working well."
"The biggest return on investment when using Cisco Umbrella for me is the ease of use of the fact that we've deployed this with our Cisco VPN Secure Client, so every computer has the Umbrella module in it."
"Umbrella, being one pane for managing, being all-encompassing, allows us to quickly go in, make a change, and it applies to either every location, if we want it to, or we can have policies in place that only apply to certain users or certain computers."
"For me, it's important that I get a connection to my corporate network in a secure and fast way. This product just runs in the background and doesn't need any attention. For me, as a user, it's perfect."
"We immediately block impersonating users from accessing services over Cisco Umbrella-controlled devices."
"Some clients only want DNS security, while others want more of the advanced features that it has available."
"The dossier feature is perfect for starting an investigation."
"The product is stable."
"Using the reporting, we can tell that we have gained an extra layer of protection. Just by looking at it, we can see what is being blocked before it even makes it to the firewall. It is definitely working."
"Infoblox BloxOne Threat Defense furthers the existing security posture rather than replacing or trying to replace any existing products."
"The automatic blocklists are most valuable. A box can maintain several lists from which we can choose if we need to block more or less. We don't have to manually manage the lists ourselves. They're automatically updated."
"The most valuable feature of this solution is the granularity for which you can categorize what you want to block versus what you don't want to block."
"The most important features for us are preventing DDOS DNS attacks."
"The reporting ability is helpful. It allows us to control what our users are able to resolve, and then be able to see reports on that."
 

Cons

"I would like for their support to be faster."
"One of the issues with Umbrella is as you get into endpoint detection and response, such as EDR point solutions, some of them will not integrate well with Umbrella. Sometimes when you want to use technology, such as Always On VPN, it will not work. There are some looming issues as one type of technology starts to crossover with Umbrella. That is the challenge and Umbrella should find a way to be more compatible with some of the endpoint response solutions that are coming out on the market."
"With any Cisco product, it's the licensing side of things that needs improvement."
"Actually, we recently switched over to Zscaler because it has more features and it's more scalable than Cisco Umbrella."
"Customization for basic users can be complex, as it is targeted toward only technical users."
"There are some situations where we would like to block things for specific user groups. I know that Umbrella does that, but it's not that easy.... when you want a specific task for specific rules and policies for user groups, you have to go three levels down in the menu, and it's hard to find where you do that task."
"There are cheaper solutions in the market"
"The major issue is that sometimes when you install the client, it shows you protected and displays that it is live with the backend servers and everything; however, in reality, it was not getting any feed from the main client and is just sending your traffic to open DNS, which sometimes causes an issue because the protection you have implemented can be breached by users."
"The setup was horrible. About a year ago, Infoblox made us re-enroll all our on-prem DNS servers by a set date to a specific version, or it would stop working. I told my colleague, "Oh, here, we have to upgrade the servers and reconnect them to the CSP." That did not go well at all."
"This is not just Infoblox, this could be any portal provider, cloud provider, sometimes they change the look of the customer-facing options and it's not completely clear why they make the change."
"Infoblox BloxOne Threat Defense is quite expensive, especially due to the significant increase in the subscription fee after the first year. This unexpected increase was a problem for us."
"The dashboard and reporting features need improvement. The user needs more informative dashboards so they can get to the results directly without getting deep in the report to get to the information."
"They could work on the UI of their website and make their website more user-friendly."
"The documentation needs to be improved because there are a lot of different models that it can be deployed in, and it's somewhat confusing determining what you need and how to set it up to best cover your use cases."
"Within the past two years, we discovered certain bugs in their products. The resolution of these bugs took a little too much time, especially if our production environment is down for a certain amount of time, then we are losing money. That is hard to convey to Infoblox support, e.g., we actually need the system up and running again within two or three hours. The awareness of these so-called production down incidents is not really easy to convey."
"The research side and the reporting side need improvement. Both of those are items on the menu. They could use a little bit of cleanup to make their respective information more easily understood."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"Cisco should make the solution cheaper."
"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."
"There is room for improvement when it comes to the cost."
"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."
"There are three models for licensing with different feature sets."
"Its price for us is quite expensive because it's a subscription, and we just use it for the DNS log. So, for us, it's quite expensive."
"Licensing with Cisco can be a little complex, but I think it's comparable with that of other similar products. It's always hard to put a price on security, but the price is fair for the value it provides."
"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."
"There is a significant charge for this product but I think that it's worth it when we look at what it's able to prevent."
"It's a pricey solution because it's for the advanced kind of customer."
"It is a very expensive system. You need to go over the licensing before purchase to make sure you're getting what is needed, not anything extra."
"If you only wanted the DNS filtering and none of the other products built into Threat Defense, it would be nicer if they could do that a la carte since we are not really using a lot of the solution."
"The licensing is set up such that you pay for the number of active users that you're defending at the moment."
"Infoblox BloxOne offers pretty good documentation. Check its documentation, then do a PoC. Infoblox is very good at providing PoCs."
"When you buy the subscription, there are no additional costs to add any additional buttons."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Computer Software Company
13%
Manufacturing Company
9%
Financial Services Firm
8%
Comms Service Provider
6%
Financial Services Firm
16%
Healthcare Company
8%
Manufacturing Company
8%
Computer Software Company
6%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business50
Midsize Enterprise30
Large Enterprise51
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business3
Midsize Enterprise3
Large Enterprise12
 

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 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.
What do you like most about Infoblox BloxOne Threat Defense?
The most valuable feature is policy redirecting and security reports.
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Infoblox BloxOne Threat Defense?
Infoblox BloxOne Threat Defense can be expensive for the commercial sector, particularly in Egypt, as this sector does not have a huge budget compared to banking or oil and gas, as the regulations ...
What needs improvement with Infoblox BloxOne Threat Defense?
If Infoblox invests in network observability, especially from the perspective of DNS and IP address observability, it could be a significant improvement.
 

Also Known As

OpenDNS
BloxOne Threat Defense, Infoblox ActiveTrust, Infoblox ActiveTrust Cloud
 

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
Council Rock School District, EagleView, Schneider Electric, Baptist Memorial Health Care, American University
Find out what your peers are saying about Cisco Umbrella vs. Infoblox BloxOne Threat Defense and other solutions. Updated: February 2026.
883,011 professionals have used our research since 2012.