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Cisco Umbrella vs Lookout comparison

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Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Jun 15, 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

iboss
Sponsored
Ranking in Secure Web Gateways (SWG)
6th
Ranking in Cloud Access Security Brokers (CASB)
7th
Ranking in Secure Access Service Edge (SASE)
9th
Average Rating
8.4
Reviews Sentiment
7.1
Number of Reviews
19
Ranking in other categories
Internet Security (3rd), Web Content Filtering (1st), ZTNA as a Service (10th)
Cisco Umbrella
Ranking in Secure Web Gateways (SWG)
1st
Ranking in Cloud Access Security Brokers (CASB)
2nd
Ranking in Secure Access Service Edge (SASE)
2nd
Average Rating
8.8
Reviews Sentiment
7.3
Number of Reviews
121
Ranking in other categories
Internet Security (1st), Domain Name System (DNS) Security (1st), Cisco Security Portfolio (2nd)
Lookout
Ranking in Secure Web Gateways (SWG)
26th
Ranking in Cloud Access Security Brokers (CASB)
15th
Ranking in Secure Access Service Edge (SASE)
21st
Average Rating
7.2
Reviews Sentiment
7.1
Number of Reviews
6
Ranking in other categories
Mobile Data Protection (3rd), Threat Intelligence Platforms (23rd), Endpoint Detection and Response (EDR) (44th), Mobile Threat Defense (2nd), ZTNA as a Service (19th), ZTNA (15th)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of July 2025, in the Cloud Access Security Brokers (CASB) category, the mindshare of iboss is 2.0%, up from 1.3% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Cisco Umbrella is 11.4%, down from 13.7% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Lookout is 0.9%, down from 0.9% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Cloud Access Security Brokers (CASB)
 

Featured Reviews

Matt Crockford - PeerSpot reviewer
It's easy to roll out, and their understanding of our business made it seamless
One aspect we value about iboss is its simplicity. Their customer service is brilliant, and they are super responsive and knowledgeable. It's easy to roll out, and their understanding of our business made it seamless. We were impressed by the solution's mental health function, which can detect if someone needs help. It scans what users are browsing and flags warning signs so we can check to see if they are okay. We've had to use it a couple of times. The user interface is highly intuitive. Our IT team picked it up with minimal training. It's arranged so that it's easy to find where things are. Another advantage is the single pane of glass console, which gives you visibility into what's happening. We're not fully there yet because we haven't implemented zero trust, but we're excited about the possibilities from the demos we've seen. We launched a POC of iboss' ChatGPT Risk Protection feature two weeks ago. AI is a great tool, but you need to be careful what you put into it. My biggest fear is employees inputting sensitive corporate information or customer PII data into one of these chatbots. I was impressed by our trial of the feature. It's exactly what we wanted. Now, when a user goes to ChatGPT, there's a banner warning them not to share information, and we can block conversations containing customer data like bank details and email addresses. I don't want to stop people from using it, but we need visibility. We've only tried it on a test group of 15 people. You can configure it to look for specific keywords or integrate it with your DLP policy if you have that configured
Emilio Montoya - PeerSpot reviewer
Ensures internet navigation safety and boosts productivity
The features of Cisco Umbrella I prefer most are DNS protection and traffic redirect. With Cisco Talos's threat intelligence, we reduce the impact of malware traffic in our network, and we currently see the behavior of equipment and choose the correct sites. Cisco Talos has helped us reduce the impact of malware traffic. We can see the behavior and choose the correct sites. We're currently testing secure access with Umbrella in order to secure access to core applications. It's a product that the user doesn't even know is there, even though it is protecting them. It's not hard on the equipment. And, for us, it centralizes everything, which improves productivity. 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. We are testing the Secure Access product with Cisco Umbrella to improve our connectivity with our users in order to secure access to the corporate applications. Cisco Umbrella is in the cloud, which is nice.
DB
Enhanced mobile security with visibility into app and website usage, but installation challenges remain
We use Lookout for mobile devices, such as phones It has reduced our risk around mobile devices. I like the security features and being able to see what apps and websites people are using. There is nothing we have come across that we've desired. We have been using Lookout for one year. The…

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"The security aspect of the solution, particularly the malware behind it, is excellent. That's something that really helped us out. It's not just a simple proxy that just blocks the insights of potential threats that come on behind it. They do malware detection and that helps us a lot."
"The iboss system is highly reliable. The false positive rates are small compared to some other systems we've experienced through other partner agencies who use competing solutions."
"The console is cloud-based, which is something I really appreciate."
"Iboss is a solution that prevents advanced persistent threats, and has a zero tolerance for attacks."
"The solution has massively improved our security posture, giving us full visibility into what our staff does online."
"Technical support is pretty sharp and very responsive."
"iboss has significantly lowered the number of security incidents. It is crazy how much it blocks and how much it is aware of the outside danger."
"Valuable features: Within the filter: Controls (Web categories, applications, and Allow/Block list) and Network (local Subnets). Within the reporter: Logs (Event Log) and Reports."
"I like the DNS layer security."
"It will protect, give you more robustness, and faster responses, compared to any firewalls or any of the proxy web servers."
"It's very stable, reliable and does its job."
"Stability-wise, it's good. I have never encountered any bugs."
"The most valuable features of this solution are the Web Filtering and the APT."
"It offers good visibility for the Administrator. The administrator has full visibility of what is blocked or has the knowledge of where users go when they are surfing the internet."
"It has helped reduce my unit's security events."
"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."
"The solution is stable."
"The protection offered by the product is the most valuable feature. It detects vulnerabilities or traps on our users' phones and then prompts them to clean up their devices. Tools we used previously would only discover, which required us to gather information on the backend, so Lookout is a welcome upgrade."
"The most valuable features are the antivirus as a whole, the anti-malware, and all of the protection features that scan our enterprise devices."
"On the outside, the main differentiation is because Lookout ingest. They have ingested basically all of the apps for the last ten years and all the versions of all the apps, and we have that in a corporate database that allows us to do very large-scale machine learning and analysis on that data set. That's not something that any of the competitors really have the capability to do because they don't have access to the data set. A lot of the apps you can no longer get them because that version of the app is five or six years old, and it just doesn't exist anywhere anymore, except within our infrastructure. So, the ability to have that very rich dataset and learn from that dataset is a real differentiator."
"We have not had any issues with bugs or breakdowns."
 

Cons

"SSL decryption: We had issues with learners using apps instead of using web browsers. This type of encryption is tough for any appliance in a BYOD environment."
"To scale up, a new iboss Node Blade Chassis must be purchased."
"Its pricing could be better."
"One thing I would like to see differently with their Zero Trust platform is that some of the AI aspects related to high-risk activities have more false positives."
"If they could implement an extra security layer preventing access to iboss from the open internet, it would be great."
"The area I would like to see improvement in is the ability with in the reporter to navigate directly to the content the user is traversing. It is kind of there, but it's not perfect. Quite frequently, I receive links that lead me to pages with error messages."
"For zero trust implementation, we encountered complexity issues, especially with a large infrastructure company ExxonMobil."
"Iboss is growing so fast that it is often hard for them to keep up with the challenges."
"Lower costs including licensing, support, and renewals would be beneficial."
"Its on-prem rollout is quite challenging. It needs better coordination with the Internet Service Provider. It is a cloud-based solution, and any endpoint that connects to it has to go through all the gateway ISPs, but some of the ISPs block HTTPS-based DNS. That's where the challenge occurs with Umbrella."
"Hopefully, it works with the Canvas and starts feeding results into the AI canvas. That would be excellent."
"I would like to see more integrability with other products."
"I'm hoping for the conversion of Cisco ZTNA's features from Duo to Umbrella."
"It is a value for money product for sure. However, it does not have that kind of awareness plus brand within the customer, as they are influenced more by brands such as Palo Alto or Fortinet."
"Cisco Umbrella should introduce an on-premises device."
"From my perspective, I would Cisco Umbrella to give more exposure to my sales engineers. I know I can call them whenever I have an issue, however, more frequent meetings would be awesome."
"The initial setup requires a little bit of experience with configuration."
"The stability depends on the service from where you access it. Because sometimes, the place you are in, you have Gateway. You don't have Gateway. The gateway is overutilized. At the end, you need to go through their gateways. And this is the key point here. You have a tracking point. If it's not well orchestrated, and it scales up as you add more to the existing team, you will suffer"
"Lookout was moving into the SSE space. And so their work on SecureWeb Gateway and SD-WAN is still sort of evolving."
"We just submitted an enhancement request reflecting the main area we want to see improvement in; the APIs. Currently, we're able to build dashboards, but it's somewhat backward because we use our MDM API to create them. Lookout should provide API to customers so we can query our data and use it in our cloud, and this is the only outstanding area for improvement with the product right now."
"From the analysis that we've done, they do seem to be maybe a step behind in trying to enter the market with a new solution. But when they do pick up, they do come out with some good products."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The overall pricing for iboss is very competitive and transparent."
"We have not priced the solution recently, but they were competitive with other vendors in the past."
"We had the cost of purchasing a new appliance along with the implementation and licensing costs. However, the following year, the cost of just licensing was similar to what was paid the previous year for a new appliance along with the implementation and licensing costs."
"It is not expensive, and it is also not cheap. iboss is priced right in the sweet spot for the number of features it offers."
"It is expensive compared to one of its competitors."
"It is probably in line with other solutions, but I do not deal with the financial side."
"Licensing fees are paid on a yearly basis."
"Cisco has a set price for a single license up to 100, but whenever we get over 100, we have to ask for a quote."
"Cisco is expensive. For example, we are looking at Nexus Dashboard, and it's costing about 250,000 euros. I ask, "What do I get from it?" I'm still not convinced that we have to spend on it, so pricing is a problem."
"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."
"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."
"The pricing model is easier compared to some of the other solutions, and it is also competitive."
"The pricing is pretty fair. It's good."
"The price is quite good."
"The licensing costs are good. Prisma has much more options and support for security, but it has a higher cost. For example, Lookout costs 2/3rd of Prisma's licensing price."
"In terms of feature performance versus cost, they're a good value."
"The pricing is fair; it's comparable to our previous solution, and we carried out multiple POCs and POVs (proof of value). The product is worth the money we pay for it."
"Lookout is definitely on the lower end when it comes to price point and that seems to be the only differentiator. The technology is in place in this space and it's really about who is coming in at the better price point now."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Computer Software Company
12%
Financial Services Firm
11%
Manufacturing Company
9%
Government
6%
Computer Software Company
20%
Educational Organization
9%
Manufacturing Company
8%
Financial Services Firm
7%
Computer Software Company
19%
Manufacturing Company
10%
Financial Services Firm
10%
Government
7%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
 

Questions from the Community

What do you like most about iboss?
Content filtering is the most useful feature of iboss.
What needs improvement with iboss?
For zero trust implementation, we encountered complexity issues, especially with a large infrastructure company Exxon...
What is your primary use case for iboss?
Previously when I used iboss, we did the POC for iboss for ExxonMobil. Four or five people wanted to move from our ol...
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. Zs...
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-nat...
What do you like most about Cisco Umbrella?
Cisco Umbrella is easy to monitor, manage, and deploy.
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Lookout?
The pricing is a little expensive. We are currently looking at comparisons with other solutions, including Umbrella.
What needs improvement with Lookout?
There is nothing we have come across that we've desired.
 

Also Known As

iBoss Cloud Platform
OpenDNS
CipherCloud
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

More than 4,000 global enterprises trust the iboss Cloud Platform to support their modern workforces, including a large number of Fortune 50 companies.
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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Find out what your peers are saying about Cisco Umbrella vs. Lookout and other solutions. Updated: June 2025.
861,524 professionals have used our research since 2012.