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Cisco Identity Services Engine (ISE) vs. Cisco Umbrella

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    Overview
    ProductRatingMost Used ByProduct SummaryStarting Price

    Cisco Identity Services Engine (ISE)

    Score9 out of 10
    N/AThe Cisco Identity Services Engine (ISE) offers a network-based approach for adaptable, trusted access everywhere, based on context. It gives the user intelligent, integrated protection through intent-based policy and compliance solutions.N/A

    Cisco Umbrella

    Score8.9 out of 10
    N/ACisco now offers OpenDNS Umbrella Web Filtering. Cisco acquired OpenDNS in August 2015, and rebranded the product as Cisco Umbrella.N/A
    Pricing
    Cisco Identity Services Engine (ISE)Cisco Umbrella
    Editions & Modules
    No answers on this topic
    No answers on this topic
    Offerings
    Pricing Offerings
    Cisco Identity Services Engine (ISE)Cisco Umbrella
    Free Trial
    NoYes
    Free/Freemium Version
    NoYes
    Premium Consulting/Integration Services
    NoYes
    Entry-level Setup FeeNo setup feeNo setup fee
    Additional Details——
    More Pricing Information
    Community Pulse
    Cisco Identity Services Engine (ISE)Cisco Umbrella
    Considered Both Products
    Cisco
    Chose Cisco Identity Services Engine (ISE)
    Cisco Identity Services Engine (ISE) stands out due to its comprehensive network access control and security features. Unlike Cisco ASA 5500-X with FirePOWER Services, which focuses on firewall and intrusion prevention, ISE provides detailed endpoint profiling, posture …
    Incentivized
    Chose Cisco Identity Services Engine (ISE)
    ISE stacks well up against other products in our portfolio with protocols like RADIUS, TACACS and REST APIs.
    ISE is in many ways good for integration with both other Cisco products (switches, firewalls, WLAN controllers) and products from other vendors. Even with cloud services …
    Incentivized
    Chose Cisco Identity Services Engine (ISE)
    In our case, the entire core of our network is based on Cisco technologies as well as user access. For this reason it was the simplest choice given that both by integration and by knowledge of the platform it was the solution with the least complexity and the best adoption …
    Incentivized
    Cisco
    Chose Cisco Umbrella
    Better integration with other Cisco portfolio of products.
    We have an enterprise subscription and Cisco Umbrella dns was already included as part of the offering.
    Also we are looking into integration with sd-wan in sites where it is hard to provide full spectrum of services that …
    Incentivized
    Chose Cisco Umbrella
    I would not evaluate any other product
    Incentivized
    Chose Cisco Umbrella
    The simplicity of administration, the possibility of having a roaming user scheme with differential security policies for each case, and its integration with other products were key when deciding and undoubtedly generated a very positive impact both in the tasks of the IT team …
    Incentivized
    Key User Insights
    Would buy again
    97%
    Would buy again
    144 Answers
    95%
    Would buy again
    91 Answers
    Delivers good value for the price
    97%
    Delivers good value for the price
    128 Answers
    98%
    Delivers good value for the price
    88 Answers
    Happy with the feature set
    96%
    Happy with the feature set
    142 Answers
    96%
    Happy with the feature set
    92 Answers
    Lived up to sales and marketing promises
    93%
    Lived up to sales and marketing promises
    99 Answers
    95%
    Lived up to sales and marketing promises
    77 Answers
    Implementation went as expected
    84%
    Implementation went as expected
    115 Answers
    92%
    Implementation went as expected
    84 Answers
    Best Alternatives
    Cisco Identity Services Engine (ISE)Cisco Umbrella
    Small Businesses
    No answers on this topic
    No answers on this topic
    Medium-sized Companies
    FireMon
    Score7.9 out of 10
    No answers on this topic
    Enterprises
    Cisco IOS Security
    Score9.6 out of 10
    No answers on this topic
    All AlternativesView all alternativesView all alternatives
    User Ratings
    Cisco Identity Services Engine (ISE)Cisco Umbrella
    Likelihood to Recommend
    9.0
    (146 ratings)
    8.9
    (124 ratings)
    Likelihood to Renew
    9.4
    (4 ratings)
    8.0
    (15 ratings)
    Usability
    7.9
    (6 ratings)
    7.5
    (10 ratings)
    Availability
    9.4
    (4 ratings)
    8.7
    (11 ratings)
    Performance
    9.0
    (1 ratings)
    10.0
    (2 ratings)
    Support Rating
    7.3
    (7 ratings)
    6.9
    (63 ratings)
    Online Training
    -
    (0 ratings)
    8.0
    (1 ratings)
    Implementation Rating
    8.4
    (4 ratings)
    9.5
    (11 ratings)
    Configurability
    8.0
    (1 ratings)
    8.0
    (1 ratings)
    Contract Terms and Pricing Model
    8.4
    (2 ratings)
    -
    (0 ratings)
    Ease of integration
    7.1
    (4 ratings)
    9.5
    (10 ratings)
    Product Scalability
    8.0
    (1 ratings)
    8.0
    (2 ratings)
    Vendor post-sale
    10.0
    (1 ratings)
    8.1
    (3 ratings)
    Vendor pre-sale
    9.0
    (1 ratings)
    8.1
    (3 ratings)
    User Testimonials
    Cisco Identity Services Engine (ISE)Cisco Umbrella
    Likelihood to Recommend
    Cisco
    Well suited... I've used it for both wired and wireless access, and it's perfect for that. In addition to enforcing security on the port, you can also lock down east-west traffic. When you get to the point where you're configuring secure group tags and things like that, you can keep people from getting to places they shouldn't. Basically, you could turn your entire network into a firewall if you wanted to. You can secure access based on the identity of any given user through role-based authentication. For example, if you have salespeople and you don't want them accessing your financial or PCI environment, they authenticate as a salesperson and you can completely stop them from getting to any of that. That's really important, especially for us. Our payment card infrastructure servers are heavily locked down. Granted, in our situation, we firewall all that off anyway, but you still don't want some random individual to be able to even attempt that sort of thing. That's what it's really good for. I'm trying to think of a weakness. I don't know. We don't really struggle with it. There's nothing that I use it for where I wish it were better, at least not that I can think of offhand. I'm sure there are things, I just can't think of anything off the top of my head.
    Incentivized
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    Cisco
    When a company has a distributed workforce, the produce works very well to unify a set of policies to apply against web bound traffic. Areas we have struggled with is getting value out of our cloud delivered firewall due to requirements to fully use it
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Pros
    Cisco
    • manageable scaled administrative access to network devices as needed
    • Great use as a radius server which allows proper authentication and authorization into the network
    • Multiple conditions that can be utilized to grant users access based on their role in the organization
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Cisco
    • As many companies think—they’re afraid of firewalls, but they want to keep something secure—and what it does best is it simplifies the approach from a cybersecurity perspective, especially from the user perspective. Users spend a lot of time on the web, trying to access sites, clicking links, scanning QR codes, and doing whatever. You can’t really stop them unless you have something in between that can check whether those links lead somewhere safe, or potentially run them in a sandbox if there are threats or specific use cases.
    • So I think one of its strongest points is that it’s very simple, and it’s not expensive compared to if you buy a firewall and licenses from other brands, where you have to configure it and spend engineer work hours or outsource the work. It’s the simplicity, and I think it just works. I had some issues five years ago, four years ago, but now it just works. I’m pretty happy.
    Read full review
    Cons
    Cisco
    • Trustsec needs more documentation and configuration best practice examples
    • The licensing model can be difficult to explain and understand for customers
    • Difficult to get an accurate benchmark to know exactly how many Cisco Identity Services Engine nodes and the size of the deployment should be
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Cisco
    • So we had in the past very general rule sets, very detailed rule sets for security rules. Like you can access this page but not this IP range and so on. So hundreds of specific rules for specific machines and the rule management in Cisco Umbrella is not that granular. So it was not possible to build up these rule sets in Cisco Umbrella, but now we see to access it's much better already. So that's why one reason why we are migrating to CQ access to have better API based possibility to manage these rule sets and synchronize them between different products that we are using and in the cloud. So yeah, we hope that with secure access it's a little bit more granular like with Cisco Umbrella currently.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Likelihood to Renew
    Cisco
    We are so very reliant on Cisco Identity Services Engine at this point that finding another solution would be a big hassle for us.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Cisco
    First off I never give anything a "10" unless it's perfect. LOL - I grade on the curve. I think OpenDNS/Umbrella is a very good product. I think that fact that Cisco absorbed them is one of the proofs of that. I have used the product back when it was free for companies our size. I have not always appreciated the cost - but in the post pandemic cyber chaos, I believe the cost benefit ratio is still very high. I have honestly not looked at other products because Umbrella continues to work to my satisfaction. I consider Umbrella to be one of the key layers in my cyber security strategy.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Usability
    Cisco
    For us the solution is very easily useable on its own. Perhaps that has to do because we started using ISE in the 1.2 days and have seen it grow during the years. Policy creation, etc. is all very visible and thus easy to use. Deployment of multiple nodes is also incredibly easy and flexible. You can easily add or remove nodes as you wish.
    Incentivized
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    Cisco
    Better features and easy to manage system with great customer support and overall usability is great as it works for hybrid environment with ease as it is having features for on prem users as wells as cloud users with great customer support and great team of trained engineers to support our opeartions.
    Incentivized
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    Reliability and Availability
    Cisco
    We do have to occasionally reboot the servers when they get low on memory, but we're also a few versions behind. Availability has generally been pretty good though with no major outages in the time that we've had it implemented.
    Incentivized
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    Cisco
    Cisco umbrella services in the cloud are always available. However, the weakness is the VM installed in the data center that are the first resolvers. If the VMs become unavailable for any reason or the vSphere goes down, then all DNS is affected
    Incentivized
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    Performance
    Cisco
    yes it does. depending on where you coming from. Logs are pretty busy same as report. it also depending on devices count and design.
    Incentivized
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    Cisco
    our experience with cisco products has always been awesome and same is the case with cisco umbrella .Under umbrella cisco provides flexible and scalable software solution to use across different dept and sites . These softwares are very user friendly ,pages load quickly as these applications are designed for minimum latency and reports are also provided quickely
    Incentivized
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    Support Rating
    Cisco
    Cisco support is second to none, both in terms of how you access support but also the knowledge of the individual support teams. If you focus on one technology and provide "manufacturer support" then you can rest assured that you are accessing Cisco's top individuals. I feel like this is a USP for Cisco support.
    Incentivized
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    Cisco
    Whilst the support is good once you get through to them, it's email only and the response is slow. This is a issue, because its a core system that needs to work. We have had issues in the past where several of our companies have gone down due to Umbrella and support is nowhere to be seen. It is very difficult to know whether Umbrella is having service issues, since they do not regularly update customers on the status of their services, such as is seen by providers such as Microsoft (status.umbrella.com just seems to show up all of the time, I'm not sure it's even updated)
    Incentivized
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    Online Training
    Cisco
    Training can only cover certain areas, there are a lot of areas training just can't cover. You have to learn by doing it.
    Incentivized
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    Cisco
    Quite easy to understand training modules prepared by knowledgeable trainers. Training modules have included all the desired features of these softwares and the content delivery is very good from the respective module trainers and it explains in details the features and apart from that further training material support is also provided if needed.
    Incentivized
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    Implementation Rating
    Cisco
    I think our system integrators lacks some competencies and this has led to an implementation that is still perfectible. (i.e. dedicating an interface for intra-cluster communication)
    Incentivized
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    Cisco
    At the time we were forced to move from Cloud Web Security to Cisco Umbrella, Cisco Umbrella was far from being a direct replacement. It was frustrating and difficult to migrate due to the lack of functionality. This has since been addressed, however we now have legacy rulesets that were built as bandaids that cannot be removed. Hopefully the migration to Secure Access will address this.
    Incentivized
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    Alternatives Considered
    Cisco
    I think all give some visibility of device monitoring and management, but Cisco Identity Services Engine gives a good way to manage more details about the device in a centralized way that gives a wider range of monitoring and control than the other softwares individually. I don't think Cisco Identity Services Engine eliminates the need for these other software as of now, but there is potential for Cisco Identity Services Engine to be able to take over more of these roles.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Cisco
    Umbrella checked all the boxes for us (at the time) because it supported multiple domains and multiple IPs to protect (we have 20+ offices), and its configuration and policies cover a lot of different options for us. We used another product prior, and it worked well, but it didn't have all the features we needed at the time.
    Incentivized
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    Contract Terms and Pricing Model
    Cisco
    Cisco ISE was competitively priced and Cisco was able to leverage some of our existing contracts to help ease the purchase.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Cisco
    No answers on this topic
    Scalability
    Cisco
    It's fully customised and comprehensive. only thing is you need to know what you want. Proper research and planning would save lots of time and effort .
    Incentivized
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    Cisco
    Cisco umbrella provides fleaxible and scalable software solutions which are easy deploy across multiple departments and sites wherever needed and this softwares are very easy to use and provides the best interface along with cisco support for other devices apart from cisco infrastructure but still there is scope for improvement on the inclusion of latest features
    Incentivized
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    Return on Investment
    Cisco
    • I don't know about negatives because we haven't seen it right now, but positive impact is one is the roadmap we have. And now since we are going ahead with doing the deployment of Cisco ISE, we see that we are getting closure to, so at the end of the day, we have to make sure that operationally we stay excellent. So that's where operational excellence comes in. Cisco ISE is basically addressing that for us. Right now we are in a situation if there is a WIFI issue or if there is an authentication issue, it gets really difficult to isolate the problem. But with Cisco ISE , this functionality is going to come in. So we believe that it would be a good ROI.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Cisco
    • It's a costly product and we have to admit that, but security breaches are costlier, and they can take more than we can afford so we always had positive mindset over our security purchase and Cisco Umbrella had overall positive impact.
    Incentivized
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    ScreenShots

    Cisco Identity Services Engine (ISE) Screenshots

    Screenshot of Cisco Identity Services Engine (ISE)