Cisco Identity Services Engine (ISE) vs. Cisco Umbrella

Overview
ProductRatingMost Used ByProduct SummaryStarting Price
Cisco Identity Services Engine (ISE)
Score 8.9 out of 10
N/A
The 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
Score 8.8 out of 10
N/A
Cisco 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 Identity Services Engine (ISE)
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 …
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 …
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 …
Cisco Umbrella
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 …
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 …
Best Alternatives
Cisco Identity Services Engine (ISE)Cisco Umbrella
Small Businesses
NinjaOne
NinjaOne
Score 9.1 out of 10

No answers on this topic

Medium-sized Companies
Nmap
Nmap
Score 10.0 out of 10

No answers on this topic

Enterprises
Nmap
Nmap
Score 10.0 out of 10
Zscaler Internet Access
Zscaler Internet Access
Score 8.9 out of 10
All AlternativesView all alternativesView all alternatives
User Ratings
Cisco Identity Services Engine (ISE)Cisco Umbrella
Likelihood to Recommend
8.8
(92 ratings)
8.6
(106 ratings)
Likelihood to Renew
9.6
(3 ratings)
8.0
(15 ratings)
Usability
7.0
(3 ratings)
7.7
(10 ratings)
Availability
8.9
(3 ratings)
8.9
(11 ratings)
Performance
9.0
(1 ratings)
9.2
(2 ratings)
Support Rating
7.0
(6 ratings)
7.6
(63 ratings)
Online Training
-
(0 ratings)
8.0
(1 ratings)
Implementation Rating
8.9
(3 ratings)
9.3
(11 ratings)
Configurability
8.0
(1 ratings)
8.0
(1 ratings)
Contract Terms and Pricing Model
8.0
(2 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Ease of integration
6.1
(3 ratings)
9.3
(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
One scenario I already mentioned is authentication integration. So that works well. We haven't run any situation where it is not suited, so we haven't run into that situation. So I am not really sure that would it work or not. But right now, so far so good.
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Cisco
It is good for whole network protection, and individual PCs with the client. Provide good reporting on where your network is going on the net. One thing I would like is a longer history with the logs 14 and 30 days are too short some times.
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Pros
Cisco
  • The most beneficial thing that I love about it, there are tons of things that I love about ISE and that it does well, but the most fascinating that I feel about is its integration with DNA center or Catalyst Center using PX Grid as the protocol wherein ISE acts as a policy server for the entire campus hand in hand with Catalyst Center to make sure that the policy policy follows the user and also in the background hand in hand with DNA Center or Catalyst Center makes sure microsegmentation is implemented so that east west traffic is blocked and takes care of the campus.
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Cisco
  • So for example, we had the problem in the past. We are connecting users to our own managed data centers. We had seven locations around the world, put them with Cisco, any connect to our on-prem data center and let them out to the internet. So that's causing some high latency bad experiences with teams and so on. And with Umbrella we can directly connect the user to the cloud and to the internet so the users have a good experience with speed with latency and it's much better than back hauling the traffic to their own company and then processing them there.
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Cons
Cisco
  • I guess the user experience itself, it's sometimes a little bit slow, but this is also dependent on the platform and the scale of the deployment of course. But actually functionality-wise it's really, really good. But yeah, it could sometimes be a little quicker to react on the good front.
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Cisco
  • The smart search feature in Cisco Umbrella is great addition for sure which helps us to identify malicious domain just by searching the URL and there is scoring system of Cisco Umbrella which mark the URL in low, medium and high risk. Sometimes Cisco Umbrella mark well known and good domain as malicious whether sometimes they mark malicious sites/domain as low risk. So, it's something that they should focus on, I think.
  • The live activity search is great for checking internet activities, but the filtering options could be improved. It would be helpful if we could filter by multiple parameters at once like combining username, destination IP and time range.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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
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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.
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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
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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.
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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)
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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.
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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.
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Implementation Rating
Cisco
I did participate in the implementation of Cisco ISE and while there were times when it was confusing and we had a lot of trial and error, overall the experience was fine.
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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.
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Alternatives Considered
Cisco
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 curve offered us.
At the level of capabilities, they seemed really similar to us, each option having some point where it surpassed the others and others where it was surpassed.
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Cisco
Different products in different spaces. The Z3 was more of a VPN endpoint so that users didn't have to worry about a client. If they are at home, they are on their corporate network and able to access resources. Cisco Umbrella can be used then to serve corporate DNS across the VPN tunnel to the Z3 device and extend the capabilities of Cisco Umbrella.
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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.
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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 .
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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
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Return on Investment
Cisco
  • Cisco ISE is fairly expensive, but I feel that the time it saves our team is well worth it.
  • We have been able to roll this our to all of our teams, and they can each manage their own device and it is really convenient to have each team mange their own devices
  • Once it is deployed and configured, it seems like there isn't much upkeep, so we don't have to hire someone to manage it we do it by committee.
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Cisco
  • So it's always very hard to calculate return on investment, especially on security and especially in a physical product. So it's not like I'm going to be selling a lot more plastic or a lot more aviation fuel because I implemented Cisco Umbrella. What I know is that definitely, the return on investment is on the ability of the business to continue to run and give the assurance that our users are safe.
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