TrustRadius: an HG Insights company

Save this comparison

Save this comparison

Add Product

Recommended Comparisons

    Overview
    ProductRatingMost Used ByProduct SummaryStarting Price

    Cisco Secure Web Appliance

    Score8 out of 10
    N/ACisco Secure Web Appliance (formerly Cisco Web Security Appliance [WSA]), powered by Cisco Talos, protects by automatically blocking risky sites and testing unknown sites before allowing users to link to them, helping with compliance. It is available models S690, S390, and S190.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 Secure Web ApplianceCisco Umbrella
    Editions & Modules
    No answers on this topic
    No answers on this topic
    Offerings
    Pricing Offerings
    Cisco Secure Web ApplianceCisco 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 Secure Web ApplianceCisco Umbrella
    Considered Both Products
    Cisco
    Chose Cisco Secure Web Appliance
    URL filtering is a feature that Cisco Secure Web Appliance does well. Cisco Secure Web Appliance latency is minimum to almost nothing.
    Incentivized
    Chose Cisco Secure Web Appliance
    Cisco Web Security Appliance (WSA) is a potent tool. When it comes to handling emails and links from blacklisted IP, Cisco Web Security Appliance (WSA) does a better job. However, considering the price to performance ratio, Mimecast is way ahead of Cisco Web Security Appliance …
    Incentivized
    Cisco
    No answer on this topic
    Key User Insights
    Would buy again
    No answers on this topic
    95%
    Would buy again
    91 Answers
    Delivers good value for the price
    No answers on this topic
    98%
    Delivers good value for the price
    88 Answers
    Happy with the feature set
    No answers on this topic
    96%
    Happy with the feature set
    92 Answers
    Lived up to sales and marketing promises
    No answers on this topic
    95%
    Lived up to sales and marketing promises
    77 Answers
    Implementation went as expected
    No answers on this topic
    92%
    Implementation went as expected
    84 Answers
    Best Alternatives
    Cisco Secure Web ApplianceCisco Umbrella
    Small Businesses
    No answers on this topic
    No answers on this topic
    Medium-sized Companies
    Forcepoint SWG
    Score8 out of 10
    No answers on this topic
    Enterprises
    Skyhigh Secure Web Gateway
    Score8 out of 10
    No answers on this topic
    All AlternativesView all alternativesView all alternatives
    User Ratings
    Cisco Secure Web ApplianceCisco Umbrella
    Likelihood to Recommend
    6.8
    (9 ratings)
    8.9
    (124 ratings)
    Likelihood to Renew
    -
    (0 ratings)
    8.0
    (15 ratings)
    Usability
    9.0
    (1 ratings)
    7.5
    (10 ratings)
    Availability
    -
    (0 ratings)
    8.7
    (11 ratings)
    Performance
    -
    (0 ratings)
    10.0
    (2 ratings)
    Support Rating
    6.4
    (2 ratings)
    6.9
    (63 ratings)
    Online Training
    -
    (0 ratings)
    8.0
    (1 ratings)
    Implementation Rating
    -
    (0 ratings)
    9.5
    (11 ratings)
    Configurability
    -
    (0 ratings)
    8.0
    (1 ratings)
    Ease of integration
    -
    (0 ratings)
    9.5
    (10 ratings)
    Product Scalability
    -
    (0 ratings)
    8.0
    (2 ratings)
    Vendor post-sale
    -
    (0 ratings)
    8.1
    (3 ratings)
    Vendor pre-sale
    -
    (0 ratings)
    8.1
    (3 ratings)
    User Testimonials
    Cisco Secure Web ApplianceCisco Umbrella
    Likelihood to Recommend
    Cisco
    We have both scenarios where we can describe that. For example, in the HQ, where we have about 3,000 users, Cisco IronPort Web Security Appliance is the ideal solution, because we can consolidate all the Internet access, policies, rules, etc. in the same box. However, if you have small offices with a few users, it's hard to justify one big and expensive box that could cost more than the whole office infrastructure.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    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
    • SMA gave us central control over multiple servers, simplifying management.
    • Performance of the Appliance VM exceeded that of our old physical appliance-based solution.
    • Convenient licensing for virtualized environments that allows easy scaling.
    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
    • I think that the interface could need updates to adapt it to a much more current system, achieve quick access to necessary tools and adapt the platform to a much more customizable and comfortable system to work with.
    • It is undoubtedly a platform that is worth having, however, the license costs could be better adjusted to small businesses so that it can be accessed more easily.
    • It could be a bit complex to use, the use of codes is quite extensive, it could be adjusted to something much more practical but just as efficient.
    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
    No answers on this topic
    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
    Because it's one of those products you almost don't realize it exists from the end user. From the administrator perspective, you can do everything on its web interface and it's very intuitive to manage, once you know the concepts behind identities, acls, etc. Also, once you build the control structure, I mean, you link 'local' groups with your own Active Directory groups, as we did here, you don't need to be managing those things on the appliance itself.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    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
    Read full review
    Reliability and Availability
    Cisco
    No answers on this topic
    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
    Read full review
    Performance
    Cisco
    No answers on this topic
    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
    Read full review
    Support Rating
    Cisco
    Our experience with Cisco's support was terrible. Other than the fact that they don't respond to service-related emails with urgency, they also keep on changing the policies that affected us. Recently, they came up with a new look for the same software, which was insanely slow. Renewal of keys for the old interface took months. Overall, the support was not very friendly from the users' point of view.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    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
    Read full review
    Online Training
    Cisco
    No answers on this topic
    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
    Read full review
    Implementation Rating
    Cisco
    No answers on this topic
    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
    Read full review
    Alternatives Considered
    Cisco
    At home I have a McAfee service that does similar tasks and helps manage the users of my internet. McAfee seems more user friendly and easier to set exceptions.
    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
    Read full review
    Scalability
    Cisco
    No answers on this topic
    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
    Read full review
    Return on Investment
    Cisco
    • Security! Security! Security! We are financial company that work with very sensitive information. A lot of unsafe traffic was blocked on the Cisco IronPort WSA over years of using it. We did not earn on it but absolutely sure that we did not lose 'gazillion' of dollars being infected or scammed.
    • Easy to configure and use, no need to teach new personnel how work with this product (hopefully saving time = saving money).
    • Unfortunately the price of license subscription made financial managers push IT dept. to look for something cheaper.
    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
    Read full review
    ScreenShots