Cisco Umbrella vs. Cloudflare Access

Overview
ProductRatingMost Used ByProduct SummaryStarting Price
Cisco Umbrella
Score 8.9 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
Cloudflare Access
Score 9.2 out of 10
N/A
Cloudflare Access is a Zero Trust Network Access (ZTNA) solution that secures internal applications by verifying identity, device posture, and context for every request. It replaces legacy VPNs with a faster, more secure alternative that lives at the network edge.N/A
Pricing
Cisco UmbrellaCloudflare Access
Editions & Modules
No answers on this topic
No answers on this topic
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
Cisco UmbrellaCloudflare Access
Free Trial
YesNo
Free/Freemium Version
YesYes
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
YesNo
Entry-level Setup FeeNo setup feeNo setup fee
Additional Details
More Pricing Information
Community Pulse
Cisco UmbrellaCloudflare Access
Features
Cisco UmbrellaCloudflare Access
Identity Management
Comparison of Identity Management features of Product A and Product B
Cisco Umbrella
-
Ratings
Cloudflare Access
10.0
2 Ratings
12% above category average
Multi-Factor Authentication00 Ratings10.02 Ratings
Endpoint Security
Comparison of Endpoint Security features of Product A and Product B
Cisco Umbrella
-
Ratings
Cloudflare Access
10.0
1 Ratings
11% above category average
Endpoint Detection and Response (EDR)00 Ratings10.01 Ratings
Threat Intelligence
Comparison of Threat Intelligence features of Product A and Product B
Cisco Umbrella
-
Ratings
Cloudflare Access
8.9
2 Ratings
14% above category average
Network Analytics00 Ratings5.62 Ratings
Threat Recognition00 Ratings10.01 Ratings
Vulnerability Classification00 Ratings10.01 Ratings
Automated Alerts and Reporting00 Ratings6.92 Ratings
Threat Analysis00 Ratings10.01 Ratings
Threat Intelligence Reporting00 Ratings10.01 Ratings
Automated Threat Identification00 Ratings10.01 Ratings
Zero Trust Security
Comparison of Zero Trust Security features of Product A and Product B
Cisco Umbrella
-
Ratings
Cloudflare Access
9.3
2 Ratings
8% above category average
Continuous Verification00 Ratings10.02 Ratings
Secure Web Gateways00 Ratings10.02 Ratings
Network Flow Control00 Ratings10.02 Ratings
Network Traffic Analysis00 Ratings6.92 Ratings
Segmentation Leveraging00 Ratings10.02 Ratings
Admin Access Control00 Ratings8.12 Ratings
Network Data Encryption00 Ratings9.42 Ratings
Network Topology Mapping00 Ratings10.01 Ratings
User Ratings
Cisco UmbrellaCloudflare Access
Likelihood to Recommend
8.9
(124 ratings)
10.0
(6 ratings)
Likelihood to Renew
8.0
(15 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Usability
7.5
(10 ratings)
10.0
(2 ratings)
Availability
8.7
(11 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Performance
9.9
(2 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Support Rating
7.0
(63 ratings)
9.1
(3 ratings)
Online Training
8.0
(1 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Implementation Rating
9.5
(11 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Configurability
8.0
(1 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Ease of integration
9.5
(10 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Product Scalability
8.0
(2 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Vendor post-sale
8.1
(3 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Vendor pre-sale
8.1
(3 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
User Testimonials
Cisco UmbrellaCloudflare Access
Likelihood to Recommend
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
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Cloudflare
I wanted to securely connect to my servers without getting tracked by malicious attackers, even though I was on public Wi-Fi. Security was my top priority, and I also wanted a setup that was easy and quick to start and provided great network performance. Cloudflare's Zero trust matches my criteria for becoming my first choice.
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Pros
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.
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Cloudflare
  • Block access to known bad, risky, or unwanted destinations at the DNS or HTTP level.
  • Excellent protection for remote users.
  • Best in class browser isolation techniques.
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Cons
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.
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Cloudflare
  • Cloudflare still need to improve CASB direction to complete set of SASE tools.
  • More integrations with the third-party agents to check device posture in the Zero Trust framework.
  • More granularity in firewall rules for full replacement of on-premise solutions.
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Likelihood to Renew
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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Cloudflare
No answers on this topic
Usability
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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Cloudflare
Within a few hours, new engineers are trained in basic tasks and are quite happy they are able to resolve issues independently. After SSO is configured, onboarding is as simple as signing into m365 via a web browser popup.
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Reliability and Availability
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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Cloudflare
No answers on this topic
Performance
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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Cloudflare
No answers on this topic
Support Rating
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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Cloudflare
Good chat support from the portal for basic questions and minor issues. The enterprise support line is provided as well.
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Online Training
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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Cloudflare
No answers on this topic
Implementation Rating
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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Cloudflare
No answers on this topic
Alternatives Considered
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.
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Cloudflare
Cloudflare was both the most feature-rich and cost-effective of comparisons. Presales engagement understood our challenges and was keen to solve them.
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Scalability
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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Cloudflare
No answers on this topic
Return on Investment
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.
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Cloudflare
  • The cost of Cloudflare Zero trust is much lower, hence reducing spending on infrastructure security.
  • The Network performance is improved thanks to Warp protocol.
  • Requires less maintenance and hence saves time.
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ScreenShots