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
Score 8.9 out of 10
N/A
Cloudflare’s connectivity cloud is a unified platform of cloud-native services designed to help enterprises regain control over their IT environments. Powered by an intelligent, programmable global cloud network, it is built to offer security, performance, visibility, and reliability.
$20
per month
Microsoft Defender for Cloud Apps
Score 7.6 out of 10
N/A
Microsoft Defender for Cloud Apps (formerly Microsoft Cloud App Security) is a multimode cloud access security broker.N/A
Pricing
Cisco UmbrellaCloudflareMicrosoft Defender for Cloud Apps
Editions & Modules
No answers on this topic
Pro
$20
per month
Business
$200
per month
Free
Free
Enterprise
Contact sales team
No answers on this topic
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
Cisco UmbrellaCloudflareMicrosoft Defender for Cloud Apps
Free Trial
YesNoNo
Free/Freemium Version
YesNoNo
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
YesNoNo
Entry-level Setup FeeNo setup feeNo setup feeNo setup fee
Additional Details
More Pricing Information
Community Pulse
Cisco UmbrellaCloudflareMicrosoft Defender for Cloud Apps
Considered Multiple Products
Cisco Umbrella
Chose Cisco Umbrella
All were cheaper we picked Cisco Umbrella because i use OpenDNS at home. The ease of use of Cisco Umbrella. It uses Cisco Talos the world largest threat intelligences. Very easy to use and can be deployed rapidly. it fit our company for remote works. The Cisco ecosystem …
Chose Cisco Umbrella
The deployment of Cisco Umbrella is easy however there are certain limitations such as data centre presence in some regions, lack of dedicated egress IPs included as standard. The integration with Cisco AMP is very helpful as well as integration with Cisco Talos. Integration …
Chose Cisco Umbrella
Umbrella provides both more visibility and an easier administration dashboard to manage operations easier.
Chose Cisco Umbrella
Cisco Umbrella offers more visibility across our company network, and it offers more content categories and regular updates on the list.
Cloudflare
Chose Cloudflare
It was a very lengthy process evaluating the differences and abilities of each of the products that were on our final review list, having to look at exactly what our requirements are from a security side as well as from a business perspective, and we found that the offerings …
Microsoft Defender for Cloud Apps

No answer on this topic

Features
Cisco UmbrellaCloudflareMicrosoft Defender for Cloud Apps
DDoS Protection
Comparison of DDoS Protection features of Product A and Product B
Cisco Umbrella
-
Ratings
Cloudflare
10.0
1 Ratings
0% above category average
Microsoft Defender for Cloud Apps
-
Ratings
Automatic Scalability00 Ratings10.01 Ratings00 Ratings
Mitigation SLA00 Ratings10.01 Ratings00 Ratings
Security policy management00 Ratings10.01 Ratings00 Ratings
WAF capabilities00 Ratings10.01 Ratings00 Ratings
Request rate limiting00 Ratings10.01 Ratings00 Ratings
Traffic filtering00 Ratings10.01 Ratings00 Ratings
Bot detection00 Ratings10.01 Ratings00 Ratings
Global threat intelligence00 Ratings10.01 Ratings00 Ratings
Real-time analytics and reporting00 Ratings10.01 Ratings00 Ratings
Best Alternatives
Cisco UmbrellaCloudflareMicrosoft Defender for Cloud Apps
Small Businesses

No answers on this topic

No answers on this topic

No answers on this topic

Medium-sized Companies

No answers on this topic

IBM Cloud Internet Services
IBM Cloud Internet Services
Score 9.0 out of 10
Avanan
Avanan
Score 9.8 out of 10
Enterprises
Zscaler Internet Access
Zscaler Internet Access
Score 8.7 out of 10
Akamai App & API Protector
Akamai App & API Protector
Score 8.5 out of 10
Avanan
Avanan
Score 9.8 out of 10
All AlternativesView all alternativesView all alternativesView all alternatives
User Ratings
Cisco UmbrellaCloudflareMicrosoft Defender for Cloud Apps
Likelihood to Recommend
8.9
(109 ratings)
9.1
(184 ratings)
7.0
(11 ratings)
Likelihood to Renew
8.0
(15 ratings)
8.2
(4 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Usability
7.6
(10 ratings)
8.6
(8 ratings)
8.0
(1 ratings)
Availability
8.7
(11 ratings)
9.1
(2 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Performance
9.9
(2 ratings)
9.1
(2 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Support Rating
7.0
(63 ratings)
7.7
(149 ratings)
5.0
(1 ratings)
Online Training
8.0
(1 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Implementation Rating
9.5
(11 ratings)
8.6
(2 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Configurability
8.0
(1 ratings)
9.0
(1 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Ease of integration
9.5
(10 ratings)
9.0
(2 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Product Scalability
8.0
(2 ratings)
9.1
(2 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Vendor post-sale
8.1
(3 ratings)
7.0
(1 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Vendor pre-sale
8.1
(3 ratings)
8.0
(1 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
User Testimonials
Cisco UmbrellaCloudflareMicrosoft Defender for Cloud Apps
Likelihood to Recommend
Cisco
It’s very well suited. From what I’ve seen where it’s installed and tested, it’s actually very well suited in accommodation businesses because people still use VPNs or similar tools when going to hotels, but it helps keep the hotel network itself secure, so malicious actors aren’t doing something there. I’m also thinking for smaller companies—as I mentioned—they have firewalls but don’t want to use them because they’re expensive and hard to configure. So it simplifies the process, and there are smaller licenses where you can protect only access points or only specific users. The flexibility is actually quite good because you can define it for different needs, like specific licenses, add-ons, APIs, and integrations, and so on.
Read full review
Cloudflare
Cloudflare works well as security measure that gives peace of mind without needing to work too hard to get it functioning well. It provides great tools to customize the security experience as well. This is all the same for the caching tools as well. They have a lot of built in tools that make using the caching easy right out of the box, but they provide the customization options to get things just right for your site.
Read full review
Microsoft
Microsoft Defender for Cloud Apps is well suited when working with other Microsoft Applications. For example, if you are working with Microsoft Office 365 it works very well when implementing CASB features. It works when implementing monitoring or blocks on Sanctioned applications however customizing the message to users is not that great.
Read full review
Pros
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.
Read full review
Cloudflare
  • The best part is the content delivery network. Cloudflare has a large network of data centres around the world that helps cache and delivers content quickly to our customers.
  • Cloudflare offers us with a fast and reliable DNS service and with the world class features such as Cloudflare workers, SSL verification, certificate management and web application firewall. When all of these are combined together, it provides very strict security for our organization.
  • One of the most important feature that we use is the analytics and threat detection. It provides us with the real time insights of all the threats originating from multiple locations and landing on our websites.
Read full review
Microsoft
  • The integration to Microsoft Entra ID is seamless, which allows Conditional Access to redirect the session to Microsoft Defender for Cloud App for it to take actions (Block or Monitor).
  • Tracker users' activity is very good when troubleshooting or running an investigate.
  • Detecting risky users through tight integration with Microsoft Entra ID is a very good feature.
  • Detecting mass downloads and blocking the download of files from non-manage company devices is a very good feature as well.
Read full review
Cons
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.
Read full review
Cloudflare
  • In some cases, using Cloudflare can actually lead to slower website speeds if the network is congested or if the website's traffic is particularly heavy.
  • Some website owners may find that the level of customization offered by Cloudflare is limited, especially in comparison to other solutions.
  • While Cloudflare is easy to set up and manage, it may be too complex for users who are not familiar with web technologies.
Read full review
Microsoft
  • It takes some time to scan and apply the policies when there is some sensitive information.
  • After it applies the policies, it works, but there is a delay.
  • It doesn't provide any way to scan Microsoft Teams when an external exchange of images is happening. You can always do the filtering on the documents during the chat, but if there is an image, then some kind of OCR capability is required to detect it. At present, there is no way [Microsoft Cloud App Security] can go and detect those kinds of images and alert us
Read full review
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.
Read full review
Cloudflare
lower cost
Read full review
Microsoft
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.
Read full review
Cloudflare
Everything is extremely concise and all settings apply immediately and take effect globally. There is no reason to explicitly plan/think in terms of individual regions as one would have to traditional cloud offerings (AWS, OCI, Azure). All Cloudflare products integrate seamless as part of a single pipeline that executes from request to response.
Read full review
Microsoft
The interface is pretty simple and easy to use; however, you will need to do a lot of investigative research on your own to get comfortable with it. Originally, many of the Microsoft security tools had their own seperate consoles. Overtime, they have blended into one interface which is the ideal state. In some cases it is clear Microsoft had to pick which console a certain feature or setting was going to reside in and this leads to some confusion. For example, DLP is managed through Defender for Cloud Apps but you will also need to jump into Purview. For things like reverse proxy on your M365 tenant, you will need to go into Azure and setup conditional access rules. Not a big problem and I can understand why the settings are located where they are but for someone just starting out with Defender for Cloud Apps, it will take some time to figure out.
Read full review
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
Read full review
Cloudflare
In 6+ years of relying on Cloudflare, I think we experienced one or two brief outages that were Cloudflare's fault.
Read full review
Microsoft
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
Read full review
Cloudflare
Their Argo for the global network is the core feature we love.
Read full review
Microsoft
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
Excellent product, Cloudflare is a true pioneer of the modern Internet, providing tools, services, and expertise that vastly improve the performance and security of web services. Any issues are resolved quickly with detailed RCA and follow-ups published publicly. I'm thankful to Cloudflare and use their services both at work and at home.
Read full review
Microsoft
I have not utilized actual support but the Sales and Product teams have been super helpful in moving our implementation forward and showing us the best practices.
Read full review
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.
Read full review
Cloudflare
No answers on this topic
Microsoft
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.
Read full review
Cloudflare
Very well executed implementation where our team was able to handle the implementation with guidance.
Read full review
Microsoft
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.
Read full review
Cloudflare
They have the most generous free offering, and after the free offering limit is reached - you're still getting plenty of value for the buck.
They have very good reputation.
They have an ever expanding list of tools that can support multiple scenarios under one roof.
Read full review
Microsoft
More flexible and more features with easy integration with cloud services like Microsoft Azure and other cloud services. Overall both gives similar features but we prefer Microsoft cloud app security due to its high threat detection rate. mostly we have been able to stop the threat in very very less time.
Read full review
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
Read full review
Cloudflare
They are built for scale and have the capacity to handle all the traffic we could ever expect to get.
Read full review
Microsoft
No answers on this topic
Return on Investment
Cisco
  • Provide an additional layer of DNS security by vetting web traffic
  • Help to understand who is consuming bandwidth so we can make adjustments as needed.
  • The cost of a single incident from bad web surfing or searches could be enormous. Umbrella helps to avoid these scenarios.
Read full review
Cloudflare
  • Immediate ROI on Registrar and DNS hosting while giving a single plane of glass to managing both with domain registrations at cost, and no cost DNS hosting
  • WAF helped us move at risk servers/applications into a protected state allowing us to perform remediations at a measured pace and get them done right instead of band aide solutions.
  • CDN proxying increase the speed of our website while simultaneously reducing server load.
  • DMARC management and report interpretation allow use to identify weak points in our email systems, remediate and move to stricter policies without significantly increasing staff time spent managing it.
Read full review
Microsoft
  • Cloud App Security saves us thousands of dollars finding and rectifying apps security issues
  • Identity Security Posture helps the organization identity stay in shape, saving thousands of dollars on security consultations
  • The cost of suffering a breach cannot be quantified, CAS helps minimize the chances of the attackers succeeding, with excellent historical logging for most operations
Read full review
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