Cisco Umbrella vs. F5 BIG-IP

Overview
ProductRatingMost Used ByProduct SummaryStarting Price
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
BIG-IP
Score 9.1 out of 10
N/A
F5 BIG-IP software from Seattle-based F5 Networks is a load balancing and application protection solution suite available on cloud or via virtual editions, on a subscription or perpetual licensing basis. The BIG-IP suite of products supports a wide range of security and application performance needs. The suite includes BIG-IP Local Traffic Manager (LTM) traffic management and optimization, BIG-IP DNS, BIG-IP Access Policy Manager (APM) identity and password protection, BIG-IP Application…N/A
Pricing
Cisco UmbrellaF5 BIG-IP
Editions & Modules
No answers on this topic
No answers on this topic
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
Cisco UmbrellaBIG-IP
Free Trial
YesNo
Free/Freemium Version
YesNo
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
YesNo
Entry-level Setup FeeNo setup feeNo setup fee
Additional Details
More Pricing Information
Features
Cisco UmbrellaF5 BIG-IP
Virtual Private Network
Comparison of Virtual Private Network features of Product A and Product B
Cisco Umbrella
-
Ratings
F5 BIG-IP
8.4
57 Ratings
6% below category average
AES 256-bit Encryption00 Ratings8.940 Ratings
Kill Switch00 Ratings7.723 Ratings
Multi-Platform Support00 Ratings8.637 Ratings
Split Tunneling00 Ratings8.629 Ratings
IP Address Masking00 Ratings8.543 Ratings
No-Logs Policy00 Ratings7.825 Ratings
Multiple Server Locations00 Ratings9.047 Ratings
Automatic Wi-Fi Protection00 Ratings7.915 Ratings
Simultaneous Connections00 Ratings8.944 Ratings
Customer Support Services00 Ratings8.552 Ratings
Best Alternatives
Cisco UmbrellaF5 BIG-IP
Small Businesses

No answers on this topic

Norton 360
Norton 360
Score 7.1 out of 10
Medium-sized Companies

No answers on this topic

Quantum Firewalls and Security Gateways
Quantum Firewalls and Security Gateways
Score 9.5 out of 10
Enterprises
Zscaler Internet Access
Zscaler Internet Access
Score 8.9 out of 10
Quantum Firewalls and Security Gateways
Quantum Firewalls and Security Gateways
Score 9.5 out of 10
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User Ratings
Cisco UmbrellaF5 BIG-IP
Likelihood to Recommend
8.6
(106 ratings)
9.1
(171 ratings)
Likelihood to Renew
8.0
(15 ratings)
9.6
(6 ratings)
Usability
7.7
(10 ratings)
8.7
(44 ratings)
Availability
8.9
(11 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Performance
9.1
(2 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Support Rating
7.7
(63 ratings)
7.9
(7 ratings)
Online Training
8.0
(1 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Implementation Rating
9.3
(11 ratings)
10.0
(1 ratings)
Configurability
8.0
(1 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Ease of integration
9.3
(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 UmbrellaF5 BIG-IP
Likelihood to Recommend
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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F5
I have configured Citrix, Kemp, and A10 load balancers professionally and the ease of use of F5 BIG-IP is far and away the easiest to use and most robust product out there for application delivery. The customization available with profiles and iRules make it a critical part of our data center infrastructure.
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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.
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F5
  • Application awareness and Certificate front loading
  • It's really good at explaining what things are doing on the help tab and its so versitile
  • We use the LTM and GTM and GTM is extremely easy to use and works great for global load balancing across our vast enterprise
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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.
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F5
  • Logs - from time to time we have issues and having more specific logs regarding traffic failures would help.
  • Virtual server support for multiple nodes with different operating systems in a single pool. We tend to have issues with servers being two different versions of windows using the same VIP and traffic stops. Usually have to recreate the VIP, and pool and separate the nodes in separate pools by OS versions.
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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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F5
So far experience with F5 BIG-IP has been good, but we are only 6 months into the deployment and will depend on how things run over time.
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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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F5
I am a relatively new Networking personell and I found the F5 BIG-IP's we use for Load Balancing to be easy to understand and was able to quickly become more fluent in it. I have been in the position less than a year and have found myself able to quickly become the go to person for Load Balancing.
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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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F5
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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F5
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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F5
On the occasions when we've had to engage f5 support, they have been great. They have always resolved our issues quickly and been easy to work with and professional. The reason I give them a 10 out of 10, however, is because when we've had issues that have crossed over between the f5 BIG-IP, our Cisco switches, and our Microsoft IIS server the f5 support representatives have been extremely knowledgeable about every product and device involved and have been able to troubleshoot end-to-end without having to engage other vendors.
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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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F5
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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F5
implementation is fine
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Alternatives Considered
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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F5
So the cloud versions, and admittedly we did not do the Imperva on-prem solution. We only went with cloud. There's a lot of idiosyncrasies, like you can't use real IP addresses, you must snap. And that caused us problems with DNS and DNS routing. So we had to turn on some features with F5 that did remediate the issue, like using the one connect profiles, but that did cause some other problems identifying traffic and we had to make some eye roll changes to use the exported four headers.
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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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F5
No answers on this topic
Return on Investment
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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F5
  • F5 BIG-IP has a highly positive impact on the customers. The main impact is on the security of the web applications.
  • F5 BIG-IP provides an easy and safe way to connect employees to assets and applications that reside in an on-premises environment.
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ScreenShots