Cisco Umbrella vs. Microsoft 365

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
Microsoft 365
Score 8.6 out of 10
N/A
Microsoft 365 (formerly Office 365) is a Microsoft Cloud subscription service that includes Microsoft Office products (Word, Excel, PowerPoint, OneNote, Outlook, Publisher, and Access). The software can be installed across multiple devices and ensures that users always have the most up-to-date version of the included Office applications.
$5
Per User Per Month
Pricing
Cisco UmbrellaMicrosoft 365
Editions & Modules
No answers on this topic
Business Basic
$5.00
Per User Per Month
Individual
$5.84
*Per Month
Business - Apps
$8.25
Per User Per Month
Enterprise - F3
$10.00
Per User Per Month
Business Standard
$12.50
Per User Per Month
Business Premium
$20.00
Per User Per Month
Enterprise - E3
$32.00
Per User Per Month
Enterprise - E5
$57.00
Per User Per Month
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
Cisco UmbrellaMicrosoft 365
Free Trial
YesNo
Free/Freemium Version
YesNo
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
YesNo
Entry-level Setup FeeNo setup feeNo setup fee
Additional Details*When billed annually.
More Pricing Information
Community Pulse
Cisco UmbrellaMicrosoft 365
Considered Both Products
Cisco Umbrella
Chose Cisco Umbrella
We evaluated a lot of products. The good part is that we didn't go outside. So Ineos grew by acquisition and therefore we inherited a lot of products there. So we looked at the Netskope and Fortinet because they were within our sphere of product portfolios that we had in the …
Chose Cisco Umbrella
We have had Cisco Umbrella for a very long time and with zero issues to date; the need to evaluate other products has not come up yet. I have used appliance-based web filters in the past and having it at the DNS level is nicer IMO for the level of redundancy it provides and the …
Chose Cisco Umbrella
We were using the Barracuda Networks Web Filtering appliance for a portion of this use case, and at one time, we were using both Umbrella and Barracuda Web Filter. We let the Barracuda support expire due to issues between Barracuda Support and Sales, and have since been using …
Chose Cisco Umbrella
We selected Cisco Umbrella while they were still OpenDNS. It was a solution to filter internet content in the residence halls. The capabilities that have been added are tremendous. We really don't use the content filtering aspects as much, as the students can just turn off …
Chose Cisco Umbrella
OpenDNS has great bang for the buck. We also run SonicWALL web content filters for most all of our clients, they make a great pair. In the past we've run Websense enterprise (great product, but pricey and their cloud version was sluggish back a few years ago.)
Microsoft 365

No answer on this topic

User Ratings
Cisco UmbrellaMicrosoft 365
Likelihood to Recommend
8.9
(124 ratings)
8.8
(259 ratings)
Likelihood to Renew
8.0
(15 ratings)
9.5
(6 ratings)
Usability
7.5
(10 ratings)
8.7
(29 ratings)
Availability
8.7
(11 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Performance
9.9
(2 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Support Rating
7.0
(63 ratings)
8.9
(54 ratings)
Online Training
8.0
(1 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Implementation Rating
9.5
(11 ratings)
9.0
(2 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 UmbrellaMicrosoft 365
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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Microsoft
Microsoft 365 would be well suited for medium to large enterprises. This is where there are several hundreds or thousands of people. Since most everyone has used one of the applications the learning curve would be reduced. Another reason would be the ability to implement security measures to prevent access to sensitive data. This could justify the cost of an Enterprise license.
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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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Microsoft
  • Chat with teams and the integrations with the other apps, and many more smaller ones, like to-dos, news, and the recent Outlook integration.
  • Easy embedding on SharePoint to broadcast all the content created in the different tools.
  • The office package is still robust with the good things from the past and new additions.
Read full review
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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Microsoft
  • Slack is 1000x better than teams. Why put a 250 limit on a chat? Our company hasn't moved fully to channels and it's making us lose transparency. Plus, the teams channels we do have nobody is going to. 90% loss in visibility and engagement.
  • Teams for web meetings. I think the UI/UX should match Zoom which is the standard for all our customers. They don't like it when we use Teams.
  • Chats and Channels need to somehow be on one screen automatically without having to choose that view because majority of our company hasn't opened Teams Channels and only stays in chats.
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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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Microsoft
There are many features of Office that we cannot replicate in any other tool. Plus people know it already. It's not going away anytime soon.
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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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Microsoft
Microsoft 365 is the gold standard for performing project tasks in a professional environment, enabling the quick transfer and exchange of files and ideas for team members who work locally and remotely. Its suite of tools is familiar and has evolved to being cloud based, allowing for files to be updated in real time from near and far.
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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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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
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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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Microsoft
Over the past 8 years of using Microsoft 365, I have noticed that they change vendors often. This always leads to a poor experience in the beginning, then levels out after some time for the company to get things worked out. As a customer, it is really frustrating because I don't have time when something isn't working to have them "look into my issue" and get back with me. They have even closed a ticket I specifically told them to keep open. Your applications are only as good as the support.
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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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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.
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Microsoft
Everything works and I use it all the time.
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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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Microsoft
Its very user-friendly, collaborative and efficient that boosts productivity using cloud tools. their security is strong and it provides data protection. There are regular updates that shields us from attackers too. It offers a wealth of learning resources, including tutorials, help articles and video guide to help users make the most of the application and personally upgrade their skills.
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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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Microsoft
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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Microsoft
  • We have a lot of nonprofit users, so they have a good ROI.
  • I like the constant updates without having to purchase the software repeatedly.
  • I used to purchase each Office (insert year here) often, so the software was up to date and had the newest options and connectors. I think my return on investment would have been much better if Microsoft had updated those versions to keep them current; after all, we did pay for them.
  • Microsoft 365's offering a monthly fee or a discount for a year helps, and you can look at it as a free backup if you have everything set to back up to One Drive. (Cloud-based document filing you can access anywhere ( with an internet connection)—you Can't beat that!)
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ScreenShots