What users are saying about
Cisco Umbrella
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Top Rated
138 Ratings
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Based on 138 reviews and ratings
59 Ratings
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Based on 59 reviews and ratings
Feature Set Ratings
Firewall
Cisco Umbrella
Feature Set Not Supported
N/A

8.5
pfSense
85%
pfSense ranks higher in 11/11 features
pfSense ranks higher in 11/11 features
Identification Technologies
N/A
0 Ratings

8.7
87%
8 Ratings
Visualization Tools
N/A
0 Ratings

7.8
78%
7 Ratings
Content Inspection
N/A
0 Ratings

7.3
73%
9 Ratings
Policy-based Controls
N/A
0 Ratings

8.4
84%
9 Ratings
Active Directory and LDAP
N/A
0 Ratings

7.9
79%
8 Ratings
Firewall Management Console
N/A
0 Ratings

9.7
97%
8 Ratings
Reporting and Logging
N/A
0 Ratings

8.6
86%
9 Ratings
VPN
N/A
0 Ratings

8.8
88%
9 Ratings
High Availability
N/A
0 Ratings

8.9
89%
9 Ratings
Stateful Inspection
N/A
0 Ratings

8.9
89%
9 Ratings
Proxy Server
N/A
0 Ratings

8.2
82%
9 Ratings
Attribute Ratings
- pfSense is rated higher in 1 area: Likelihood to Recommend
Likelihood to Recommend
8.4
Cisco Umbrella
84%
69 Ratings

9.1
pfSense
91%
22 Ratings
Likelihood to Renew
10.0
Cisco Umbrella
100%
3 Ratings

pfSense
N/A
0 Ratings
Usability
9.4
Cisco Umbrella
94%
4 Ratings

pfSense
N/A
0 Ratings
Support Rating
7.3
Cisco Umbrella
73%
67 Ratings

pfSense
N/A
0 Ratings
Implementation Rating
9.0
Cisco Umbrella
90%
2 Ratings

pfSense
N/A
0 Ratings
Likelihood to Recommend
Cisco Umbrella
Cisco Umbrella provides another layer of protection on top of firewalls and antivirus. Cisco Umbrella makes whitelisting, blacklisting, and categorical web filtering easier through the use of a single admin portal. Updates to these lists are populated almost instantly to all of your local and remote devices. Cisco Umbrella may be overkill for smaller businesses that do not have a distributed workforce.
Information Technology Team Lead
West Star Aviation, LLCAviation & Aerospace, 501-1000 employees
pfSense
For fast-growing or SME companies, pfSense is quite suitable because pfSense already had many advanced features such as VPN and multiple WAN / LAN. As a result, we just need to pay for expensive router frequently to upgrade our infrastructure.
IT & T Manager
Madison (Hong Kong) LimitedRetail, 51-200 employees
Pros
Cisco Umbrella
- Cisco Umbrella protects our devices and users from malicious sites of all kinds.
- Cisco Umbrella allows us to add additional web site types we may want to block for specific users.
- Cisco Umbrella keeps the list of sites blocked current by utilizing data from their entire security platform.
Network Administrator
Plainfield Community SchoolsEducation Management, 501-1000 employees
pfSense
- pfSense is an excellent firewall - It logs all of your traffic. It has packages you can install to snort bad traffic.
- pfSense has a tool called "p0f" which allows you to see what type of OS is trying to connect to you. You can filter these results and you can also block a specific OS from connecting to you.
- pfSense is an excellent load-balancer: (Multi-WAN and Server Load Balancing) The fail-over/aggregation works very well. This is perfect if your business uses multiple ISP's to ensure your customers are always able to access their data. Also helps with bandwidth distribution as well.
- VPN's - I am not entirely sure if this package was free with pfSense, but it does offer the ability to use OpenVPN which is what I am familiar with.
- They also have IPsec in the settings as well, but I am not familiar with that enough to go into any detail with it.
- As I mentioned I do use OpenVPN the only thing I don't care for with it is I can create OpenVPN configs for each user I want to be able to VPN into the network and I assumed each one would be "unique" but this does not seem to be the case. I could be doing it wrong, but if I create a config for a specific employee I would expect only that employee should be able to use that config, but I have been able to login to everyone that I made using my credentials.
- I mentioned earlier that pfSense had a GUI.
- I personally really think it is cool because it has a bunch of reporting graphs for monitoring your networks. I think when I become the full-time admin at the company I am going to try to talk them into getting me a TV I can mount on the wall and display all the graphs and real-time info pfSense shows so I can monitor what is going on with the network(s) at all times. Plus I think it would look rad.
Technical Support Specialist
TimeTrak Systems, Inc.Computer Software, 11-50 employees
Cons
Cisco Umbrella
- Keeping up to date on known malicious sites and blocking those is difficult for all vendors, but this could always be improved upon.
- A more detailed descriptions of what is included the Security Categories would be useful. Generic descriptions are provided. For example, state lottery sites could be detailed in the description of the Gambling category.
IT Security Manager
Reynolds, Smith and Hills (RS&H)Design, 1001-5000 employees
pfSense
- There is no API for making changes. This can be a hindrance in environments where auto-deploying something needs firewall rules or HAProxy configs updated. Since all settings are stored in an XML file and then configs are generated from that, even manually updating config files cannot be done.
- Beware that some network cards can have issues. pfSense is based on FreeBSD, so it's best to look on their compatibility list before deploying.
Information Technology Manager
TimeTrak Systems, Inc.Computer Software, 11-50 employees
Pricing Details
Cisco Umbrella
General
Free Trial
Yes
Free/Freemium Version
Yes
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
Yes
Entry-level set up fee?
No
Starting Price
—Cisco Umbrella Editions & Modules
—
Additional Pricing Details
—pfSense
General
Free Trial
—Free/Freemium Version
—Premium Consulting/Integration Services
—Entry-level set up fee?
No
Starting Price
$179 per appliance
pfSense Editions & Modules
Edition
SG-1100 | $1791 |
---|---|
SG-2100 | $2291 |
SG-3100 | $3991 |
SG-5100 | $6991 |
XG-7100-DT | $8991 |
XG-7100-1U | $9991 |
XG-1537 | $1,9491 |
XG-1541 | $2,6491 |
- per appliance
Additional Pricing Details
—Likelihood to Renew
Cisco Umbrella
Cisco Umbrella 10.0
Based on 3 answers
It is a great product. It is easy to manage and is affordable. We are a Cisco shop, so it is easily integrated with our other security suite of products to include Threat Response and SecureX.
IT Security Manager
Reynolds, Smith and Hills (RS&H)Design, 1001-5000 employees
pfSense
No score
No answers yet
No answers on this topic
Usability
Cisco Umbrella
Cisco Umbrella 9.4
Based on 4 answers
The product was easy to install and get running. To maintain the product is also a simple matter of maintaining lists of wanted and unwanted domains or URLs. The basic and advanced security features all do what they are intended to do with no known erroneous outcomes
IT Security Manager
Reynolds, Smith and Hills (RS&H)Design, 1001-5000 employees
pfSense
No score
No answers yet
No answers on this topic
Support Rating
Cisco Umbrella
Cisco Umbrella 7.3
Based on 67 answers
Our network team mostly works with Cisco support but from what I understand, they were pretty helpful because we're an enterprise company. We use a few other Cisco products, so we do get a pretty good response from Cisco customer support. I'm not a fan of Cisco's SSO because we can't put it behind Okta but that's beyond the scope of this.

Verified User
Engineer in Information Technology
Information Technology and Services Company, 1001-5000 employeespfSense
No score
No answers yet
No answers on this topic
Implementation Rating
Cisco Umbrella
Cisco Umbrella 9.0
Based on 2 answers
Overall, the implementation was smooth with little issues. Testing some of the advanced features and ensuring they did not impact our user population was the greatest challenge
IT Security Manager
Reynolds, Smith and Hills (RS&H)Design, 1001-5000 employees
pfSense
No score
No answers yet
No answers on this topic
Alternatives Considered
Cisco Umbrella
We used a product before this called iPrism by EdgeWave and also briefly tried Barracuda Web Security in the cloud. We were having such a large influx of service desk calls about proxy-based layer 7 web filters that we wanted to step back and pick something more at the DNS level, to protect our employees but not hover over their social media use, etc. Cisco will also employ a layer 7 proxy if a site is suspicious, which does require us to push a certificate out should we want that feature. For most policies we have it enabled.
IT Infrastructure Supervisor
Sight and Sound TheatresEntertainment, 201-500 employees
pfSense
Before pfSense we were using consumer and small business rated network appliances from Linksys, Cisco, Buffalo and Netgear. We were replacing them on average of every 6-12 months because they'd fail or would offer poor wifi availability.Switching to pfSense allowed us to use professional grade switches and wifi access points, offloading all of the services that the consumer grade products took care of, onto pfSense (DHCP, DNS, routing, firewall, VPN, etc).
Chief Technology Officer
LoudDoor, LLCMarketing and Advertising, 11-50 employees
Return on Investment
Cisco Umbrella
- On the positive side, the product does help block known bad sites, resulting in less time that technicians spend cleaning infections.
- On the negative side, the problem that causes Windows to incorrectly report no Internet access has taken a lot of time for many technicians.
- Reporting features for individual clients help us more efficiently provide browsing reports when needed.

Verified User
Manager in Information Technology
Information Technology & Services Company, 11-50 employeespfSense
- Moving to a FWaaS solution installed on a decent computer the initial investment was moderate to cover 50 to 250 users, but still being cheaper that a Fortinet, Cisco ASA, or a Sophos UTM.
- Paying only for support can be a double edge knife, cause you need to identify what's the goal of the request, or your drown into a an endless list of requirements.
- To stay in the top with the half of a regular investment pFSense gives a wide variety of plugins that will give you a deep knowledge of your security flaws and strong points.
IT Manager
Stoneleaf Construction LLCConstruction, 51-200 employees