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    Overview
    ProductRatingMost Used ByProduct SummaryStarting Price

    Cisco Umbrella

    Score8.9 out of 10
    N/ACisco now offers OpenDNS Umbrella Web Filtering. Cisco acquired OpenDNS in August 2015, and rebranded the product as Cisco Umbrella.N/A

    pfSense

    Score8.5 out of 10
    N/ApfSense is a firewall and load management product available through the open source pfSense Community Edition, as well as a the licensed edition, pfSense Plus (formerly known as pfSense Enterprise). The solution provides combined firewall, VPN, and router functionality, and can be deployed through the cloud (AWS or Azure), or on-premises with a Netgate appliance. It as scalable capacities, with functionality for SMBs. As a firewall, pfSense offers Stateful packet inspection, concurrent…

    $179

    per appliance

    Pricing
    Cisco UmbrellapfSense
    Editions & Modules
    No answers on this topic
    SG-1100
    $179
    per appliance
    SG-2100
    $229
    per appliance
    SG-3100
    $399
    per appliance
    SG-5100
    $699
    per appliance
    XG-7100-DT
    $899
    per appliance
    XG-7100-1U
    $999
    per appliance
    XG-1537
    $1,949
    per appliance
    XG-1541
    $2,649
    per appliance
    Offerings
    Pricing Offerings
    Cisco UmbrellapfSense
    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
    Community Pulse
    Cisco UmbrellapfSense
    Considered Both Products
    Cisco
    No answer on this topic
    Netgate (Rubicon Communications, LLC)
    No answer on this topic
    Key User Insights
    Would buy again
    95%
    Would buy again
    91 Answers
    94%
    Would buy again
    16 Answers
    Delivers good value for the price
    98%
    Delivers good value for the price
    88 Answers
    100%
    Delivers good value for the price
    17 Answers
    Happy with the feature set
    96%
    Happy with the feature set
    92 Answers
    94%
    Happy with the feature set
    16 Answers
    Lived up to sales and marketing promises
    95%
    Lived up to sales and marketing promises
    77 Answers
    100%
    Lived up to sales and marketing promises
    14 Answers
    Implementation went as expected
    92%
    Implementation went as expected
    84 Answers
    94%
    Implementation went as expected
    16 Answers
    Features
    Cisco UmbrellapfSense
    Firewall
    Comparison of Firewall features of Cisco Umbrella and pfSense
    Feature
    Cisco Umbrella
    -
    Ratings
    pfSense
    8.9
    17 Ratings
    4% above category average
    Identification Technologies00 Ratings8.714 Ratings
    Visualization Tools00 Ratings8.714 Ratings
    Content Inspection00 Ratings9.216 Ratings
    Policy-based Controls00 Ratings8.717 Ratings
    Active Directory and LDAP00 Ratings7.913 Ratings
    Firewall Management Console00 Ratings9.516 Ratings
    Reporting and Logging00 Ratings8.417 Ratings
    VPN00 Ratings9.117 Ratings
    High Availability00 Ratings9.416 Ratings
    Stateful Inspection00 Ratings10.015 Ratings
    Proxy Server00 Ratings8.415 Ratings
    Best Alternatives
    Cisco UmbrellapfSense
    Small Businesses
    No answers on this topic
    SonicWall NSA Series
    Score8.3 out of 10
    Medium-sized Companies
    No answers on this topic
    Barracuda CloudGen Firewall
    Score9.6 out of 10
    Enterprises
    No answers on this topic
    Cisco Adaptive Security Appliance (ASA) Software
    Score9 out of 10
    All AlternativesView all alternativesView all alternatives
    User Ratings
    Cisco UmbrellapfSense
    Likelihood to Recommend
    8.9
    (124 ratings)
    9.3
    (30 ratings)
    Likelihood to Renew
    8.0
    (15 ratings)
    -
    (0 ratings)
    Usability
    7.5
    (10 ratings)
    9.7
    (8 ratings)
    Availability
    8.7
    (11 ratings)
    -
    (0 ratings)
    Performance
    10.0
    (2 ratings)
    -
    (0 ratings)
    Support Rating
    6.9
    (63 ratings)
    10.0
    (1 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 UmbrellapfSense
    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
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Netgate (Rubicon Communications, LLC)
    I believe PFSense is well suited for both home lab environments as well as up to small to mid-size business environments on a tight budget. However, I would implore that anything in production requires the use of the authorized hardware that PFSense sells to receive support. However, in my experience, PFSense is a solid set-and-forget firewall solution.
    Read full review
    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.
    Read full review
    Netgate (Rubicon Communications, LLC)
    • Easy to use. Good user interface design! Easy to understand and easy to set up.
    • Lower hardware requirement. 3 years ago, we used an old PC to run it. Now, we have changed to a router device with Celeron CPU and 8GB RAM. It runs smoothly with a 1000G commercial broadband.
    Incentivized
    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.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Netgate (Rubicon Communications, LLC)
    • I did kind of mention a Con in the Pro section with OpenVPN.
    • When I create a config for an employee other employees are able to login to that config.
    • I could be doing something wrong when I am making it - I am not afraid to admit that as I am pretty new to all of this, but it seems like it builds a key and I would think the key would be unique in some way to each employee, but I could be wrong.
    • I actually do not have a lot of Con's for this software - I did not get to set this up on our work network so I am not sure of any downfalls when installing.
    • I installed this on my personal machine in a Hyper-V environment to get a feel for it before I started working on it at work and it seemed pretty smooth. I didn't run into any issues.
    Incentivized
    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.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Netgate (Rubicon Communications, LLC)
    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.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Netgate (Rubicon Communications, LLC)
    The pfSense UI is easy to navigate and pretty go look at. It is much better than some high dollar firewalls that just throw menus you you. The pfSense UI is quick and responsive and makes sense 99% of the time. Changes are committed quickly and the hardware rarely requires a reboot. It just runs.
    Incentivized
    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
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Netgate (Rubicon Communications, LLC)
    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
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Netgate (Rubicon Communications, LLC)
    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)
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Netgate (Rubicon Communications, LLC)
    pfSense+ basic provides "As Available" email support. pfSense+ Pro offers 24 hr turn around email support. pfSense+ Enterprise offers 24/7 phone support.
    Incentivized
    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.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Netgate (Rubicon Communications, LLC)
    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.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Netgate (Rubicon Communications, LLC)
    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.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Netgate (Rubicon Communications, LLC)
    Meraki has a unified management login for all devices, which is nice. It also has decent content filtering, both areas where pfSense is weaker. Where pfSense far ouclasses Meraki is in the ease of use and the other width of features. These include features such as better VPN interoperability, non-subscription based pricing, auditability, not relying on the infrastructure of a third party, more transparency of what's actually going on, easier to deploy replacements if hardware fails. Additionally, the NAT management for pfSense seems to be a bit better, as you can NAT between any network segment and not just the LAN segments out the WAN interfaces.
    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
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Netgate (Rubicon Communications, LLC)
    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.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Netgate (Rubicon Communications, LLC)
    • pfSense can be installed on commodity hardware with no licensing fees. With a simple less than 10 minute restore time, on most hardware, it's an extremely inexpensive way to achieve the same results that some of the more expensive vendors provide.
    • The easy to use interface has allowed configuration management to be preformed by lower level technicians with quick and easy training.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    ScreenShots