Pros and Cons of Cisco Umbrella 2025

Q: What are Cisco Umbrella's top competitors?

Cloudflare , Akamai CDN , and Zscaler Internet Access are common alternatives for Cisco Umbrella.

Overview

What is Cisco Umbrella?

Cisco now offers OpenDNS Umbrella Web Filtering. Cisco acquired OpenDNS in August 2015, and rebranded the product as Cisco Umbrella.

An important product for securing information

Rating: 9 out of 10

March 18, 2025

IncentivizedVetted ReviewVerified User

Our business needs a reliable security solution to ensure business continuity. We use Cisco Umbrella primarily to secure our staff's web browsing and prevent them from going t...

Vesa Jordan

Director - Information Technology

CTO at Finnfund

Finnfund

5 years of experience

Cisco Umbrella

Rating: 10 out of 10

March 15, 2025

IncentivizedVetted ReviewVerified User

We are using it to protect our entire organization. We use it to deny access to mal-domains CNC fishing, etc. Filter non business related sites, I especially like that fact we...

Robert Rogers

Professional - Information Technology

Senior IT Systems Analyst

Kalamazoo County Government

3 years of experience

Safer internet with Cisco Umbrella.

Rating: 8 out of 10

March 14, 2025

IncentivizedVetted ReviewVerified User

We use Cisco Umbrella for several purposes, one of them is to secure our internet users within our office network. Cisco Umbrella works as a shield for us against cyber threat...

Osman Gani

Manager - Information Technology

Project Coordinator

Hamida Traders Ltd (htl-bd.com)

1 year of experience

Cisco Umbrella as Cloud Security Service for SD-WAN Edge Routers

Rating: 9 out of 10

March 13, 2025

IncentivizedVetted ReviewVerified User

We are using Cisco Umbrella to integrate with SD-WAN Edge devices to provide cloud based security. This helps us to layoff the security analysis and logs storage responsibilit...

Adnan Tanveer

Engineer - Engineering

Network Engineer

Telstra

2 years of experience

Great extra security layer for your remote workers

Rating: 10 out of 10

March 12, 2025

IncentivizedVetted ReviewVerified User

We started using the Cisco Umbrella way before the pandemics as an extra security layer to protect computers working within our internal network. That had been working really ...

Carlos Coque

Analyst - Information Technology

System Administrator

IBEX Payroll Services

4 years of experience

Awards

Products that are considered exceptional by their customers based on a variety of criteria win TrustRadius awards. Learn more about the types of TrustRadius awards to make the best purchase decision. More about TrustRadius Awards

Video Reviews

3 videos

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Cisco Umbrella Review

10:34

Cisco Umbrella Review

13:09

Convenient and Secure | A Cisco Umbrella Review

02:10

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Product Details

What is Cisco Umbrella?

Cisco Umbrella, a key component of Cisco's secure access service edge (SASE) architecture, integrates multiple security services in a single, centrally managed, cloud-native solution to secure access to the internet and control cloud app usage. By unifying secure web gateway, firewall, DNS-layer security, threat intelligence, and cloud access security broker (CASB) solutions, Cisco Umbrella helps reduce the resources required for deployment, configuration, and integration. And, by delivering this functionality from the cloud, you can scale to meet the needs of a remote and roaming workforce, shifting network perimeter, and multi-cloud environment — all while simplifying security. Umbrella can be easily integrated with an SD-WAN implementation to provide a combination of performance, security, and flexibility to delight both end users and a security team.

Cisco Umbrella Features

Supported: DNS-layer security
Supported: Secure web gateway (full proxy)
Supported: Cloud access security broker (CASB) functionality
Supported: Cloud-delivered firewall
Supported: Interactive threat intelligence
Supported: Integrates with SD-WAN

Cisco Umbrella Videos

Watch how Cisco Umbrella, a key component of Cisco’s SASE global cloud architecture, enables your cloud transformation.

Watch how KCA Deutag strengthens their security with Cisco Umbrella to ensure consistent enforcement across distributed sites.

Cisco Umbrella Integrations

Cisco Secure Malware Analytics
ThreatConnect SOAR (discontinued)
ZeroFOX
FireEye
Check Point
Splunk
ThreatQ
Umbrella Enforcement API for Custom Integrations

Cisco Umbrella Competitors

Cloudflare
Akamai CDN
Zscaler Internet Access
Infoblox DDI (BloxOne)
Netskope Intelligent Security Service Edge
Palo Alto Networks Advanced DNS Security

Cisco Umbrella Technical Details

Deployment Types	Software as a Service (SaaS), Cloud, or Web-Based
Operating Systems	Unspecified
Mobile Application	Apple iOS, Android, Chromebooks
Supported Countries	190 Countries

Cisco Umbrella Downloadables

Frequently Asked Questions

Cisco now offers OpenDNS Umbrella Web Filtering. Cisco acquired OpenDNS in August 2015, and rebranded the product as Cisco Umbrella.

Cloudflare, Akamai CDN, and Zscaler Internet Access are common alternatives for Cisco Umbrella.

Reviewers rate Implementation Rating and Ease of integration highest, with a score of 9.3.

The most common users of Cisco Umbrella are from Mid-sized Companies (51-1,000 employees).

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Comparisons

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Reviews From Top Reviewers

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Cisco Umbrella

Rating: 10 out of 10

Incentivized

March 15, 2025

Robert Rogers

Senior IT Systems Analyst

Kalamazoo County Government (Government Administration, 501-1000 employees)

Vetted Review

Verified User

3 years of experience

View profile

Pros

It is easy to setup and they have very helpful onboarding staff.
It took only a few hours to get it up and running.
It is updated in Realtime by Cisco Talos Intelligence who are awesome.

Cons

It takes a while to get the order of policies figured out.
There is a slight delay in changes as it filters down to your client.

Safer internet with Cisco Umbrella.

Rating: 8 out of 10

Incentivized

March 14, 2025

Osman Gani

Project Coordinator

Hamida Traders Ltd (htl-bd.com) (Information Technology Services, 1001-5000 employees)

Vetted Review

Verified User

1 year of experience

Pros

Managing the overall security policies is quite seamless in Cisco Umbrella. it is quite easy to set up and implement web filtering rules and other necessary configurations without any hassle.
The reporting features like 'activity search' provides greater visibility of our user's internet activity within our organization. We can identify security related risks quickly and take decisions to mitigate them.
The deployment and integration of Cisco Umbrella with other vendors product is quite appreciable. We other non cisco security devices which Cisco Umbrella was integrated with without any major issues.
We can easily track down any user that goes to the internet through the activity search feature.

Cons

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.