We performed a comparison between Cisco Secure Firewall and Cisco Umbrella based on real PeerSpot user reviews.
Find out in this report how the two Cisco Security Portfolio solutions compare in terms of features, pricing, service and support, easy of deployment, and ROI."We get the Security Intelligence Feeds refreshed every hour from Talos, which from my understanding is that they're the largest intelligence Security Intelligence Group outside of the government."
"Once configured to suit your needs, these firewalls are rock solid appliances."
"VPN load balancing has been particularly essential for my connections to integrate via multiple time zones."
"Web filtering is a big improvement for us. The previous version we used, the AC520, did not have that feature included. It was not very easy for us, especially because the environment had to be isolated and we needed to get updates from outside, such as Windows patches. That feature has really helped us when we are going outside to pull those patches."
"We chose Cisco because it had the full package that we were looking for."
"Simple to deploy, stable."
"The stability is very good; there's no vagueness. Either it works or it doesn't, and it's also very easy to find out why."
"It just works for us."
"The most valuable feature is that it secures our network against blacklisted or malicious websites."
"I have found the malware protection feature valuable. It is helpful and deliverable and is able to protect my entire organization from getting compromised. It also prevents us from visiting any malicious sites which are not visible to the users."
"We are very new users of the solution and are still in the exploration stages, but we are happy with the product thus far."
"What we like most is security and how easy it is to integrate with other appliances."
"The most valuable thing is how easy it is to deploy. We did it with 9,000 users at my last job, and it took a week to get to all the endpoints. Doing that without having to physically touch all those endpoints was very simple."
"The integration features within, for example, the Cisco VPN product and the Umbrella module are valuable."
"Cisco Umbrella is easy to monitor, manage, and deploy."
"The most valuable features are the protection against ransomware and phishing."
"One area that could be improved is its logging functionality. Your logs are usually displayed on the screen, but if you want to go back one or two days, then you need another solution in place because those logs are overwritten within minutes."
"In terms of functionality, there isn't much to improve. There could be more bandwidth and better interface speed."
"One thing that we really would have loved to have was policy-based routing. We had a lot of connections, and sometimes, we would have liked to change the routing depending on the policies, but it was lacking this capability. We also wanted application filtering and DNS filtering."
"It would be nice if you didn't have to configure using a command-line interface. It's a bit technical that way."
"It's not unexpected, but it's a common scenario where customers request dual layers of security. For instance, when dealing with regulatory compliance, especially in financial sectors regulated by entities like the Central Bank, having two distinct units is often mandated. If a client predominantly uses a solution like Palo Alto, they may need to incorporate another vendor such as Cisco or Forti. Importantly, there's a significant disparity in interfaces and management platforms between these vendors, necessitating careful consideration when integrating them into the overall security architecture"
"Most users do not have awareness of this product's functionality and features. Cisco should do something to make them aware of them. That would be quite excellent and useful to organizations that are still using legacy data-center-security products."
"In the past though, colleagues have had issues during the upgrade process. The failover didn't work and production was down."
"One feature I would like to see, that Firepower doesn't have, is email security. Perhaps in the future, Cisco will integrate Cisco Umbrella with Firepower. I don't see why we should have to pay for two separate products when both could be integrated in one box."
"If I want to see which users access a website, I need an Active Directory registered on Umbrella's cloud."
"I'd like to see improvement in its overall integration with all the other platforms. There's some integration between Umbrella and Meraki, but an overall Cisco problem is that there are so many different tools, and finding easy, seamless ways of connecting everything together is always a challenge."
"I would like them to make some videos, practical videos, the kind with steps that people can use to learn and deploy"
"I would like for them to continue building on IPS and IDS functionalities."
"The main issue that we have is with the final steps or the full integration and getting rid of Zscaler. The company still has to fall back to Zscaler when something in Umbrella is not working as expected, such as when we enable SSL inspection. When something is not working 100%, the company is falling back to Zscaler."
"The price could be better. The price is definitely a bit high, but we have to pay a premium for Cisco products."
"The API is very Cisco orientated, which is absolutely fine if you're using Cisco Firepower and SecureX kind of products, but if you want to integrate with third parties, it is a bit tricky. There are some key API connectors for the more prevalent SIEM tools. I would really like to see in Cisco Umbrella the ability to create customized reports and then assign the rights to view these reports to people within a group. I should be able to create a customized report, which is viewable by anybody who has the rights. I should be able to create groups within Cisco Umbrella, and then assign reports to groups and have those reports split out automatically only to those groups. I can kind of do it by restricting my email list, but it is a half-complete way of doing it."
"I think it's a very basic solution, and because of that, Cisco Umbrella would not be a suitable solution for large companies."
Cisco Secure Firewall is ranked 4th in Cisco Security Portfolio with 404 reviews while Cisco Umbrella is ranked 2nd in Cisco Security Portfolio with 108 reviews. Cisco Secure Firewall is rated 8.2, while Cisco Umbrella is rated 8.8. The top reviewer of Cisco Secure Firewall writes "Highlights and helps us catch Zero-day vulnerabilities traveling across our network". On the other hand, the top reviewer of Cisco Umbrella writes "Protects endpoints wherever they are, always pushing people to the right locations to avoid malicious intent". Cisco Secure Firewall is most compared with Fortinet FortiGate, Palo Alto Networks WildFire, Netgate pfSense, Meraki MX and Sophos XG, whereas Cisco Umbrella is most compared with Zscaler Internet Access, Microsoft Defender for Cloud Apps, Prisma Access by Palo Alto Networks, Palo Alto Networks DNS Security and Fortinet FortiGate SWG. See our Cisco Secure Firewall vs. Cisco Umbrella report.
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