Azure DNS vs Cisco Umbrella comparison

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Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Dec 11, 2022
 

Categories and Ranking

IBM NS1 Connect
Sponsored
Average Rating
9.6
Number of Reviews
11
Ranking in other categories
Managed DNS (7th)
Azure DNS
Average Rating
8.4
Number of Reviews
31
Ranking in other categories
Managed DNS (2nd)
Cisco Umbrella
Average Rating
8.8
Number of Reviews
109
Ranking in other categories
Secure Web Gateways (SWG) (1st), Internet Security (1st), Cloud Access Security Brokers (CASB) (1st), Secure Access Service Edge (SASE) (2nd), Domain Name System (DNS) Security (1st), Cisco Security Portfolio (2nd)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of July 2024, in the Managed DNS category, the mindshare of IBM NS1 Connect is 3.5%, down from 3.5% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Azure DNS is 21.4%, down from 24.0% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Cisco Umbrella is 3.8%, down from 4.4% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Managed DNS
Unique Categories:
No other categories found
No other categories found
Secure Web Gateways (SWG)
22.7%
Internet Security
41.0%
 

Featured Reviews

Michael Wills - PeerSpot reviewer
Jun 8, 2022
Balances cost and functionality, speeds up provisioning, and reduces the DNS maintenance work drastically
The provisioning is great. They have an API service that is simple to use and very quick. The changes that we make are replicated worldwide in a matter of usually milliseconds, sometimes seconds. They are done very rapidly. That's something that's obviously priceless when we're dealing with things like DNS. It is great as an API-first platform for DNS and application traffic management. It is very simple to use. It allows us to rapidly provision and deprovision things. We are all around happy with the solution. From a metrics standpoint, the solution that we came from had no metrics. So, it has been great. Their service team is excellent in taking the time to provide reports for both growth and strategic planning. It has been great.
Bruno Clemente - PeerSpot reviewer
Nov 1, 2023
A stable solution that saves us time and cost and provides excellent integration features
We use the solution for some e-commerce sites that we use. It also integrates with our Kubernetes environment on Azure Azure DNS improves our integration with the Kubernetes environment. When we scale or increase our Kubernetes site, the tool updates DNS automatically. It saves us time and cost.…
AN
Jun 15, 2023
Prevented a countless number of attacks on our organization
iOS devices and mobiles are huge in my environment right now, and I cannot run them on Cisco Umbrella 24/7. Each user has one desktop but three or four mobile devices on two iPads, and a phone or multiple phones and an iPad, or vice versa. I'd like to turn on my Cisco Umbrella on the network level, at least on my office premise. However, my security team would like to keep all devices on-network and off-network to be connected or managed by Cisco Umbrella all the time. So their use cases are higher and stronger than my mobile ones. Sometimes we try to work around my mobile ones with MDM, but sometimes it would be way more flexible to have both running side-by-side. Also, in the Apple services or the Apple space, between my Cisco Umbrella and between my Apple updates, something breaks. I'm not sure if it's because of a policy that my company did before I joined them or if it's something that's happening due to a conflict in the configuration somewhere. So we always have to completely get the device or the endpoint out of any filtration to get the policies. We get everything pushed properly from Apple to the device and provision it afterward. Then we add the Cisco Umbrella roaming client to it.

Quotes from Members

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:
 

Pros

"The Filter Chain is one of the most valuable features, for geo-load balancing and geo-fencing. The Filter Chain is the most useful because it allows us to do several things. With geo-fencing we can redirect a particular user to a particular answer. That's very valuable for us. Filter Chains with monitoring is our strategy to provide redundancy."
"Monitoring is really important for us. We really care about reliability, and we want to make sure that we can remove some points of presence in our sector and in our edge network really fast when we experience any problems. So, monitoring that NS1 provides for DNS is really important for us."
"Everything we download into our observability platform so that we can also track any changes in traffic behavior or things like that is also something that we use quite a lot. I'd say traffic management, the speed of updates, and observability are the top three things that we use."
"It massively speeds things up. Today, we allow developers to deploy services and have externally facing DNS scrapers that are created automatically without the addition of human intervention."
"Their Pulsar filters allow us to collect RUM metrics from our users so that we can determine the best paths for our users to take. That has been very useful in providing the best user experience, and for responding to and recovering from downtime of our multiple CDNs."
"The provisioning is great. They have an API service that is simple to use and very quick. The changes that we make are replicated worldwide in a matter of usually milliseconds, sometimes seconds. They are done very rapidly. That's something that's obviously priceless when we're dealing with things like DNS."
"One of the features that is non-standard and that is very useful is the filtered DNS. We have set up our external VPN, which is what all our employees connect through, to use this feature. It's geolocation-aware. In that way, for India we set it up so that these are the servers that should be supporting things, and in the UK these servers, in the U.S. these servers, and in Sweden these ones."
"We find that the low latency access to DNS queries has a direct effect on the customer experience. Visiting a site, whether it's an AdTech-based solution or marketing tech, the fact that whatever we're rendering on a page can be rendered better than the industry standard, in terms of time, ensures a better user experience."
"The most valuable feature of Azure DNS is it works automatically after configuration. Additionally, the solution is secure."
"The most valuable feature of the solution is the simplicity of putting DBs."
"Can be configured to achieve a hundred percent reliability"
"The tool is easy to manage and use."
"The integration with other services on Azure is valuable."
"The most valuable features of Azure DNS are the DNS forwarder and the DNS additional record editions."
"Azure DNS is a user-friendly and very easy-to-manage solution."
"The initial setup is straightforward and not that complex."
"A single pane of glass saves time... This does have a lot of options available for us to see who's doing what, what trends, what errors. We can set up our alerting through it as well. It is definitely a great dashboard."
"We are very new users of the solution and are still in the exploration stages, but we are happy with the product thus far."
"Cisco Umbrella is such a solution and can be implemented very fast and easy. All that we must do is redirect the DNS registers in their routers, or the active directory service of the enterprise that are going to use in Umbrella services. If you buy the service now, in two hours you are protected by the service because it's very fast to put in service."
"I was able to implement it myself. It was really easy to install. You could install it on a server locally if you want to. If you have the biggest site, you would do that, but for my site, it was just directing all the traffic out through the Cisco Umbrella DNS. It was really handy. When the owners of the company went overseas, I knew that they would be secure because even if they were not on the company network, they would still go through the Cisco Umbrella servers. It was a complete solution for protecting the company with outgoing data."
"One of the most important features is the security posture check which Umbrella offers when a user accesses any website. That is one of the most unique features that it offers."
"DNS protection, domain blocking, SIP component, and the Cisco Umbrella roaming client are the valuable features of Cisco Umbrella."
"The implementation is pretty easy."
"The agent that gets installed on the endpoints or on people's laptops and devices is a Cisco AnyConnect Umbrella module. It's one of the most impressive things because you are able to protect your users anywhere they are."
 

Cons

"The Filter Chain simulation is really good in the UI, but it would be nice to have something similar in the API so that we could simulate and test things before we deploy them."
"When we first deployed, we flipped the switch, and it didn't work as well as we expected. It wasn't a complete outage, but we had issues in some places with some customers. The NS1 team went out of their way to resolve it on Thanksgiving. We have a post about it on our blog. We called it "Black Thursday.""
"We use the geo load balancing functionality and there are a couple of things that are helpful there. But the language itself is something we had to get used to a little bit. Some of my folks made a few mistakes in rolling out the Filter Chain...The Filter Chain setup is a bit hard to grasp at first. It would also be nice to have a way to simulate changes in addition to staging."
"We would really like them to become a DNS registrar."
"I would love to see improvement in the testing capabilities they provide. They have a simulate-filter feature so that you can simulate how your traffic would flow, based on their Filter Chains. I believe that was shut off for quite some time. Having that as a way to test our load-balanced CDN structure would be fantastic."
"The reporting metrics are great from an API standpoint, but it would be a little bit nicer if there was some type of dashboard around that. There should also be some type of reporting that's more executive-level focused."
"We care about monitoring and telemetry work, and NS1 provides a pretty good system for monitoring. We can monitor our endpoints and points of presence around the world. If there are any issues, we can easily remove them from our network, but this area needs some improvement because it is not always reliable in NS1. In the past, we had a number of false-positive cases when the monitoring system told us about some problems in our infrastructure that were not true. NS1 is improving the system, and we are constantly talking about this with them. I know that they are releasing a new version of their monitoring system, which is really important for us, but this is a different area where we would expect them to improve."
"We use our client in our infrastructure to communicate with NS1. This client is a bit complex in the way that it is set up. NS1 has their own client solution that you can deploy into your platform to do this, but even that is a bit complex. So, I would like a very simple, thin, light API agent that we can deploy into our platform to communicate with NS1. That would be welcome."
"The CDN integration could be improved."
"The pricing can be more competitive."
"The product must be integrated with additional security features."
"The web interface to manage the solution must be made easier."
"Azure DNS could improve by having more updates."
"What needs improvement in Azure DNS is visibility in terms of troubleshooting. It's similar to the area for improvement in Azure Network Watcher, where I can see how the source is going out if I'm troubleshooting a source destination. I can also see the destination. As for seeing how the packet travels, that's what should be improved. It's still lacking in visibility. Suppose I'm looking into backend machines, and if I'm hitting another NPM machine or any machine on the other side, there should be visibility. The tool should tell you that a specific machine is passing through a VPN gateway or route table, routing to a third-party firewall, and then dropping. Azure DNS should show an accurate answer to help the customers, which is its area for improvement."
"They should include more integration with other platforms."
"There are some latency issues that could be improved."
"With any Cisco product, it's the licensing side of things that needs improvement."
"In the next release, I would like to see the integration of VDI NSX with Cisco Umbrella."
"The product can be pretty expensive."
"I feel that the application needs other characteristics that are available with other applications in the market."
"The pricing changes too fast. We get the license and we need to relicense it because they already made changes to it. We always need to be on top of the licenses because they're always changing."
"If you wish to inspect all the traffic and it's integrated with Cisco AnyConnect, all the traffic basically goes through Cisco AnyConnect, which is not a good idea. That means you need to have more internet capacity as a data sampler, so in the case of a split tunnel, we cannot inspect the traffic that is being migrated through the local internet. I'm not sure whether there is a possibility wherein Cisco Umbrella can also inspect the traffic that is outside the AnyConnect tunnel."
"They can maybe simplify the configuration. For example, sometimes, the proxy part is quite difficult, and that's why we didn't deploy that."
"For us, as an MSP, the initial licensing changes were a roadblock, and they still could be a lot clearer. Specifically, it's an honor-based licensing system. We'd like it to be more specific to our traffic or our users so that we can make sure that the customer is paying for all their licensing."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"NS1's pricing is much more aggressive than its competitors in the market and you get more value out of what you pay for it."
"The cost of this product is one of the reasons that we chose it."
"From a cost standpoint, it's certainly not the most expensive out there, and it's also not the cheapest, but it does well to balance the cost and the functionality/reliability."
"We pay about $30,000 a month. We used to pay about $20,000 with Dyn every month, for lower volume than we're doing right now, but it had none of the features that we have available with NS1, so it was worth it for us. It seems competitive for us, given that we're doing 4.5 billion requests."
"Everything can always be cheaper, but as it is today the pricing is fair."
"The solution's price is reasonable."
"The solution is free."
"The price is low and it's a reasonable price for that product."
"The pricing is expensive."
"The solution itself is free but you need to pay for the Microsoft Azure infrastructure and host your domains in Azure to use it."
"In my opinion, DNS is inexpensive. The pricing depends on how you use it, but overall, it's quite affordable. It typically costs just a fesw cents, and Microsoft even offers ten thousand free hits per month."
"We have an enterprise license agreement with Microsoft. Their pricing is competitive. I would rate it a three and a half out of five."
"To use Azure DNS, I need to buy the license meant for Windows Server."
"Cisco solutions are generally perceived to be rather expensive. We have constant internal discussions as to whether we should offer lower-priced security solutions from some of the competitors."
"It needs a better price point."
"The price could be lower."
"There is a subscription cost."
"You can request an evaluation license​."
"It was a little bit expensive on a per seat basis, but the company I was running was only a midsize Australian company, and it was a reasonable budget per computer for that system. It started off being a free product, and then Cisco bought it, and it went to a reasonable price. I was using Cisco AMP as well. So, my per computer cost was reasonably high, but for a small company, it was within an acceptable level."
"Cisco Umbrella is expensive and could be cheaper."
"The licensing and pricing structure of Cisco Umbrella is in line with standard systems on the market, and we have no specific requirements in this area. Overall, we have found it to be an acceptable pricing model for our organization."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Computer Software Company
22%
Financial Services Firm
14%
University
9%
Comms Service Provider
6%
Computer Software Company
17%
Financial Services Firm
10%
Manufacturing Company
8%
Government
7%
Computer Software Company
19%
Educational Organization
19%
Financial Services Firm
8%
Manufacturing Company
7%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
 

Questions from the Community

What do you like most about NS1 Managed DNS?
For starters, Managed DNS from NS1 is an easy way to get the job done. Whether you're a novice or a pro, Managed DNS ...
Azure DNS or Amazon Route 53?
Azure DNS is a hosting service of DNS domains. It has excellent operating time and performance, resulting in fast res...
What do you like most about Azure DNS?
The tool is easy to manage and use.
What needs improvement with Azure DNS?
The web interface to manage the solution must be made easier. The tool must provide seamless integration between DHCP...
Which is the better security solution - Cisco Umbrella or Zscaler?
Cisco Umbrella and Zscaler Internet Access are two broad-spectrum Internet security solutions that I have tried. Zs...
Which is the better security solution - Cisco Umbrella or Microsoft Cloud App Security?
Cisco Umbrella is an integral component of the Cisco SASE architecture. It integrates security in a single, cloud-nat...
What do you like most about Cisco Umbrella?
Cisco Umbrella is easy to monitor, manage, and deploy.
 

Also Known As

NS1 Managed DNS, NS1
No data available
OpenDNS
 

Learn More

 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Avast Software, Bloomberg L.P., BBC, Carfax, CNBC LLC, Deloitte Consulting LLP, Disney Streaming, Dropbox, EBAY Inc, Gannett Media Corp, Salesforce, Wayfair, Workday
M-Files
Chart Industries, City of Aspen, Eastern Mountain Sports, FLEXcon, George Washington University, Jackson Municipal Airport Authority, Ohio Public Library Information Network, PTC, Richland Community College, Smart Motors, Tulane University, VeriClaim
Find out what your peers are saying about Cloudflare, Microsoft, Amazon Web Services (AWS) and others in Managed DNS. Updated: July 2024.
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