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BMC Helix Cloud Security vs Cisco Umbrella comparison

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Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive Summary

Review summaries and opinions

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

Categories and Ranking

SentinelOne Singularity Clo...
Sponsored
Average Rating
8.6
Reviews Sentiment
7.5
Number of Reviews
118
Ranking in other categories
Vulnerability Management (4th), Cloud and Data Center Security (3rd), Container Security (3rd), Cloud Workload Protection Platforms (CWPP) (4th), Cloud Security Posture Management (CSPM) (3rd), Cloud-Native Application Protection Platforms (CNAPP) (3rd), Compliance Management (2nd), AI Observability (2nd)
BMC Helix Cloud Security
Average Rating
8.0
Reviews Sentiment
7.5
Number of Reviews
5
Ranking in other categories
Cloud Workload Protection Platforms (CWPP) (26th), Cloud Security Posture Management (CSPM) (39th)
Cisco Umbrella
Average Rating
8.8
Reviews Sentiment
7.3
Number of Reviews
123
Ranking in other categories
Secure Web Gateways (SWG) (1st), Internet Security (1st), Cloud Access Security Brokers (CASB) (2nd), Domain Name System (DNS) Security (1st), Cisco Security Portfolio (2nd)
 

Mindshare comparison

Cloud Workload Protection Platforms (CWPP) Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
BMC Helix Cloud Security0.6%
Microsoft Defender for Cloud16.5%
AWS GuardDuty14.2%
Other68.7%
Cloud Workload Protection Platforms (CWPP)
Domain Name System (DNS) Security Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
Cisco Umbrella20.5%
Infoblox Advanced DNS Protection10.7%
Palo Alto Networks DNS Security8.1%
Other60.7%
Domain Name System (DNS) Security
 

Featured Reviews

SC
Information Security Engineer at DataVigilant Infotech
Enables us to prioritize and effectively address critical security issues
Evidence-based reporting helps us to prioritize and solve critical security issues. The new visualization feature demonstrates how an attacker can enter the system, highlighting the potential path that can be exploited and outlining all the steps the attacker could take. With that visibility, we can ensure the perimeter is strong and attackers cannot enter, thus reducing the risk. It has helped us prioritize issues. The visibility into how an attack could happen is valuable. For example, it highlights the system vulnerability and outlines where an attack could propagate. The visualization helps me to prioritize remediation, and if I don't know where to start, I can check to see the score that enables me to prioritize issues. I am using infrastructure-as-code scanning, and it's one of the useful features. In pre-production, it identifies embedded secrets and misconfigurations, including issues with Kubernetes or some privileged containers. This feature allows us to pass the audit and secure IaC code so that it isn't easily exploitable by attackers. We can more proactively work to identify and resolve vulnerabilities by using the dashboard and the alerting system that SentinelOne provides. It helps us with audits and compliance. We can show the compliance in percentage. We can confidently say that our company or infrastructure is very secure. It has improved our security posture by 30% to 35%. It has reduced our false positives by 30%. It has helped teams collaborate better. The security team manages SentinelOne Singularity Cloud Security, and when it flags vulnerabilities, they are forwarded to DevOps for remediation. Previously, we needed to identify and report the issues, but there would be lapses in communication. Now, there is a centralized dashboard that anyone can look at and see the open issues and work on them.
DG
Portfolio Manager/ Helix Administrator at Frontier Communications
A highly scalable and straightforward solution with a knowledgeable support team
We work on a third-party shared environment. It wouldn’t have been feasible for a smaller company. My company was actually the first one to do it. Just like any cloud security, it pays to do your research and have complimentary security involved. The product can’t be the be-all and end-all tool for your security. Overall, I rate the solution a nine out of ten.
BB
Senior Network Engineer at Mintz, Levin, Cohn, Ferris, Glovsky and Popeo, P.C.
Ensures comprehensive protection with seamless threat logging and efficient policy management
My favorite feature of Cisco Umbrella is probably just the DNS and the fact that when a security threat happens, all of that gets logged in their Umbrella portal, and it's very easy to find who's been accessing the site and how many people have accessed it, so that we can go to them and make sure they're not compromised. The features of Cisco Umbrella benefit my company by providing less time to search for things through logs, to look for what we need. It's just one place to go, and we just search for it, and we find it really fast. The fact that there's a virtual database that has all that information is great on our portal.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"The GUI is one of the best features. Audit reports and documentation for alerts are also valuable."
"SentinelOne Singularity Cloud Security offers security solutions for both Kubernetes and CI/CD pipelines."
"SentinelOne Singularity Cloud Security is excellent, and I highly recommend it."
"The monitoring tool has comprehensive monitoring features."
"I would rate SentinelOne Singularity Cloud Security a ten out of ten."
"The features that stand out are threat detection using advanced artificial intelligence and machine learning, helping to identify and respond to threats in real-time."
"The most valuable feature is the easy-to-understand user interface, which allows even non-technical users to comprehend and resolve issues."
"SentinelOne Singularity Cloud Security offers valuable features like runtime notifications. These alerts come to my account, ensuring that if any port or component within my infrastructure is opened or compromised, I am informed immediately. It highlights issues within minutes or even seconds."
"It is a good tool to make sure that your containers are safe and sound."
"The best feature is time to value. With very minimal effort, you are able to have a cohesive view into your security posture on one or multiple cloud accounts, particularly if you are dealing with multicloud. If you have Azure and AWS deployments, you might have multiple subscriptions in Azure and usually multiple accounts in AWS. You may even be doing some GCP work (around Google Cloud Platform). It's very difficult to manage a common set of policies, even less reporting, across multiple subscriptions, accounts, and cloud environments. What BMC Helix Cloud Security does is provide a unified view or single pane of glass as to your baseline. Then, it also facilitates the ability for Level 1 or 2 operations support to take action and report on security vulnerabilities."
"Role-based security is a valuable feature."
"It's also multi-cloud. You can look at several cloud providers: AWS, Azure, or GCP."
"The features that I've found most valuable are its container security aspect. I also like its vulnerability management tools."
"The cool feature of Helix Cloud Security is that you can do all that — understand and remediate issues — in one dashboard, based on the different policies that are available for security, out-of-the-box."
"With very minimal effort, you are able to have a cohesive view into your security posture on one or multiple cloud accounts, particularly if you are dealing with multicloud."
"Using this solution is an eye-opener; having that holistic view is the biggest eye-opener because you understand, from any of your connected cloud accounts, what your vulnerabilities are with it."
"I haven't needed to reboot the servers for years due to their excellent stability."
"It provides centralized, device-agnostic management of the Internet experience."
"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."
"I like the original functionality, which allows for providing secure DNS services."
"I had worked for Juniper support before and I worked for other tech support teams and I feel that Cisco's type of support is the best."
"Overall, it has been pretty helpful for what we're using it for."
"It has improved our company a lot because we now see where the users are going and prevent them from going to malicious websites."
"The customer experience is very good, and the product improves security posture."
 

Cons

"SentinelOne Singularity Cloud Security has limited legacy system support and may not fully support older operating systems or legacy environments."
"SentinelOne Singularity Cloud Security is on the costlier side."
"I would like SentinelOne Singularity Cloud Security to add real-time detection of vulnerabilities and cloud misconfigurations."
"We recently adopted a new ticket management solution, so we've asked them to include a connector to integrate that tool with Cloud Native Security directly. We'd also like to see Cloud Native Security add a scan for personally identifying information. We're looking at other tools for this capability, but having that functionality built into Cloud Native Security would be nice. Monitoring PII data is critical to us as an organization."
"A two-month grace period for extended searches would be a valuable improvement."
"From my personal experience, the alerting system needs to be faster. If something happens in our infrastructure, the alert appears on the dashboard, but I have to log in to the dashboard and refresh it."
"The Kubernetes scanning on the Oracle Cloud needs to be improved. It's on the roadmap. AWS has this capability, but it's unavailable for Oracle Cloud."
"SentinelOne Singularity Cloud Security can be improved by developing a comprehensive set of features that allow for automated workflows."
"We've had some issues with connectors; the connectors have seemed to cause a little bit of trouble, perhaps with the APIs trying to scan the environment."
"I think its TOA interfaces are still not that comfortable. The UI could be more user-friendly, easier to use."
"The UI could be more user-friendly."
"The biggest challenge now, which is a good problem to have, with BMC Helix is content."
"BMC Helix Cloud Security has room for improvement in terms of integrating its various features."
"Every organization out there doesn't rely on just one control body. They use FISMA control. They may use HIPAA, CIS, PCI, or SOX, then blend them. One of the things that is now in big demand for BMC Helix Cloud Security is content. That's the next journey in its lifespan, making it easier for the community to share and collaborate on content for security controls that can be measured and remediated."
"I want the role-based security feature to be improved."
"We've had some with issues connectors. The connectors have seemed to have caused a little bit of trouble, perhaps with the APIs trying to scan the environment. The only time I've had to reach out to tech support was for that. It seems it may not have been scanning correctly or I wasn't seeing data within a specific time. But we've set up a couple of connectors in the past couple of weeks and they actually scanned the AWS environment and we had data within about 10 minutes. It's working a lot faster and I think they're making improvements as they go."
"Hopefully, it works with the Canvas and starts feeding results into the AI canvas. That would be excellent."
"There are cheaper solutions in the market"
"The pricing could be improved."
"The price could be better. The price is definitely a bit high, but we have to pay a premium for Cisco products."
"Security, overall, can always be improved."
"Cisco Umbrella can be improved in terms of limited coverage and wind vulnerability. The product can only shield a small area, making it less effective for larger spaces or multiple users."
"Pricing needs to be reduced for SMB based on the blocking capabilities and the lack of other features that you just cannot do in DNS, such as authentication-based filtering."
"I would like to see integration with SecurNX in the future."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"PingSafe is less expensive than other options."
"PingSafe is cost-effective for the amount of infrastructure we have. It's reasonable for what they offer compared to our previous solution. It's at least 25 percent to 30 percent less."
"It is not that expensive. There are some tools that are double the cost of PingSafe. It is good on the pricing side."
"I wasn't sure what to expect from the pricing, but I was pleasantly surprised to find that it was a little less than I thought."
"I am personally not taking care of the pricing part, but when we moved from CrowdStrike to PingSafe, there were some savings. The price of CrowdStrike was quite high. Compared to that, the price of PingSafe was low. PingSafe is charging based on the subscription model. If I want to add an AWS subscription, I need to pay more. It should not be based on subscription. It should be based on the number of servers that I am scanning."
"I understand that SentinelOne is a market leader, but the bill we received was astronomical."
"The pricing is somewhat high compared to other market tools."
"Singularity Cloud Workload Security's licensing and price were cheaper than the other solutions we looked at."
"The pricing is based on an annual subscription, upfront, and it's based on cloud assets. Whether your assets are in Azure and AWS combined, the tool tells you how many assets are being scanned and that's the number used for pricing."
"It is a subscription model with term licensing that is usually yearly. This includes, not only the product, but support and maintenance. It is based on cloud assets. Therefore, if you have 100 cloud assets, those cloud assets are measured based on evaluation or transactions. For example, if I'm evaluating that cloud asset for CIS compliance, PCI compliance, and AWS best practices, that asset gets evaluated three times, as those are three transactions. However, the license model is based on peak asset usage. So, over a year, if you deploy 100, 1000, 500, and then 2000 assets, you will be charged for the 2000 peak of assets managed by Helix Cloud Security."
"The pricing model is easier compared to some of the other solutions, and it is also competitive."
"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."
"I am not sure, I don't have the numbers in front of me, but I think it's $1.00 or so per device/month."
"I think Cisco Umbrella is priced well. We have a mix of customers with different verticals such as education. We have clients in the commercial space as well. Umbrella is at a good price point for all of our customers."
"You get what you pay for."
"The price is fair, and the licensing cost is based on the number of users. We have seen a good ROI."
"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."
"You can request an evaluation license​."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
14%
Computer Software Company
11%
Manufacturing Company
9%
Government
5%
Construction Company
17%
Performing Arts
10%
Comms Service Provider
9%
Financial Services Firm
9%
Computer Software Company
14%
Financial Services Firm
8%
Manufacturing Company
8%
Comms Service Provider
6%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business49
Midsize Enterprise22
Large Enterprise55
No data available
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business50
Midsize Enterprise30
Large Enterprise51
 

Questions from the Community

What do you like most about PingSafe?
The dashboard gives me an overview of all the things happening in the product, making it one of the tool's best featu...
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for PingSafe?
Regarding the pricing for SentinelOne Singularity Cloud Security, I do not think it is something I can compare.
What needs improvement with PingSafe?
I do not see room for improvement in SentinelOne Singularity Cloud Security. In the future, I would like to see the i...
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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 is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Cisco Umbrella?
The pricing for Cisco Umbrella is fair compared to other platforms out there for DNS security. We acquired it as a bu...
 

Also Known As

PingSafe
TrueSight Cloud Security, SecOps Policy Service
OpenDNS
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Information Not Available
NHS, Vodafone, Kansas City Life, SKY Italia, Cybera
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 Microsoft, Amazon Web Services (AWS), Wiz and others in Cloud Workload Protection Platforms (CWPP). Updated: March 2026.
885,837 professionals have used our research since 2012.