We performed a comparison between Cisco Umbrella and F5 BIG-IP Local Traffic Manager (LTM) based on real PeerSpot user reviews.
Find out what your peers are saying about Cisco, Zscaler, Palo Alto Networks and others in Secure Web Gateways (SWG)."On the outside, the main differentiation is because Lookout ingest. They have ingested basically all of the apps for the last ten years and all the versions of all the apps, and we have that in a corporate database that allows us to do very large-scale machine learning and analysis on that data set. That's not something that any of the competitors really have the capability to do because they don't have access to the data set. A lot of the apps you can no longer get them because that version of the app is five or six years old, and it just doesn't exist anywhere anymore, except within our infrastructure. So, the ability to have that very rich dataset and learn from that dataset is a real differentiator."
"The most valuable features are the antivirus as a whole, the anti-malware, and all of the protection features that scan our enterprise devices."
"The solution is stable."
"The protection offered by the product is the most valuable feature. It detects vulnerabilities or traps on our users' phones and then prompts them to clean up their devices. Tools we used previously would only discover, which required us to gather information on the backend, so Lookout is a welcome upgrade."
"It analyzes the domain security helps us implement the securest policy."
"They have a wealth of articles in their knowledge base. This has given me the freedom to troubleshoot on my own time. "
"Cisco's technical support is pretty good. When a solution is available, they will find it. On a scale from one to ten with ten being the best, I'd rate Cisco's technical support at nine."
"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."
"For me, it's important that I get a connection to my corporate network in a secure and fast way. This product just runs in the background and doesn't need any attention. For me, as a user, it's perfect."
"Its simplicity is most valuable. I can install it and get it up and running, and it can be pervasive across my business within a business day. It is pretty simple and straightforward to install and configure. Its remit is reasonably clearly defined. When you look at solutions like Darktrace and Carbon Black, the mission objective isn't as clearly defined. Cisco Umbrella, Sophos Central, or some of the other solutions have a more standardized approach to antivirus, which includes enhanced response from the machine learning or deep learning perspective."
"Cisco Umbrella is a totally different solution. They are the first to come up with this idea of security. It's a totally new concept of security for everybody, for every time, real time, perfectionism."
"If it didn't have a single pane of glass, we would not be using it. The single pane of glass gives you a one-stop shop. It's like going to Home Depot. You find all your stuff there. You can see all your threats and your endpoints. It's a very important feature and makes things very simple."
"The load balancing function, the monitors that you can create, and iRules programmability are most valuable."
"The most valuable feature of this solution is IP Intelligence."
"I've worked a little bit with iRules and it is amazing."
"It is a stable product from a stable company. Recently, they have been more focused on security as well."
"The setup is pretty easy."
"The combination of ADC and WAN is good."
"It provides first-tier firewalling, for you application. And it provides server load-balancing, it provides optimization, and it provides a proxy feature, where your users cannot directly access your server. It acts as a fully proxy architecture. It has client-side and server-side connections, both, and they're separate."
"The most helpful thing is that it's open-source. It's very easy to program and customize."
"We just submitted an enhancement request reflecting the main area we want to see improvement in; the APIs. Currently, we're able to build dashboards, but it's somewhat backward because we use our MDM API to create them. Lookout should provide API to customers so we can query our data and use it in our cloud, and this is the only outstanding area for improvement with the product right now."
"Lookout was moving into the SSE space. And so their work on SecureWeb Gateway and SD-WAN is still sort of evolving."
"The stability depends on the service from where you access it. Because sometimes, the place you are in, you have Gateway. You don't have Gateway. The gateway is overutilized. At the end, you need to go through their gateways. And this is the key point here. You have a tracking point. If it's not well orchestrated, and it scales up as you add more to the existing team, you will suffer"
"From the analysis that we've done, they do seem to be maybe a step behind in trying to enter the market with a new solution. But when they do pick up, they do come out with some good products."
"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."
"The reporting could be improved by way of the information that's displayed. For example, when you pull a report, it shows an internal employee going to many websites, but you can spin that right down by saying a lot of it is being cached."
"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."
"Something on our end that might make it better is alerting going to our ticketing system. It's not something that we have discussed, but that would be a proactive option for us to provide a learning experience for the staff."
"Cisco Umbrella hasn't integrated customized reporting yet. With Cisco Secure Endpoint Hub, I can see a report on user downloads and set it up to constantly get an email alert. Based on my understanding, Cisco Umbrella can't do that. You can set it up with third parties, but it would be better if that were built into the platform."
"I feel that the application needs other characteristics that are available with other applications in the market."
"Its price could be better."
"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."
"For integration with other AWS environments, we do some tie-ins with some autoscaling groups. This has been challenging for us. We have had issues, where when autoscaling groups scale up, there are some instances which are not showing up in the proper size. Then, those IPs would get registered with F5, but never get released. Therefore, we are ending up with a whole bunch of ghosted IPs."
"The user experience for dashboards and reports can be improved. They should make dashboards and the reporting system easier for users. They need to add more reports to the dashboard. Currently, for complicated reports, I have to do the customization. It should have more integration with network firewalls to be able to gather all the information required for traffic management."
"The logging features are too limited and do not give us a solid understanding of what's happening."
"Its GUI could be a bit better. Other than that, it's already pretty good. We don't use it in a high-performance environment. So, we don't really care so much about too many features."
"Security and Reporting."
"A lot of functions that are attributed to iRules can actually be simple profile changes. iRules do have a certain performance impact. Therefore, instead of writing simple iRules, they can create certain profiles for classes that will perform the same function."
"Lacking in free training to help users understand the product more, so they would know how to correctly use it. Like other vendors and their products, becoming more proactive is an area for improvement."
"In terms of what could be improved, I would expect more integration with different platforms and more integration with the backend systems. Additionally, in the next release, I would like a more secure version."
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Cisco Umbrella is ranked 1st in Secure Web Gateways (SWG) with 108 reviews while F5 BIG-IP Local Traffic Manager (LTM) is ranked 1st in Application Delivery Controllers (ADC) with 116 reviews. Cisco Umbrella is rated 8.8, while F5 BIG-IP Local Traffic Manager (LTM) is rated 8.2. The top reviewer of Cisco Umbrella writes "Protects endpoints wherever they are, always pushing people to the right locations to avoid malicious intent". On the other hand, the top reviewer of F5 BIG-IP Local Traffic Manager (LTM) writes "Helps deliver applications to users in a reliable, secure, and optimized way". 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, whereas F5 BIG-IP Local Traffic Manager (LTM) is most compared with Citrix NetScaler, Fortinet FortiADC, Microsoft Azure Application Gateway, NGINX Plus and HAProxy.
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