Cisco Umbrella vs Infoblox BloxOne Threat Defense comparison

Cisco Umbrella vs. Infoblox BloxOne Threat Defense

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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

Cisco Umbrella

Ranking in Domain Name System (DNS) Security

1st

Average Rating

8.8

Reviews Sentiment

7.3

Number of Reviews

121

Ranking in other categories

Secure Web Gateways (SWG) (1st), Internet Security (1st), Cloud Access Security Brokers (CASB) (2nd), Secure Access Service Edge (SASE) (2nd), Cisco Security Portfolio (2nd)

Infoblox BloxOne Threat Def...

Ranking in Domain Name System (DNS) Security

6th

Average Rating

8.0

Reviews Sentiment

5.9

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

No ranking in other categories

Mindshare comparison

As of July 2025, in the Domain Name System (DNS) Security category, the mindshare of Cisco Umbrella is 21.3%, down from 27.2% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Infoblox BloxOne Threat Defense is 6.0%, up from 5.4% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.

Domain Name System (DNS) Security

Featured Reviews

Emilio Montoya

CTO at PROA

Ensures internet navigation safety and boosts productivity

The features of Cisco Umbrella I prefer most are DNS protection and traffic redirect. With Cisco Talos's threat intelligence, we reduce the impact of malware traffic in our network, and we currently see the behavior of equipment and choose the correct sites. Cisco Talos has helped us reduce the impact of malware traffic. We can see the behavior and choose the correct sites. We're currently testing secure access with Umbrella in order to secure access to core applications. It's a product that the user doesn't even know is there, even though it is protecting them. It's not hard on the equipment. And, for us, it centralizes everything, which improves productivity. With the Experience Insights feature of Cisco Secure Access, we've seen impacts on the management of user connectivity by allowing us to deliver safe connectivity. We are testing the Secure Access product with Cisco Umbrella to improve our connectivity with our users in order to secure access to the corporate applications. Cisco Umbrella is in the cloud, which is nice.

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Igor Van Den Ouden

Engineer at Routz

A hybrid solution for DNS security with insights and security reports

The most valuable feature is policy redirecting and security reports. It detects threats and blocks them. Also, it offers DNS handling and data extraction. It provides a centralized view of connected users and incoming data sources. It is integrated via the API to different monitoring systems that send out alerts. We haven't had any false positives due to this solution.

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Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"I like that it integrates with the infrastructure. I also like the kind of data and intelligence that's built-in. It helps create innovative reports for security."

"One valuable feature is definitely its simplicity in terms of deployment. It is very easy to integrate it into the environment without any heavy lifting. Users didn't notice that we implemented it. You can start with a very low monitoring mode and start observing what Cisco Umbrella sees."

"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."

"They have a wealth of articles in their knowledge base. This has given me the freedom to troubleshoot on my own time. "

"Using this solution has meant that we've needed to make fewer firewall changes."

"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 insight into what our users are doing via Cisco Umbrella is valuable. Knowing that we're protecting our users as they leave our network is also valuable now because we've got more hybrid working."

"It has certainly saved us time. If we go and look at what's rejected on the requests from the hospital itself, it has saved about 5% or 6% time."

More Cisco Umbrella pros

"The most valuable feature is policy redirecting and security reports."

"The product is stable."

"The most important features for us are preventing DDOS DNS attacks."

"Using the reporting, we can tell that we have gained an extra layer of protection. Just by looking at it, we can see what is being blocked before it even makes it to the firewall. It is definitely working."

"The stability of Infoblox BloxOne Threat Defense is near perfect at a rating of ten."

"The dossier feature is perfect for starting an investigation."

"With the model we have, we are able to scale very easily if we need to."

"The automatic blocklists are most valuable. A box can maintain several lists from which we can choose if we need to block more or less. We don't have to manually manage the lists ourselves. They're automatically updated."

More Infoblox BloxOne Threat Defense pros

Cons

"Their support should be improved. It is necessary that the support is efficient. It is not really easy to get a resolution for an issue from Cisco support. They should be faster and more efficient."

"Its DNS service does not support IPv6 query."

"One of the issues with Umbrella is as you get into endpoint detection and response, such as EDR point solutions, some of them will not integrate well with Umbrella. Sometimes when you want to use technology, such as Always On VPN, it will not work. There are some looming issues as one type of technology starts to crossover with Umbrella. That is the challenge and Umbrella should find a way to be more compatible with some of the endpoint response solutions that are coming out on the market."

"I would like to see more integrability with other products."

"It's somewhat pricey for us, however, it's an awesome solution."

"There are a couple of interface issues. I know that they say that there are feature enhancements that are noted. For example, we've got the Cisco Meraki security appliances, and there, we geofence our company to where we're allowed to send and receive traffic. So, in our case, by default, we only allow traffic to six different countries, which allows us to effectively prevent traffic for the majority of bad players in the world, but they don't give you an easy way to do that in Cisco Umbrella. With Cisco Meraki, I can specify or pick the countries. I can say that I want to only allow traffic from these six countries, and I'm done. With Cisco Umbrella, I have to rely on the fact that they're going to prevent traffic to other countries. They're going to decide if it's good or bad."

"If the virtual appliances could also gather traffic bandwidth reports, that would be great."

"It could be more secure. It would be better if they provided a transferring proxy as an add-on and more integration."

More Cisco Umbrella cons

"I would rate their customer service or technical support as not always good. You can be fortunate if you meet someone knowledgeable because most people try and get you to a certain point."

"The onboarding is a little rough at times, and you need to have some information at hand. It is pretty good, but it would be useful to have a few good examples to set up things like data exfiltration."

"The product is slightly more expensive compared to other DNS solutions."

"This is not just Infoblox, this could be any portal provider, cloud provider, sometimes they change the look of the customer-facing options and it's not completely clear why they make the change."

"The documentation needs to be improved because there are a lot of different models that it can be deployed in, and it's somewhat confusing determining what you need and how to set it up to best cover your use cases."

"The product could be cheaper."

"The initial setup is not a simple "click-click-next" installation. It requires some level of experience ."

"A lot of their documentation needs improvement."

More Infoblox BloxOne Threat Defense cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

"When talking about Cisco solutions in general there pricing model is horrible. For example, you can sell a Meraki-based solution, but if the customer starts shopping around, someone is going to have access to the pricing at a level that you cannot compete because they do not have uniform pricing. Not everybody gets fair pricing. Unless you are one of the real major corporations selling the solution your ability to compete is impossible. Cisco will acknowledge the situation and assure you next time it will be in your favor but it never becomes favorable for you. Cisco is not very good in this regard. However, Umbrella is good."

"It has a reasonable price. It is certainly not as expensive as it used to be. It is in line with other offerings on the market. There are a number of different flavors of Umbrella. They could bring Umbrella SIG down a bit because its price is a little bit high for what it does, but I also understand why its price is high."

"In the region I'm from, that of EMAR, Europe, the Middle East, Eastern Asia and Africa, our organizations do not have many liquid cash assets, so the price could be better."

"I rate the tool's pricing a five out of ten."

"There are no hidden costs with Umbrella. Everything is included in the package."

"There are three models for licensing with different feature sets."

"Our licensing fees are on a yearly basis."

"There is a one-time cost of approximately $800 USD per user, and then a yearly support fee of about $50 per user."

More Cisco Umbrella pricing and cost advice

"It's a pricey solution because it's for the advanced kind of customer."

"The licensing is set up such that you pay for the number of active users that you're defending at the moment."

"When you buy the subscription, there are no additional costs to add any additional buttons."

"It is a very expensive system. You need to go over the licensing before purchase to make sure you're getting what is needed, not anything extra."

"Infoblox BloxOne offers pretty good documentation. Check its documentation, then do a PoC. Infoblox is very good at providing PoCs."

"There is a significant charge for this product but I think that it's worth it when we look at what it's able to prevent."

"If you only wanted the DNS filtering and none of the other products built into Threat Defense, it would be nicer if they could do that a la carte since we are not really using a lot of the solution."

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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Computer Software Company

20%

Educational Organization

11%

Manufacturing Company

Financial Services Firm

17%

Computer Software Company

13%

Manufacturing Company

Educational Organization

Company Size

By reviewers

Large Enterprise

Midsize Enterprise

Small Business

Questions from the Community

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. Zscaler Internet Access is a good option for carrying out multiple security functi...

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-native solution, unifying multiple features like DNS-layer security, threat intelli...

What do you like most about Cisco Umbrella?

Cisco Umbrella is easy to monitor, manage, and deploy.

What do you like most about Infoblox BloxOne Threat Defense?

The most valuable feature is policy redirecting and security reports.

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Infoblox BloxOne Threat Defense?

Infoblox BloxOne Threat Defense can be expensive for the commercial sector, particularly in Egypt, as this sector does not have a huge budget compared to banking or oil and gas, as the regulations ...

What needs improvement with Infoblox BloxOne Threat Defense?

If Infoblox invests in network observability, especially from the perspective of DNS and IP address observability, it could be a significant improvement.

Zscaler Internet Access vs Cisco Umbrella

Comparisons

Compared 16% of the time

Prisma Access by Palo Alto Networks vs Cisco Umbrella

Compared 9% of the time

Cisco Secure Access vs Cisco Umbrella

Compared 7% of the time

Infoblox Advanced DNS Protection vs Cisco Umbrella

Compared 7% of the time

FortiSASE vs Cisco Umbrella

Compared 2% of the time

More Cisco Umbrella Competitors

Palo Alto Networks DNS Security vs Infoblox BloxOne Threat Defense

Compared 20% of the time

Zscaler Internet Access vs Infoblox BloxOne Threat Defense

Compared 16% of the time

Infoblox Advanced DNS Protection vs Infoblox BloxOne Threat Defense

Compared 7% of the time

EfficientIP DNS Guardian vs Infoblox BloxOne Threat Defense

Compared 6% of the time

Akamai Secure Internet Access Enterprise vs Infoblox BloxOne Threat Defense

Compared 4% of the time

More Infoblox BloxOne Threat Defense Competitors

Product Reports

Cisco Umbrella

Download Cisco Umbrella product report

Infoblox BloxOne Threat Defense

Download Infoblox BloxOne Threat Defense product report

Also Known As

OpenDNS

BloxOne Threat Defense, Infoblox ActiveTrust, Infoblox ActiveTrust Cloud

Overview

Cisco Umbrella delivers rapid DNS security with over 30,000 customers, providing outstanding threat protection and handling more than 600 billion requests daily. It's recognized for high threat efficacy in the SSE domain and integrates elements like SWG, ZTNA, CASB, and more.

Cisco Umbrella is renowned for its effective DNS-layer security against ransomware and phishing. It offers flexible content filtering and integrates seamlessly with existing networks while providing single-pane-of-glass management for centralized monitoring. Its robust threat intelligence and customizable policies are central to its appeal. Users highlight room for improvement in areas like WHOIS data inclusion, malware enhancement, and reporting analytics. Integration with other threat feeds and better client support are requested for more comprehensive coverage.

What are the key features of Cisco Umbrella?

DNS-Layer Security: Blocks malicious domains, preventing ransomware attacks.
Web Content Filtering: Allows users to manage lists for strict content control.
Seamless Integration: Blends with systems like Active Directory and Meraki.
Remote Protection: Keeps remote users safe across different locations.
Single-Pane Management: Facilitates effective monitoring and reporting.

What should users expect in reviews about Cisco Umbrella?

Threat Intelligence: Provides comprehensive malware and attack data.
Customizable Policies: Enables tailored security measures for users.
Integration Options: Works with diverse systems for holistic security.
Ease of Use: Offers a straightforward experience for administrators.
Remote Worker Security: Ensures protection outside traditional networks.

Industries implement Cisco Umbrella primarily for DNS-level security, web filtering, and protecting remote employees. It strengthens cybersecurity frameworks by blocking malware and avoiding access to harmful sites. The tool is widely integrated with Active Directory and Cisco Meraki, providing consistent internet security for employees.

Cisco

Infoblox BloxOne Threat Defense strengthens and optimizes your security posture from the foundation up, giving you the visibility, control and automation to secure the hybrid workplace. Operating at the DNS level, BloxOne Threat Defense uncovers threats that other solutions do not and stops attacks earlier in the threat lifecycle. Through pervasive automation and ecosystem integration, it drives efficiencies in SecOps, increases the effectiveness of the existing security stack, secures digital and work-from-anywhere efforts and lowers the total cost for cybersecurity.

Infoblox

Sample Customers

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

Council Rock School District, EagleView, Schneider Electric, Baptist Memorial Health Care, American University

Cisco Umbrella vs. Infoblox BloxOne Threat Defense