We compared Netskope and Cisco Umbrella based on our users' reviews across four parameters. After reading all of the collected data, you can find our conclusion below.
Cisco Umbrella is praised for its customer service, positive ROI, and ease of use, yet it needs to enhance its user interface, reporting and analytics capabilities, integration with third-party platforms, and customer support. Netskope offers comprehensive data protection and advanced threat protection but could improve its interface, customer support, performance during high traffic, and reporting capabilities. Pricing is competitive for both options.
Features: Netskope stands out with comprehensive data protection and advanced analytics, while Cisco Umbrella excels in robust security measures, seamless integration, user-friendly interface, and reliable performance.
Pricing and ROI: The setup cost of Netskope is straightforward, with competitive pricing options, ensuring a smooth experience for customers. Cisco Umbrella also offers reasonable and competitive pricing, with a hassle-free setup cost and a simple and flexible licensing process for easy management. Netskope has shown a positive ROI with improved security, data protection, visibility, threat detection, and cost savings. Cisco Umbrella also provides improved security, productivity, ease of use, and integration with existing systems.
Room for Improvement: Netskope could benefit from improvement in its interface, customer support, performance during high traffic, and reporting capabilities. Cisco Umbrella needs to enhance its interface, the solution's reporting and analytics capabilities, third-party integration, and customer support.
Deployment and customer support: Some Netskope users found the initial setup to be simple and quick, as it only involves rolling out an agent and can be deployed on the cloud. Others mentioned that the implementation phase can be complex and time-consuming, requiring coordination and effort. The deployment process was generally considered easy, especially for those with a networking background. Cisco Umbrella users find the initial setup to be straightforward, with deployment taking as little as a day or two. Others report that deployment can take a couple of days to a few weeks, depending on the complexity of the deployment model and any customization needed. Netskope's customer service is responsive, helpful, and attentive, delivering prompt resolution and knowledgeable assistance. Cisco Umbrella also provides highly regarded customer service, with prompt and efficient assistance and a knowledgeable support team.
The summary above is based on 68 interviews we conducted with Netskope and Cisco Umbrella users. To access the review's full transcripts, download our report.
"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."
"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 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."
"Cisco Umbrella is absolutely stable."
"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."
"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 think recently with many people working from home, Cisco Umbrella has been very useful. For example, we can manage the device and the network when the employee is not working on the local host. Cisco Umbrella is very valuable for this kind of infrastructure."
"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."
"It has the ability to quickly block new threats."
"We immediately block impersonating users from accessing services over Cisco Umbrella-controlled devices."
"Stability-wise, it's good. I have never encountered any bugs."
"Their technical support is very good."
"Technical support is pretty good."
"Amazing reporting and tracking mechanisms."
"The automation offered by the product is pretty solid."
"The most valuable features were related to discovery, data protection, and ensuring compliance with regulations."
"The interface is good."
"The product's analytics part is pretty fine."
"The solution offers a better understanding of the real scenario and identifies the cloud apps that are being utilized."
"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"
"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."
"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."
"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."
"Cisco Umbrella should introduce an on-premises device."
"The solution's technical support is not very good."
"The firewall capabilities could be better. Cisco is starting to introduce some layer 7 capabilities now, but there's still some room to grow. They should continue with the development of Umbrella so that it is a full-blown cloud-managed firewall solution."
"It would be better if there was a little bit of flexibility for organizations that don't have SD One in their environment. Because of the complexity of the environment, it's not easy to actually turn on the feature of the secure internet gateway for our users. We have not been able to explore that option yet."
"Having ready-to-go templates with best practices is definitely something that would be an improvement. Deployment, from day one, is something that definitely needs to be improved for Cisco customers."
"iOS devices and mobiles are huge in my environment right now, and I cannot run them on Cisco Umbrella 24/7."
"If the security issues are taken care of it would be better."
"In some cases, when you have a lot of policies, it can get confusing for users and you can get lost in the GUI."
"Netskope CASB can improve by working more similarly to a VPN technology instead of a proxy. They then could have visibility on the endpoint device. Most clients have some tools where they check the endpoint health or other things, such as the security posture, or if they want to access the resources. For example, if they should have antivirus running, this kind of posture check should be available but it is missing."
"The initial setup is complex and should be simplified."
"They can focus more on ease of admin, ease of use, and ease of migration. Migration should be simple for companies that are using a different platform and would like to move to Netskope. Everyone looks for a simple migration. They can also focus more on cloud services and cloud trends. They have to see the cloud market, and they should try to compete with Zscaler and other players. They should also work on licensing costs."
"It needed some fine-tuning on core business sites that we used, which were sensitive to what we term a man-in-the-middle certificate by design. Some sites were not tolerant because they presented as potentially malicious. So, we just had to make some tweaks so that it would bypass or interpret it."
"They could add endpoint security features."
"The product's high price is an area of concern where improvements are required."
"The configuration in the cloud model could be improved upon."
Cisco Umbrella is ranked 1st in Cloud Access Security Brokers (CASB) with 108 reviews while Netskope is ranked 4th in Cloud Access Security Brokers (CASB) with 35 reviews. Cisco Umbrella is rated 8.8, while Netskope is rated 8.4. 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 Netskope writes "Network proxy that provides visibility during deployment and allows you to control PII". 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 Azure DNS, whereas Netskope is most compared with Zscaler Internet Access, Prisma Access by Palo Alto Networks, Microsoft Defender for Cloud Apps, Skyhigh Security and Cato SASE Cloud Platform. See our Cisco Umbrella vs. Netskope report.
See our list of best Cloud Access Security Brokers (CASB) vendors and best Secure Access Service Edge (SASE) vendors.
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