We compared Cisco Umbrella Zscaler Internet Access based on our users’ reviews in five categories. After reading the collected data, you can find our conclusion below.
Comparison Results: Cisco Umbrella offers more comprehensive features, including granular customization of DNS blocking, tenant lock content filtering, and support for hybrid work. It also has better integration with other products and more reliable technical support. Zscaler Internet Access has a competitive pricing model and a cloud-native proxy architecture, it lacks certain features such as VPN and client-to-client communication. Overall, Cisco Umbrella provides a more complete and user-friendly solution for organizations.
"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."
"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 interface is well organized, so you can easily find everything. Even if you don't have much experience with Cisco, you can easily navigate the solution and find your way around. Everything has been done well, from the deployment to monitoring."
"We are very new users of the solution and are still in the exploration stages, but we are happy with the product thus far."
"The Global Block List is one of the most valuable features because it's really easy to block domain names as well as URLs. Sometimes you don't want to block the whole site, you just want to block one URL. The Global Block and Allow Lists are the best features for us."
"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."
"The most valuable feature is that it secures our network against blacklisted or malicious websites."
"What we like most is security and how easy it is to integrate with other appliances."
"You can manage and create policies based on a group of users. It can permit some URLs and block others."
"They have a wealth of articles in their knowledge base. This has given me the freedom to troubleshoot on my own time. "
"Zscaler excels in security protection and the cloud is always up-to-date. It does not matter if you are a small or big organisation, you will receive the same security quality."
"SSL inspection is a valuable feature."
"All internet access flows through the Zscaler proxy, regardless of whether people are in office or remote. I have greater control site access and I minimize the number of compromises that we experience to almost none."
"Overall, we're very happy with our product."
"I like the granularity of the control of all the traffic, including SSL inspection. I also like the fact that the user interface is intuitive. The latencies with Zscaler are minimal compared to those of any other competitor. Other competitors do not really have the global scale that Zscaler has and cannot promise low latencies."
"The solution offers a distributed organization to master and to control all of the endpoints."
"The initial setup was straightforward. The biggest thing for us was to build our own policies. The deployment itself was only a few hours."
"Tech support is good."
"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."
"I would like to see more integrability with other products."
"If I want to see which users access a website, I need an Active Directory registered on Umbrella's cloud."
"The integration with Cisco could be better."
"Its price could be better."
"Cisco Umbrella should introduce an on-premises device."
"There should be a way to monitor traffic at the user level."
"It has happened in the past that Cisco Umbrella has denied us access to secure websites."
"I would like to see DLP integration in the next release of this solution."
"It needs better integration with other applications. It takes a fair amount of regular activity to apply the by-passes because it is very strict in its restrictions and frequently you have to go in and open things up to allow the workforce to work."
"In terms of usage, here in the GCC, it's still growing a growing market, so the combination of DLP, data leak prevention, to a certain extent is fine. But what it requires is user-based access or role-based access. The solution needs to grow into that, which definitely takes time. There's not an easy way to integrate it, when you have a cloud-based solution."
"Zscaler should continue to make the user interface better. They should also improve the backup network and continue to expand it so that it can handle larger numbers of customers."
"Zscaler should provide adjacent services, which would be complementary to their current offering that could to be more pragmatic for a customer. For example, if you take Akamai, you get multiple sets of services, all depending on the customer and the strategy and the complexity and the problems. In some areas, they are more varied in terms of coverage."
"The performance needs improvement. Some areas create performance issues and, depending on the use cases, require reconfiguration to perform again."
"It also needs better integration with other applications as well. There are some restrictions."
"The pricing is an issue. It is expensive if you have all of your users in the same location. It is expensive compared to other firewalls on the market."
"The solution can be improved by advancing some of the newer technologies such as the DLP feature, and adding email security."
Cisco Umbrella is ranked 1st in Secure Web Gateways (SWG) with 108 reviews while Zscaler Internet Access is ranked 2nd in Secure Web Gateways (SWG) with 46 reviews. Cisco Umbrella is rated 8.8, while Zscaler Internet Access 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 Zscaler Internet Access writes "Provides integrated CASB and file sandboxing but could be less expensive ". Cisco Umbrella is most compared with Microsoft Defender for Cloud Apps, Prisma Access by Palo Alto Networks, Palo Alto Networks DNS Security, Infoblox Advanced DNS Protection and Cloudflare DNS, whereas Zscaler Internet Access is most compared with Microsoft Defender for Cloud Apps, Netskope , Prisma Access by Palo Alto Networks, FortiSASE and Forcepoint Secure Web Gateway. See our Cisco Umbrella vs. Zscaler Internet Access report.
See our list of best Secure Web Gateways (SWG) vendors and best Internet Security vendors.
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