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Amazon Route 53 vs Cisco Umbrella comparison

 

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:
 

ROI

Sentiment score
6.1
Amazon Route 53 provides ROI through downtime prevention, efficiency improvements, security enhancements, and justifies its cost with quality.
Sentiment score
7.5
Cisco Umbrella improves security, reduces costs, and enhances productivity, offering quick ROI and increased efficiency with threat prevention.
The main factors are time-saving and security, even if the cost is slightly higher.
 

Customer Service

Sentiment score
8.1
Amazon Route 53 offers effective support, but premium plans improve experiences; basic plans might limit engagement and satisfaction.
Sentiment score
8.0
Cisco Umbrella is praised for efficient support and extensive resources, with minor delays in email and purchasing processes.
Amazon services are very stable, and there are few problems.
Amazon's customer support is very good with a quick response time.
They provide a normal developer level of support, and within twenty-four hours for non-critical issues, which is acceptable for us.
I would rate customer support ten out of ten due to the excellent assistance throughout the POC process.
Cisco's support is fantastic, providing assistance when needed, especially during the initial installation process.
The support channel isn't like the usual Cisco support where I could call instantly for a hardware issue like a router or switch.
 

Scalability Issues

Sentiment score
8.3
Amazon Route 53 is highly rated for its scalability, reliability, and efficient integration, though some find it costlier.
Sentiment score
8.1
Cisco Umbrella offers scalable, cloud-based infrastructure, enabling easy deployment and management across diverse organizational sizes globally.
We haven't faced any scalability issues, thanks to its integration with AWS services.
The scalability is maintained by AKS, and Route 53's scalability part is primarily involved with load balancing.
Amazon Route 53 is scalable as I use automation with YML files to handle scalability needs, and it works well.
Cisco Umbrella is scalable for our company.
It is a scalable solution but requires improvement in specific areas.
 

Stability Issues

Sentiment score
8.2
Amazon Route 53 is highly reliable, rated 99.99% stability, with rare downtime, enhanced by advanced routing features.
Sentiment score
8.3
Cisco Umbrella is praised for its excellent stability, high uptime, and reliability despite rare minor connectivity issues.
The solution is stable.
I have not encountered any stability issues.
I have not experienced any outages or downtime.
I have not experienced any major stability issues with Cisco Umbrella.
I will give stability a score of seven, as there are some glitches from time to time.
 

Room For Improvement

Users seek improvements in handling requests, logging, UI, security, pricing, support, configuration, integration, automation, and domain support in Route 53.
Cisco Umbrella needs improved integration, user experience, reporting, and regional data centers for better security and network performance.
There could be improvements in the configuration process, particularly in the options provided during setup, such as subdomain configurations and certificate management.
In my project, everything is already configured, and we focus on monitoring and health checks.
There is room for improvement in restricting access through one website from S3 buckets.
Making it more flexible and easy to deploy, particularly when integrating with other technologies like Active Directory and proxies, would be beneficial.
I have to write an email to Umbrella support to get assistance, unlike the other products where I can call the Cisco technical assistance center and get an engineer.
The product can only shield a small area, making it less effective for larger spaces or multiple users.
 

Setup Cost

Amazon Route 53 offers scalable, usage-based pricing; considered reasonable for reliability but complex for high-demand sites.
Cisco Umbrella pricing is fair yet expensive, with flexible plans, negotiable discounts, and complex scalability for large enterprises.
Route 53 is more expensive.
The pricing of Route 53 is slightly higher compared to other services, however, it is justified by its high availability and reliability.
The only cost associated is the license cost unless additional solutions need to be integrated with Umbrella, which would incur extra costs.
The prices need to be lower as the current pricing is exceedingly high.
 

Valuable Features

Amazon Route 53 excels in scalable DNS management, traffic routing, AWS integration, security, cost-effectiveness, and global domain management.
Cisco Umbrella offers DNS-based protection, web filtering, and integration, enhancing security and productivity for hybrid work environments.
I find Amazon Route 53 valuable for its ability to manage DNS records and efficiently route traffic with features like failover routing and geolocation routing.
Route 53 is valued for its health check feature and reliability.
One of the best advantages is managed security.
The DNS layer security provided by Cisco Umbrella is very effective for our security posture, offering us vast improvements in visibility over DNS queries and potential threats.
The most valuable feature of Cisco Umbrella is its DNS security.
If a machine is attempting to access compromised sites, it can pinpoint the machine to prevent it, thus narrowing down the attack surface.
 

Categories and Ranking

Amazon Route 53
Average Rating
8.6
Reviews Sentiment
7.3
Number of Reviews
32
Ranking in other categories
Managed DNS (2nd)
Cisco Umbrella
Average Rating
8.8
Reviews Sentiment
7.3
Number of Reviews
113
Ranking in other categories
Secure Web Gateways (SWG) (1st), Internet Security (1st), Cloud Access Security Brokers (CASB) (2nd), Secure Access Service Edge (SASE) (3rd), Domain Name System (DNS) Security (1st), Cisco Security Portfolio (2nd)
 

Mindshare comparison

Amazon Route 53 and Cisco Umbrella aren’t in the same category and serve different purposes. Amazon Route 53 is designed for Managed DNS and holds a mindshare of 6.4%, down 9.1% compared to last year.
Cisco Umbrella, on the other hand, focuses on Domain Name System (DNS) Security, holds 22.4% mindshare, down 27.9% since last year.
Managed DNS
Domain Name System (DNS) Security
 

Featured Reviews

Jithin Scaria - PeerSpot reviewer
Provides clear documentation, easy to understand, simplifies management and efficiently handles our domain-related configurations and DNS records
For initial setup, we generally use provisioning tools for these kinds of DNS records. The choice often depends on the cloud provider and the Infrastructure as Code (IAC) tools the client prefers. We adapt our approach accordingly rather than focusing on a single method within Route 53. The documentation is very user-friendly. Even someone with no prior experience can easily understand it. It provides step-by-step instructions and explains things in a clear and concise way. You can find everything you need to know about Route 53 and its features in the documentation, including white papers. In addition to manual configuration, you can also use third-party tools like Terraform, Pulumi, or AWS CloudFormation templates to manage your Route 53 configurations.
Rohan Singh - PeerSpot reviewer
Protects endpoints wherever they are, always pushing people to the right locations to avoid malicious intent
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 single pane of glass management makes it very easy to manage your rollout. We get a lot of "single panes of glass" and, eventually, you need a pane of panes of glass. But it's always good to have a clear and graphical view, and Umbrella's is nice and easy to read. Definitely, of the panes of glass that we do have, it's one of the easiest to use. The single pane of glass is good to group users together and separate people out. Some people need different types of security. Some people are more vulnerable. Some have more highly valuable assets, like C-suite people. It's really good to be able to have end-users defined inside of that. You don't have to jump around. You don't have to figure out who's who. It's all done through one pane of glass. What most people don't realize is that it's running in the background, which is a really nice aspect when it comes to security. Often, when you deploy a security tool, it takes up CPU performance. Everything slows to a grind. But Umbrella is so simple and easy and it doesn't affect the end-user experience. It's the best of all worlds. It's nice when people realize that they're being protected when they go to the wrong site. I think people are happy that they're protected, but it's nice that they rarely notice it. It's generally easy to maintain network connectivity, but with Umbrella, the nice part is that whichever connectivity you're on, you're always secure. With Umbrella, as long as you're online, you're going to be protected.
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Educational Organization
20%
Computer Software Company
15%
Financial Services Firm
9%
Manufacturing Company
6%
Educational Organization
26%
Computer Software Company
17%
Financial Services Firm
7%
Manufacturing Company
7%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
 

Questions from the Community

Azure DNS or Amazon Route 53?
Azure DNS is a hosting service of DNS domains. It has excellent operating time and performance, resulting in fast resolution. We like the ability to view everything in the Azure portal - this makes...
What do you like most about Amazon Route 53?
The most valuable features of the solution are the DNS, routing, and traffic features.
What needs improvement with Amazon Route 53?
There is a need for technical knowledge to use Amazon Route 53 effectively. If a person without much technical background could use it, I would have rated it a ten out of ten.
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.
 

Also Known As

Route 53
OpenDNS
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Hess, Expedia, Kelloggs, Philips, HyperTrack
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 Cloudflare, Amazon Web Services (AWS), Quad9 DNS and others in Managed DNS. Updated: March 2025.
845,589 professionals have used our research since 2012.