Cisco Umbrella vs Infoblox BloxOne Threat Defense comparison

Cisco Umbrella vs. Infoblox BloxOne Threat Defense

Download the complete report

Helped 860,632 peers since 2012

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.

Read full review

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.

Read full review

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"When we have laptops that leave the building, they could connect to public WiFi before they establish a VPN connection back into the company. For that duration or that period of time when they're not docked in the network or on a VPN, they effectively don't have that full layer of security that I provide inside the building. This tool stands in during that period of time, and we extend the security settings through their basic firewall or their cloud-based firewall at that time. So, we do content filtering and control access, but they also are looking at new domains, IP addresses, and bad requests. They're blocking them on my behalf when a laptop is not sitting behind our security appliances."

"It offers good visibility for the Administrator. The administrator has full visibility of what is blocked or has the knowledge of where users go when they are surfing the internet."

"The best possible thing is that it is very easy to deploy, easy to configure, and very fast to get onboarded with a customer because this is a cloud-based service."

"The most valuable feature is the ability to block users from reaching places that they should not even try to reach has been a boon."

"I like the DNS layer security."

"The customer service and technical support of Cisco Umbrella are great."

"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's support is fantastic, providing assistance when needed, especially during the initial installation process."

More Cisco Umbrella pros

"Overall, I would rate the Infoblox BloxOne Threat Defense as 8.5 out of 10."

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

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

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

"Our ability to detect data exfiltration was minimal before Infoblox and the cloud portal was instituted for us. In terms of DNS security as a whole, we had some capability with our firewalls, but this is a lot more specialized because we're sending all of our DNS requests to Infoblox. I'd say we improved 100%."

"The most valuable feature is blocklisting. It's good at what I like to describe as the "silly side cases." We have this annoying security architecture that says we must do this, that, and the other, so we try to make it easier on ourselves."

"The most valuable feature of this solution is the granularity for which you can categorize what you want to block versus what you don't want to block."

"The most useful aspect of Infoblox BloxOne Threat Defense is its user-friendly interface and its powerful analytic reporting."

More Infoblox BloxOne Threat Defense pros

Cons

"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."

"There are some situations where we would like to block things for specific user groups. I know that Umbrella does that, but it's not that easy.... when you want a specific task for specific rules and policies for user groups, you have to go three levels down in the menu, and it's hard to find where you do that task."

"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."

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

"Sometimes there are some lags, and I have to refresh multiple times to access parts of the dashboards. Sometimes the dashboard pages crash and I'm not sure why, so that's one area for improvement."

"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."

"I don't have an answer for how Cisco Umbrella can be improved, as it has been some time since I've worked with it."

"Some countries don't have a DNS server leading to a domain resolution IP, not at a local level."

More Cisco Umbrella cons

"The integration of threat intelligence with other solutions is challenging. If I want to expose threat intelligence, I cannot do it via taxi services. I have to call the API, but the customers are not into creating the APIs. The integration of embedded threat intelligence with other platforms should be better. Infoblox should work on this, and it should be easier for the end user to integrate it. It is very easy to deploy this solution. We should be able to integrate it with other platforms, such as the Next-Generation Firewall, with the same ease."

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

"I have faced quite a few problems in my eight months of experience with the product in GTS, despite it being a relatively short period."

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

"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 could be cheaper."

"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."

"Within the past two years, we discovered certain bugs in their products. The resolution of these bugs took a little too much time, especially if our production environment is down for a certain amount of time, then we are losing money. That is hard to convey to Infoblox support, e.g., we actually need the system up and running again within two or three hours. The awareness of these so-called production down incidents is not really easy to convey."

More Infoblox BloxOne Threat Defense cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

"Cisco has a set price for a single license up to 100, but whenever we get over 100, we have to ask for a quote."

"The pricing was marvelous."

"There is room for improvement when it comes to the cost."

"Cisco Umbrella is not a cheap product. However, it's not a matter of the cost; it's more a matter of the value of security. It is easy to measure this value when you have a security incident. I think the price is a good trade-off for a product that can help you avoid security threats."

"The pricing model is easier compared to some of the other solutions, and it is also competitive."

"The price depends on the use case, and it's a bit linear. But it depends on the customer's strategy and how Cisco plans to optimize the costs."

"Cisco uses subscription models for the pricing and there are three subscription plans."

"It was a little bit expensive on a per seat basis, but the company I was running was only a midsize Australian company, and it was a reasonable budget per computer for that system. It started off being a free product, and then Cisco bought it, and it went to a reasonable price. I was using Cisco AMP as well. So, my per computer cost was reasonably high, but for a small company, it was within an acceptable level."

More Cisco Umbrella pricing and cost advice

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

"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."

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

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

"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."

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

"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."

See which vendors are best for you

Use our free recommendation engine to learn which Domain Name System (DNS) Security solutions are best for your needs.

See recommendations

860,632 professionals have used our research since 2012.

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