Cisco Umbrella Alternatives

Impacted by Cisco Ending OpenDNS? Check out our article here.

Cisco Umbrella alternatives: WebTitan DNS filter is a direct swap out technically for Cisco Umbrella DNS. It is the number one Cisco Umbrella alternative in the market in 2024 for business and managed service providers. Both are DNS layer filters with best-of-breed advanced AI-driven threat protection and are built on the same core principles. 

Over the last 36 months, many Cisco Umbrella customers and MSPs have made the switch to WebTitan web filter from TitanHQ, the main Cisco Umbrella competitors. Cisco Umbrella pricing has been a big issue for customers as has support levels.  

Cisco Umbrella Comparison Guide

Cisco Umbrella Alternatives Video 

WebTitan Threat Intelligence

Cisco Umbrella Versus WebTitan: Customer Ratings

Cisco Umbrella Alternatives Function Comparison 

Why are Managed Service Providers and businesses moving to WebTitan from TitanHQ, the top Cisco Umbrella competitors? 
Managed Service Providers are moving from OpenDNS and Cisco Umbrella DNS to WebTitan because of the better pricing, fantastic support from product experts both before and after the sales process.
Read more about the benefits of WebTitan DNS filter for Managed Service Providers here

WebTitan is consistently the top-rated DNS security solution on the market across the main review platforms including G2 Crowd, Capterra and Expert Insights. 

WebTitan Web Filter provides leading-edge AI driven threat intelligence including:

• Real-time URL threat protection powered by 650 million end users and growing.
• Our real-time Database contains 3 million malicious URLs, phishing sites and IP addresses.
• Every single day we identify 100,000 NEW malicious threats and URLs.  
• Real-Time Categorization and Malicious Detection for Domains, Full-Path URLs, and IPs
• Crowd-sourced coverage and protection powered by over ​650​ million end users 
• Industry-leading ​99.9% Coverage​ and over ​99% Accuracy​ of ActiveWeb URLs & IPs 
• 100%​ coverage of the Top 1 Million most visited websites (ActiveWeb) 
• Highly granular categories which include malicious, objectionable, and topic-based groups 
• 10​ ​Malicious​ categories including Botnet, Phishing/Fraud, Malware Distribution Point, Command and Control, Cryptocurrency Mining, Ad Fraud, and more. 
• Malicious URLs are revisited daily to determine if they are still infected, abandoned, or cleaned. This ensures that our malicious database stays as “fresh” and accurate as possible. 
• Support for over ​200 ​languages 
• Real-time continuous updates​ provide up-to-the-minute protection against newly identified malicious source  

WebTitan Versus Cisco Umbrella: WebTitan Web filter BEATS Cisco Umbrella in 6 key success rating factors.  

On the G2 Crowd independent review platform which leverages more than 650,000 independent and authenticated user reviews read by more than 3 million buyers WebTitan web filter is neck and neck with Cisco Umbrella and also comprehensively beats Cisco Umbrella DNS on the 6 main rating factors. 
These are independent customer reviews of both products PLUS WebTitan is considerably more affordable than Cisco Umbrella. 

WebTitans malicious detection solution employs a crowd-sourced approach to obtaining a constant stream of URLs for analysis. The continuous stream of ActiveWeb URLs comes from our global network of over 650 million end users across a number of high traffic markets. We leverage an integrative, multi-vector approach to detect,  monitor, and accurately categorize new threats as they occur. WebTitan uses AI-based services and human-supervised machine learning techniques and verification methods to achieve unmatched coverage (99.9%) and accuracy (99%+) for ActiveWeb domains, sub-domains, full-path URLs, and IP addresses. That includes 100% coverage of the Top 1 Million most visited sites and supports 200 languages, worldwide.

WebTitan identifies malicious sources from the following: 
● URLs/Website Detections 
Link & Content Analysis 
Static, Heuristic, & Behavior Anomaly Analysis 
In-house and 3rd party tools/feeds 

● Browser/Traffic Detections 
Bot/Non-Human Analysis 
Data Center/Crawler Analysis 
Low-Quality Traffic Analysis 
Data Mining and more...  

The key reasons that businesses and Managed Service Providers (MSPs) are looking for Cisco Umbrella alternatives include the following: 

Why are customers choosing WebTitan over Cisco Umbrella?

1. Cisco Umbrella Pricing and Packages* 

The current 2022 Cisco Umbrella pricing comparison that we are seeing when talking to prospective customers is as follows:
2022 Web Filtering Pricing – Cisco Umbrella Pricing versus WebTitan Web Filter 

Cisco Umbrella: $2.70
TitanHQ WebTitan:  $1.42
(this price is based on per user per month, with 100 users for the same key features and threat intelligence.)

* Cisco offers three different primary Umbrella packages: DNS Security Essentials, DNS Security Advantage, and Secure Internet Gateway (SIG) Essentials. These different packages have different features and pricing, different price lists depending upon region, and volume discounting based on user count.

WebTitan offers flexible pricing based on the customer's preferences - we can price based on AP's, IP's or locations - the customer decides.Read more WebTitan Web Filter reviews

1. We don't operate monthly minimums - we'll grow and shrink with our customers
2. Cisco Umbrella offers complex pricing tiers 
3. You can see all of our WebTitan web filter pricing completely openly displayed on this page - our pricing is entirely transparent. 

Customer Quote:
"Excellent web proxy WebTitan is extremely easy to use and easy to setup. Integration with our network was very simple as well. We were looking for a product that had an informative dashboard and an easy way to set up rules. This was the perfect product for us.  If you are looking for an effective solution that meets your price requirements as well as ease of administration, WebTitan is a perfect product for you. We are using this product to limit internal users from accessing restricted sites. We also use this product to audit activity for specific users in our office."
System Administrator in Non-Profit Organization 

2. Differences in Support levels between Cisco Umbrella DNS and WebTitan 

Support from TitanHQ, the main Cisco Umbrella competitors, is hands-on and world-class including contact with a qualified engineer through the entire process. 

- this includes full support during the trial period, migration help and on-going free technical support when you become a customer. With TitanHQ there are no additional support costs or add on pricing

- all features, upgrades, and support are included in the price quoted. TitanHQ are very hands-on when it comes to support

We have had several customers migrate to WebTitan because of poor post-sales support from Cisco Umbrella.

Cisco Umbrella Versus WebTitan Live Review on Capterra:  
"I am liking it a lot better than Umbrella by Cisco, which we were previously using.
Pros: The simple interface is the best feature. When Cisco bought OpenDNS, they revamped the UI to make it look "modern", but they also made it a lot slower to use and find the info you need. With WebTitan, I am finding that I can log in, quickly look for blocked users, check their individual traffic, and get out in less than 5 minutes. With Umbrella (formerly known as OpenDNS), I just wasn't even bothering to look at traffic because the experience was frustrating. Now with WebTitan, I am finding that I am using it daily again because it is quick and easy to use and doesn't make me feel like I am fighting with the UI."
Todd Russell, Director of IT, Saint Joseph Seminary College, Covington, Louisiana

Here's an excellent new case study detailing Saint Joseph Seminary Colleges move from Cisco Umbrella to WebTitan for improved usability, reporting & costs.
You can view the full case study here.
 
Also here's a new case study about a UK based MSP called Network Needs migrating from
OpenDNS Cisco Umbrella to WebTitan 

3. WebTitan is Easy to use and manage 

Cisco Umbrella cost is an issue. With WebTitan there are No minimums, No DNS request limits, No extra support costs, No unanswered support calls. No add on costs for roaming clients. Once you are a WebTitan customer, you are a customer. There are No tiers or costly minimums just a solid product and great service. As a business, we will grow and shrink with you. Can Cisco Umbrella say the same? 

MSP Customer Quote:
"Comprehensive protection at a reasonable price. I really love the amount of options you have in protecting your network. There seems to be an almost endless granularity in filtering.
My clients have realized the potential of DNS Filtering services. The reporting has gotten more comprehensive. Our recurring revenue has increased because of this."
Capterra MSP 

4. Data Compliance - Where exactly is your data?

WebTitan can guarantee that your data stays in your region.  .
WebTitan Cloud is regionalized so ALL info is guaranteed to stay within the same region (US/EU/ANZ etc.) Our private clouds are located in your data centre or in AWS locally.

The following companies trust WebTitan for their web security needs and many have switched from Cisco Umbrella:

5. Twice as much custom reporting with WebTitan than Cisco Umbrella

WebTitan offers twice as many custom reports as OpenDNS Cisco Umbrella. Custom reports allow for flexible reporting based on an organization's specific requirements. When Active Directory integration is in place WebTitan offers an additional 10 reports as well as the ability to add filters to the pre-canned reports.
WebTitan reporting is also renowned for its speed and real-time functionality. All of this reporting is available via our extensive API. 

Customer Quote:
“Ensuring our network and users are secure is vital, and Umbrella’s frustrating interface was making this task more difficult than it needed to be, We were unhappy with the overly-complex Umbrella user interface for a long time and were jeopardizing security because of this complexity. WebTitan’s many features prompted tus to explore the solution. It didn’t take long to realize that WebTitan was the best alternative for an efficient, cost-effective, and easy to use filtering solution to replace Cisco Umbrella”.
Todd Russell, Director of IT, Saint Joseph Seminary College, Covington, Louisiana

6. Google Safe Search 

With WebTitan you can enable safe search for Google and Bing with just one click. When SafeSearch is on, it helps block explicit images, videos, and websites from Google Search results. This is an integral part of web filtering. Why block content in the search results if users can see the content in images and videos. 

7. WebTitan Extensive API Calls

WebTitan's extensive API set facilitates simple integration for users. The OpenDNS API is not as extensive with less customization possible. WebTitan Cloud allows deep integration making 'Cloud to Cloud' integration straightforward. Our backend expertise brought through to your front end provides you a single pane of glass view.

Benefits of an API driven architecture:

» Easy - Backend functionality is split from front-end allowing easy back-end integration.

» Scalability - You can add more clients as you wish and all call the same API.

» You save time by removing the need to repeat laborious tasks and increase organizational efficiency.

MSP Customer Quote:
"Webtitan review. The service is very intuitive and easy to use. I'm using it as an MSP provider and the integration with the API is simple, well documented and supported. Makes it much easier to use and offer it to our customers.
Offering domain filtering services to my customers, and not having to develop it as a service of our company, made it economically better"
Wasserman MSP, Australia

8. Email Alerts

With WebTitan you have the ability to set up email alerts to be notified if a user hits a page/domain that's blocked (for security reasons). An administrative alert email is immediately sent to the admin account or another designated user in the account. OpenDNS umbrella does not offer this option.

9. Post-Sales Support from Open DNS Cisco Umbrella

We routinely receive great feedback (98% customer satisfaction) for our post-sales support. Hands-on contact with a qualified and experienced engineer at all stages is an important factor in this high rating. Customers we've migrated from OpenDNS and Cisco Umbrella see this as a key factor in moving to WebTitan.

MSP Customer Quote about Cisco Umbrella support:
"We pay for it for all our clients.  Support is very slow, days to get responses.  Adding a blocked site should be easy.  The Cisco dashboard is overly complicated for a basic proxy service.  The switch to Cisco has come at a cost to the end users and tech people.  Not happy."
Jonathan2766, IT service provider, Spiceworks.

" Cisco Umbrella Sales. What do you actually need to do to sign up for this thing?
We’ve signed up for a trial (last week)and ready to go. Sent two requests to their sales team requesting someone to reach out so that we can convert to a paid subscription. Nothing!"

"Cisco Umbrella
Good luck. It took me 8 months to get them to reply to me AFTER we signed our contract with them.
Appalling account management."

"Cisco AMP and Cisco Umbrella is officially the worst communication and support I have ever seen in my entire IT career. How can a company treat a customer THIS freaking poorly after asking for the amounts of money we have paid them? 
UPDATE: We have Dropped Cisco for security. They reached out to us and said it would be another 48+ hours till they could get us licensing. So we are being refunded (THIS is a complex thing with this much money "Refund" Does not give it justice. but for now "Refund") Our Partner went to a 2nd solution and is moving heaven and earth to get us techs who work with the new product. And yes it was Cisco who dropped the ball here and not the partner.
I don't know what else to say. It has been a nightmare. They are seriously the worst company I have ever dealt with in my life.
Literally never had a worst customer experience in any other way with any other business.
They do not give a sxxt about their customers in the slightest."

10. Active Directory Integration

Web Titan Cloud runs off a group ranking system. From customer feedback, our ranking system is a lot more user-friendly and easier to manage.

MSP Customer Quote
We looked at OpenDNS last year and ended up going with WebTitan,  I've been happy with it so far.  It is cloud based, but make sure you install the VM appliance they offer for free to help it sync with your AD to show what user is accessing the content.  The cost was a whole lot less than OpenDNS for the same functionality.
We switched from a Barracuda appliance we had at each of our sites.  It's nice to show all of our locations from a single console with WebTitan now.
Chad1642, MSP, Spiceworks

11. Your Own Private Web Filtering Cloud versus OpenDNS Anycast 

TitanHQ has always been MSP focused when it comes to features and product development. This web filter was built by MSP's for MSP's.  WebTitan can be deployed as a private cloud with all of your customers on your private cloud. With WebTitan there are lots of customizations options, the solution can be fully white labeled. 

• Your own private dedicated cloud.
• Allows for extensive customization.
• Allows for deep integration with your interface.
• Unlimited capacity, from small MSPs sent to the Telco deployments.
• Extensive white labeling.

12. The Cost of Free

What happens when a free service and business service mix? The paying customers unwittingly end up subsiding the free service. For the people using the free service this is fantastic however this means the paying customer is invariably overpaying.  WebTitan customers only ever pay for what they use.

Additional Notes:

• WebTltan Pricing models are scalable for MSPs.
• Flexible Pricing options, AP's, IP's, per location.

13. Freshness of Threat Intelligence is much more important than size 

Bigger isn’t always better especially in the world of malicious threat intelligence. WebTitans’ dynamic, lean and fast DNS filtering platform has been proving very popular amongst legacy OpenDNS or Cisco Umbrella customers. In the evolving world of threat intelligence bigger isn’t necessarily better. Freshness of threat intelligence is much more important than size.
Leaning on a boxing analogy – as a managed service provider or business do you want the agile, lean, mean Anthony Joshua on your side or would you prefer a slow, bloated Andy Ruiz Jr. (sorry Andy but you did admit to being 4 stone overweight!).

Determining the efficacy of a malicious database does not equate directly to superior protection.​ The web is made up of close to two billion sites and significantly more full-path URLs. It is also continuously evolving and importantly the threat vectors evolve and change constantly. Certain changes are particularly dangerous; compromised websites, new malicious phishing sites, new iterations of malware or new ransomware etc.

Because domains and URLs on the internet are continuously changing any premium web filtering solution that stores a classification must “revisit” those destinations on a regular basis in order to stay fresh. It’s nearly as important as the finding of the original URL. This freshness is particularly important for malicious categories which often blink on and off to fulfill a specific, malicious purpose. Heavy, bloated databases can find this process unwieldy, slow and difficult.  

Scary fact: 1 in 13 web requests leads to malware and roughly 20% of malicious domains are very new and used around 1 week after they are registered. Here is where regular active threat detection and freshness and agility are the key benefits. In 2016, approximately 84% of phishing sites existed for less than 24 hours, with an average life cycle of under 15 hours. In 2019, the average lifespan of a phishing site was under 40 minutes.  The median time for the first user to click on a phishing URL is less than four minutes. The increased adoption of single-use phishing URLs slashes the time to live down to zero seconds from first user access.

The fleeting lifespan of phishing URLs is driving an urgent need for accelerated phishing detection and protection. This is where you need a fast, lean solution rather than the traditional bloated, super sized databases. Local threat databases must be updated with phishing detections in a matter of seconds, to adequately protect users. This type of zero-second phishing protection requires an entirely different approach to detection and protection – the WebTitan approach.

Regular fast, revisits of malicious classifications do two things:

1) They ensure the malicious database is an active representation of current REAL TIME threats on the web and

2) they prevent database bloating. It’s easy to find lists of malicious threats or feeds and include all of them into one super-duper master malicious database. Unless you have the AI-based and crowd-sourced systems to revisit and re-analyze at scale and with high accuracy that database quickly becomes obsolete.

The key takeaway here is that a larger database does not equate to higher levels of web protection​.  Accuracy including freshness of the database, how recently analysis and classifications were made, as well as high coverage (which WebTitan accomplishes through crowd-sourcing) are the most important success criteria of a malicious database for your threat intelligence.

Summary:

The size of a malicious database is not an accurate measurement of the level of protection or value it provides. The number of malicious URLs that threaten users and devices on the internet will vary significantly from day-to-day, month-to-month, and so on. The same is true for the number of malicious status changes that occur every day (a safe site becomes malicious, or a malicious site is cleaned and becomes safe). Hence, the importance of having a system that continuously revisits and re-assesses the malicious status of identified malicious URLs on a regular basis. The value and protection from a malicious database is derived from a high level of coverage (of all URLs), freshness (how recently they were reviewed), and accuracy of the classification systems.

"The entire experience with WebTitan has been terrific. From better reporting to a usable UI, we’ve gotten the visibility we need and have therefore been able to improve our security position.
There is nothing to lose by contacting WebTitan and setting up a trial instance. I was able to do that very quickly over the phone and spend a little time in the interface to determine whether or not it could do what I wanted. That brief demo was all I needed to know that WebTitan would serve my needs much better than Umbrella and I have been thrilled with the improvements to my workflow since switching over,”
Todd Russell, Director of IT, Saint Joseph Seminary College, Covington, Louisiana

What does WebTitan from TitanHQ give the MSP:
 - margin making capability.
 - private, scalable, multi-tenant clouds in the UK, in aws and are fast. Private IP with secondary back up.
- A malware and phishing link killer for your customers.
- Microsoft, T-Mobile, Virgin, ViaSat and Datto all use WebTitan primarily for it's security capabilities.
- save on truck roll cost and engineering + support costs. Stop unhappy, time consuming customers.
- real time LIVE updating of malware and malicious threats.
- active database of 650 million users driving the AI driven protection in this product
- ease of deployment, roll out and use. We’ll hold your hands on roll out and scale you into the product if needs be. We’re a partner who will grow and slow together
– no punitive terms or measures, no sharp practices. - Full industry leading support from real techies who sit beside the product owners over both phone and email. Pre and post-sales support.
- API for the MSP in particular when not using an RMM. Automation capabilities for them.
- Reporting – the power of reporting with full AD integration. Ease of user identification and reporting. They can show their customers the volume of malicious attacks they have prevented.
- Easy filtering at multiple levels and the capability to recognize users in many different ways. Offers remote employee protection.

If you are interested and feel some of these reasons apply to you as a customer or as a managed service provider feel free to drop us an email on info@TitanHQ.com or visit our contact us page .
We have real web security experts offering live support and guidance on our live chat feature - click the buttons on the bottom right and left of the page. 
We're happy to provide web filtering pricing, arrange a free trial, a product demo or discuss your technical set up.

Moving from Cisco Umbrella DNS to WebTitan - the Case Studies: 

1. Saint Joseph Seminary Colleges move from Cisco Umbrella to WebTitan for improved usability, reporting & costs. 
    
2. UK based Managed Service Provider Network Needs migrating all their endpoints from OpenDNS Cisco Umbrella to WebTitan 
    
3. FamilyGuard Wi-Fi solution provider selecting WebTitan over Cisco Umbrella 

More DNS Filtering Comparisons: 
Lightspeed: An Independent Comparison of WebTitan Web Filter and Lightspeed Web Filter for the Education Sector
Webroot DNS: WebTitan versus Cisco Umbrella versus Webroot DNS 

The Key WebTitan technical features to remember are: 

WebTitan Technical Feature List
Two primary use cases:
1. A DNS security layer.  Blocks Malware, Phishing, Viruses, Ransomware & Malicious Sites at source.
2. Brand protection. Advanced content control.

WebTitan Web Filtering Functions:
1. URL filtering. Filters website URLs into 53 predefined categories in 200 languages. An additional 8 customizable categories are also available.  
2. Security Layer. Best-in-class malicious URL detection. SSL supported. HTTP and HTTPS covered.
3. Flexible Policies. Create Policies for an entire organization, from AD groups down to the user level.
4. API Driven. Integrate and control Webtitan using its extensive APIs, roll your own UI, auto provision your customers from your existing systems. Integrate billing and monitoring systems.
5. Reporting: Realtime reporting dashboard to the per DNS request level or high level reports with customizable filters. Schedule customizable reports in multiple formats to be delivered via email. Drill down options with 55 predefined reports to choose from.
6. Deployment options. Gateway/shared cloud/Private Cloud. WebTitan Cloud, a private cloud deployed for you on AWS with failover or hosted by you in your own data centre. We deploy servers globally tailored for you and your operations. The IP for DNS forwarding provided to you are yours and yours only.  Your data in your geographic locations.
7. Group Policies. If you use Windows Active Directory, you have already got groups defined, pull them into WebTitan and apply policies to individual groups.
8. Safe Search: One click enforcement of Google and bing SafeSearch and YouTube restricted mode (this can be customised)
9. Whitelist and Blacklist functionality. Per policy white and black list functionality.
10. AD Integration. Allows for user identification, user/group policy application.  
11. On the Go roaming agent. WebTitan is perfect for BYOD environments where employees use multiple devices on and off site. Covering windows and MacOS. We also don’t charge extra for our agents.  
12. IPv6 coverage. We have full IPv6 support thus are future proofed.
13. Location types Static IP, dynamic IP, Dynamic DNS, Roaming or Virtual Locations (EDNS) all supported.
14. Bypass keys. Each Cloud Key can be created for single or multiple users and are controlled by time or date. This key can over ride the blocked pages; each key activity is also individually reported on.
15. Customisable block pages – Each customer can have their own specific block page to show their messaging and branding.
16. White Labelling: Our GUI can be 100% White Labelled to your branding
Features:
1. Market-leading accuracy, coverage and malicious website detection collated through real time advanced analytics and detection from 550 million end users and 5 trillion web queries per month covering 99.9% of the active web. Proprietary Al-based and machine learning categorization engines process millions of URLs daily.

2. Scalable.  Solutions can handle any volume of usage with no latency.

3. Real time auto threat and category updating.
 
4. Support. Renowned for our top-class support team both pre and post sales. This full support comes at no extra cost!  

5. Multitenant. Support multiple clients from one centralised platform. Each location has its own log in and policy manager. Each account administrator can control the content accessed for multiple locations

7. User identification: Identify individual users and report on their activity. Integrates with active directory or LDAP to allow you to create per user or per group reporting for your organisation.

8. Full path detection: One of the critical features that Web Titan provides is an ability for deep analysis due to full path detection. Page and path-level reporting provides analytical credibility to what is being marked as malicious. URLs in the Web Titan databases are detailed down to the path level.

9.  Zero Latency: Beauty of DNS Filtering is there is no impact on internet speeds to your users. 

10. 3 step setup: i) add location identifier ii) Set policy iii) Forward DNS to WebTitan Cloud

A video on the benefits of WebTitan versus Cisco Umbrella :