Cisco Umbrella Review 2025: Pros, Cons, Pricing, and Who It's For

Cisco Umbrella is one of the most widely deployed web security products in the mid-market, and for good reason: its DNS-layer protection is fast, cheap to roll out, and backed by Cisco Talos threat intelligence. This Cisco Umbrella review covers what it does well, where it falls short, how pricing works, and the detail that changes every buying decision in 2027: Cisco has announced end-of-life for Umbrella SIG and DNS as the product becomes Cisco Secure Access.

Full disclosure: we're dope.security, a direct competitor. We've tried to give Umbrella real credit where it earns it.

Updated for 2027. Facts current as of October 2026.

The verdict in 30 seconds

• Best at: blocking malicious domains at the DNS layer across every device and port, with very little setup.
• Weakest at: seeing inside encrypted HTTPS sessions unless you buy SIG and route traffic through Cisco's cloud proxy.
• Users like it: Cisco Umbrella averages around 4.4 out of 5 on Gartner Peer Insights and Capterra as of October 2026.
• The 2027 catch: Umbrella SIG and DNS reach end of sale on January 31, 2027. Buying Umbrella now means planning a second migration, to Secure Access or something else, before your 2028 renewal.
• Buy it if: you're a committed Cisco shop that needs DNS filtering today and plans to move to Secure Access.

What is Cisco Umbrella?

Cisco Umbrella is a cloud-delivered security service that grew out of OpenDNS, which Cisco acquired in 2015. Its core job is DNS-layer security: when a device looks up a domain, Umbrella answers, and if the domain is malicious or blocked by policy, the connection never happens. The Secure Internet Gateway (SIG) packages add a cloud secure web gateway, cloud-delivered firewall, CASB and add-on DLP that inspect traffic in Cisco's data centers. For the full explainer, read what is Cisco Umbrella.

Cisco Umbrella in 2027: the end-of-life timeline

Any Cisco Umbrella review written today has to start here. On September 1, 2026, Cisco published end-of-life bulletin EOL15975 for Umbrella SIG and DNS, describing the product as evolving into Cisco Secure Access, its Security Service Edge (SSE) platform. The milestones:

• January 31, 2027: end of sale. Also the end of software maintenance releases, meaning the last date Cisco engineering may release product enhancements.
• January 31, 2028: last day to renew or add to an existing subscription.
• January 31, 2029: last date of support. After that, the product is obsolete.

Existing deployments keep working and stay supported through January 2029. But the product you evaluate today won't get new features after January 2027, and every Umbrella customer will move to Secure Access or another platform. We break down the choices in Cisco Umbrella end of life: your options.

Cisco Umbrella pricing and packages

Cisco doesn't publish list prices for Umbrella. You get a per-user quote from Cisco or a partner, and the number depends on package, seat count, term, and whether you buy through a Cisco Enterprise Agreement. Organizations already buying Duo, Meraki or other Cisco security products often get better per-feature economics through bundled licensing.

Umbrella comes in four main packages:

• DNS Security Essentials: DNS-layer filtering and threat blocking. No HTTPS inspection.
• DNS Security Advantage: adds the intelligent proxy for risky domains and file inspection.
• SIG Essentials: adds the full cloud secure web gateway, cloud-delivered firewall and CASB. The lowest tier that inspects encrypted web traffic.
• SIG Advantage: the top tier, with added capabilities such as IPS.

Several capabilities are separate SKUs on top of the package. Cisco's end-of-life bulletin lists Umbrella Data Loss Prevention, remote browser isolation and Investigate console access as their own line items. Budget for them if you need them.

Each package has a mapped successor. Per the bulletin, DNS Essentials maps to Secure Access DNS Essentials, DNS Advantage to Secure Access DNS Advantage, SIG Essentials to Secure Access Internet Access Essentials, and Umbrella DLP to Secure Access DLP. For estimates and the math by package, see our Cisco Umbrella pricing guide.

What Cisco Umbrella gets right

• DNS-layer protection is fast and broad. Blocking known-bad domains at resolution time stops a large class of phishing, malware and command-and-control traffic before a connection opens, on any port and for devices that can't run an agent.
• Deployment at the DNS layer is quick. Point your network DNS at Umbrella and every device on that network is covered.
• Talos threat intelligence. Cisco Talos is one of the most respected threat research teams in the industry, and its feeds power Umbrella's block lists.
• Cisco ecosystem fit. If you run Meraki, Cisco SD-WAN, Duo or ISE, Umbrella plugs in natively and licensing can bundle.
• Users are generally happy. Ratings around 4.4 out of 5 on Gartner Peer Insights reflect a product that does its core job well.

Where Cisco Umbrella falls short

DNS can't see inside HTTPS

DNS filtering decides on the domain. It doesn't see the URL path, the file being uploaded, or which account is signing in. Google's HTTPS Transparency Report shows the vast majority of Chrome page loads now use HTTPS, so on DNS-only packages that blind spot covers most of the web. Our explainer on URL filtering vs DNS filtering walks through the difference.

Fixing it with SIG means backhauling

To inspect HTTPS, you move up to SIG and route traffic through Cisco's cloud proxy, which requires a Cisco root certificate on every device. Now every inspected request makes a stop in a Cisco data center first. That's the same cloud-proxy model Zscaler and Netskope use, and it adds latency for remote and traveling users. We cover the tier in detail in Cisco Umbrella SIG Essentials explained.

Global category updates can fail globally

A shared cloud control plane is convenient until a definition goes wrong. Two 2026 examples from Cisco's own status page: on July 25, policies blocking the Microsoft Copilot app categories incorrectly matched legitimate Microsoft 365 hostnames, disrupting services including Outlook for about six hours. On September 21, a Generative AI category update misclassified Oracle domains and blocked them over DNS and SWG for about 41 minutes. Neither was catastrophic. Both show that one bad update reaches every customer at once. More in our Cisco Umbrella outages tracker.

AI governance stops at the domain

The control teams want most right now is allowing your corporate ChatGPT or Claude workspace while blocking personal accounts on the same domain. Tenant identity lives inside the encrypted session, so DNS can't make that call. In Umbrella, anything finer than allow or block the domain requires SIG, SSL decryption, and the extra cost that comes with it.

Another migration is coming

Umbrella customers already moved once when the standalone Roaming Client reached end of software maintenance on April 2, 2025 and its functionality moved into Cisco Secure Client. The Secure Access transition is a bigger move: a new console, a new policy model and new SKUs, on Cisco's timeline.

Who should use Cisco Umbrella in 2027

• Committed Cisco shops running Meraki, Duo or ISE that plan to move to Secure Access anyway.
• Teams that only need DNS-layer filtering and want broad, low-friction coverage, including devices that can't run an agent.
• Organizations with a Cisco Enterprise Agreement where bundled licensing makes the per-feature cost attractive.

Who should look elsewhere

• Remote and hybrid teams that need full HTTPS inspection. DNS-only misses it, and SIG adds a cloud detour.
• Teams governing AI tools. If you need to separate corporate and personal ChatGPT, Claude or Gemini accounts and inspect what gets uploaded, DNS can't do it.
• Anyone not already in the Cisco ecosystem. Outside Cisco, the integration advantages fade, and buying a product at end of sale is hard to justify.

If you're in this group, our top 10 Cisco Umbrella alternatives for 2027 compares the field.

Cisco Umbrella vs. an on-device secure web gateway

dope.security takes a different approach: the secure web gateway runs on the laptop itself, and traffic flies direct to the internet with no stopover data center.

• HTTPS visibility: dope.SWG performs SSL inspection on the device in every deployment, not just in a premium tier.
• Traffic path: no backhaul to a vendor data center, with up to 4x performance over legacy proxy SWGs.
• Corporate vs. personal accounts: Cloud Application Control allows enterprise ChatGPT, Claude, Google and Microsoft 365 tenants and blocks personal logins.
• Data in motion: Dopamine DLP intercepts file uploads and AI prompts. Text is extracted on the device and classified by an LLM with zero data retention.
• Operations: one console, policy lands on every endpoint in under a minute, and the agent runs on Mac and Windows in under 100 MB of RAM.

Real-world proof: Greylock Partners ditched Cisco Umbrella for dope.security and went from first proposal to signed contract in 27 days. Another Umbrella customer migrated 2,000 machines in two days.

Frequently asked questions

Is Cisco Umbrella any good?

Yes, at what it was built for. Its DNS-layer security is fast, easy to deploy and backed by Talos threat intelligence, and users rate it around 4.4 out of 5 on Gartner Peer Insights. Its limits are HTTPS visibility on DNS-only packages, backhaul on SIG, and the end-of-life timeline.

Is Cisco Umbrella being discontinued?

Cisco has announced end-of-sale and end-of-life for Umbrella SIG and DNS as the product evolves into Cisco Secure Access. The last day to order is January 31, 2027, the last day to renew is January 31, 2028, and support ends January 31, 2029.

How much does Cisco Umbrella cost?

Cisco doesn't publish list prices. Umbrella is quoted per user per year and varies by package (DNS Essentials, DNS Advantage, SIG Essentials, SIG Advantage), add-ons, seat count and term. Get a quote from Cisco or a partner, and ask how it maps to Secure Access pricing.

Does Cisco Umbrella inspect HTTPS traffic?

Only on the SIG packages, when traffic routes through Cisco's cloud proxy with SSL decryption turned on and a Cisco root certificate installed. DNS Security packages don't inspect HTTPS content.

What replaces Cisco Umbrella?

Cisco's official successor is Cisco Secure Access. If you want HTTPS inspection and AI governance without a cloud detour, an on-device secure web gateway like dope.security is the architectural alternative.

See it on your own fleet

Your Umbrella renewal clock is running. Start a free trial at dope.security/pricing, or book a 20-minute demo and test the corporate-vs-personal ChatGPT case against your own traffic.