CleanBrowsing vs Cisco Umbrella

This is where the difference is most dramatic. Cisco Umbrella does not publish pricing publicly — getting a quote requires engaging with Cisco sales, and contracts are typically annual with multi-year commitments encouraged. Industry reports consistently place Cisco Umbrella pricing in the thousands to tens of thousands of dollars per year, even for smaller organizations.

CleanBrowsing publishes all pricing on its website. Plans start at $75 per year for 25 devices. You can sign up, configure your filters, and be protected in minutes — no sales calls, no contracts, no procurement process.

For organizations that need DNS filtering without the overhead of an enterprise procurement cycle, CleanBrowsing is the clear choice.

Cisco Umbrella is one component of Cisco's broader security portfolio. It bundles DNS-layer security with a Secure Web Gateway, CASB, cloud firewall, and remote browser isolation. These are valuable capabilities for large enterprises running complex multi-cloud environments.

CleanBrowsing is a dedicated DNS filtering service. It does one thing and does it well: filtering content at the DNS layer for families, schools, businesses, and Wi-Fi providers. You get granular content filtering, custom allow/block lists, encrypted DNS support, activity monitoring, and roaming clients — all included in every paid plan.

If you only need DNS-based content filtering, why pay for SWG, CASB, and browser isolation you will never use?

Cisco Umbrella's full deployment typically requires installing the Umbrella roaming client on endpoints, integrating with Cisco's cloud infrastructure, configuring policies through the Umbrella dashboard, and potentially integrating with existing Cisco infrastructure (Meraki, ISR routers, AnyConnect). Organizations without dedicated IT staff will find this challenging.

CleanBrowsing deploys in minutes by simply changing your DNS settings. Point your router, device, or network to CleanBrowsing's DNS servers and filtering begins immediately. No agents are required for basic filtering. For organizations that need roaming protection, clients for iOS and Android are included in all paid plans at no additional charge.

Whether you are deploying on a single home router or across a school district, CleanBrowsing gets you up and running without enterprise-grade complexity.

In April 2025, Cisco reached end-of-life for the legacy Umbrella Roaming Client. Organizations that relied on this client for off-network protection are now required to migrate to Cisco Secure Client (formerly AnyConnect) — a more complex agent that bundles VPN, endpoint security, and DNS protection into a single package.

This migration adds operational overhead and may force organizations to adopt additional Cisco infrastructure they did not previously need. For organizations affected by this transition, CleanBrowsing offers a straightforward alternative: lightweight DNS filtering that works on any device, any network, without agent dependencies.

Cisco Umbrella benefits from Cisco Talos, one of the largest commercial threat intelligence teams in the world. Talos processes massive volumes of telemetry data and provides industry-leading malware, phishing, and command-and-control protection. This is genuinely impressive and a real advantage for Cisco.

CleanBrowsing maintains curated threat feeds updated every 3 hours. Our categorization engine integrates community feedback, and we keep ourselves honest by making our categorization publicly verifiable at categorify.org. For most organizations, our threat coverage provides solid, reliable protection.

If your primary threat concern is advanced persistent threats and nation-state actors, Cisco Talos is hard to beat. If you need reliable malware and phishing protection for your network, CleanBrowsing delivers at a fraction of the cost.

CleanBrowsing has dedicated features for K-12 schools and libraries seeking CIPA compliance. Our filters are purpose-built for education environments, providing the content filtering, monitoring, and SafeSearch enforcement institutions need to meet federal requirements. We are trusted by hundreds of schools, from public school districts to universities like Cornell, UCLA, and Arizona State. See our complete CIPA compliance guide and checklist.

Cisco Umbrella can technically meet CIPA requirements, but it was not designed with K-12 education as its primary use case. The pricing alone puts it out of reach for many school districts and public libraries operating on limited budgets.

Cisco Umbrella offers multi-organization management through its MSP console. However, MSPs working with Cisco typically need to navigate Cisco's partner program, meet minimum commitments, and manage the complexity of the broader Cisco ecosystem.

CleanBrowsing's partner program provides centralized management for MSPs starting at $750 per year for 10 customer accounts. It includes the same filtering capabilities as individual plans, with a unified management console for overseeing multiple client networks.

Both CleanBrowsing and Cisco Umbrella support encrypted DNS protocols. CleanBrowsing includes DNS-over-HTTPS (DoH) and DNS-over-TLS (DoT) on every plan, including the free tier. We believe encrypted DNS is a basic requirement, not a premium feature.

Cisco Umbrella supports DoH and DoT as part of its platform, though the implementation is tightly coupled with Cisco's infrastructure and client software.