We’re considering changing DNS providers from Ci$co Umbrella to ChurchDNS. Does anyone have any experience with ChurchDNS or both and able to compare services?
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Never heard of ChurchDNS before now. What are you looking for in a DNS provider?
We made the switch from OpenDNS to ChurchDNS a few months ago because Cisco rates were too expensive. It took a bit extra to get ChurchDNS working for us, mainly because they blocked domains that OpenDNS did not. After that, it works just as well. ChurchDNS is changing the name to Scout something soon, if they haven’t already. I think it was $300 a year which was much lower than Cisco wanted to charge us.
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What are you doing for laptops offsite as I don’t think ChurchDNS has a mobile agent?
For our mobile clients we use SonicWall Content Filtering Client. It works rather well. Same filtering as we have when onsite.
@davidshq mainly looking for web content filtering for all devices - those we can’t put clients on or don’t have control over.
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Just wanted to chime in here to mention that we have a Cisco MSSP (Managed Security Services Provider) agreement to sell Cisco Umbrella.
This gives us quite a bit of pricing flexibility so I would certainly be happy to compare for anyone - feel free to send me a PM.
That said, we would expect Cisco to be more expensive than a vanilla content filtering solution because the cheaper ones are likely to rely on open source data bases whereas with Cisco you get Cisco proprietary threat intelligence and (with certain packages) selective proxying to block advanced threats and malware.
What is perhaps of more interest to the church community than per-user licensing is the new Meraki MR + Umbrella combined license. This provides a subset of Umbrella functionality for Meraki WiFi networks without needing to pay for a full Umbrella license. The benefit here of course is that you are then paying per AP not per user.
I hope this is of use!