Blocky vs Cisco Umbrella
Blocky and Cisco Umbrella are both network ad blocking software. Blocky is open source under Apache-2.0, with 7.1k GitHub stars. Cisco Umbrella is a commercial product from Cisco.
Which to pick
- Pick Blocky when
- You want Pi-hole-style network ad blocking as a single stateless binary configured in code, without a built-in web UI.
- Pick Cisco Umbrella when
- A business or school wants a simple first layer of web filtering and threat blocking across all sites and devices.
Side by side
A DNS proxy and ad blocker for a local network that applies blocklists per client group and supports DoH, DoT and DoQ, caching and conditional forwarding, all from one YAML file.
Cloud DNS-layer security that blocks malicious and unwanted domains for offices and roaming laptops, extending to secure web gateway and firewall features.
No admin interface out of the box; query logs and dashboards mean adding a database and Grafana or a third-party UI.
Higher tiers get expensive and are being folded into Cisco's wider security bundles.
Production-ready (both)
Self-hosted server
Cloud service
Go
Not published
Open source, Apache-2.0 (permissive)
Closed source, sold by Cisco
You can build it into a product you sell, as long as you keep its copyright notice.
Closed source: you use it under the maker's terms and cannot change or resell the code.
7.1k GitHub stars
No Wikipedia article of its own
Established: started 7 years ago, latest release v0.35.0.
Not known
Other comparisons
More network ad blockers and DNS filters
Both sides were judged on 2026-11-03 from makers' descriptions, Wikipedia, READMEs and GitHub data. License, age and popularity lines are worked out directly.