--- title: CIRA DNS Firewall Reviews meta_title: 'CIRA DNS Firewall Reviews 2026: Details, Pricing, & Features | G2' meta_description: Filter 18 reviews by the users' company size, role or industry to find out how CIRA DNS Firewall works for a business like yours. aggregate_rating: rating_value: 4.8 review_count: 18 scale: '5' date_modified: '2026-05-05' parent_category: name: Network Security url: https://www.g2.com/categories/network-security --- # CIRA DNS Firewall Reviews **Vendor:** CIRA **Category:** [DNS Security Solutions](https://www.g2.com/categories/dns-security-solutions) **Average Rating:** 4.8/5.0 **Total Reviews:** 18 ## About CIRA DNS Firewall Uniquely Canadian cybersecurity delivered by CIRA. The CIRA DNS Firewall delivers protection against malware and phishing attacks by blocking access to malicious websites at the DNS layer. And it does this only from servers located in Canada to improve performance, data privacy, and sovereignty. Combining advanced data science, a global network for threat detection and decades of experience managing critical infrastructure to deliver a cost-effective and easy way to add to your defence-in-depth strategy. The unique threat intelligence is provided by Akamai and includes multiple additional feeds, like that from the Canadian Center for Cybersecurity. After-all you don't really have depth if your threat information all comes from the same source. On average we add more than 100,000 net new malicious URLs to the block list every day, and we do it within 14 minutes of the first query anywhere on the global internet. Protecting over 3 million Canadians and counting. As a non-profit, we work closely with network operators in Canada, keep all data sovereign and private, and give-back through grant programs and helps to build Canada's internet infrastructure. ## CIRA DNS Firewall Reviews ### 1. Great Option to Limit Advertising and Unwanted Websites **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Information Technology and Services | Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.) **Reviewed Date:** January 07, 2021 **What do you like best about CIRA DNS Firewall?** The firewall is easy to configure and has an option to temporarily disable in order to test sites. **What do you dislike about CIRA DNS Firewall?** Using the advertising block feature can mean email links do not work. You then have to figure out what the link is and add it as an allowed site. Minor in the overall scheme of things. **Recommendations to others considering CIRA DNS Firewall:** This is a great option to limit traffic to your router / firewall. Great first gate utility. **What problems is CIRA DNS Firewall solving and how is that benefiting you?** Blocking some unwanted spawned browser pages. Less adverts overall. ### 2. Outstanding value **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Jaymon L. | Director, IT Services, Enterprise (> 1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** June 26, 2020 **What do you like best about CIRA DNS Firewall?** It adds another layer of content and security control. Redundancy alone would be worth the price, but it also augments our other security tools. It is super simple to setup. Policies can be broad or granular as you needed. It catches malware payloads that have not yet been detected by other vendors. I love tools that are simple, effective, and affordable. CIRA's D-Zone Firewall checks all 3 boxes. **What do you dislike about CIRA DNS Firewall?** I do not dislike anything. It seems like I need to add more letters to meet some kind of minimum. **What problems is CIRA DNS Firewall solving and how is that benefiting you?** Ransomeware and phishing payloads sent via email make up a significant majority of threat vectors. D-Zone Firewall gives us another method of blocking credential grabbing destinations. ### 3. dzone survey **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Primary/Secondary Education | Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** July 09, 2020 **What do you like best about CIRA DNS Firewall?** It's super easy to setup and manage. and it's nice peace of mind knowing that there is an additional scan happening above our corporate firewalls Thanks for adding the HTTPS blocks in the reporting. Our counts went way up after that was added. **What do you dislike about CIRA DNS Firewall?** reporting aspects good be better, but what is there now works ok. Would be great to see the IP associated with the blocks/alerts There are some false hits, like at one point 'reddit.com', but we can manually whitelist them **Recommendations to others considering CIRA DNS Firewall:** use it :) **What problems is CIRA DNS Firewall solving and how is that benefiting you?** nothing really noted to date but it's great to see it blocking stuff that goes back our firewall ### 4. Great value for an effective and simple security solution **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Mike T. | Senior Information Security Analyst, Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** January 08, 2021 **What do you like best about CIRA DNS Firewall?** Simple set up and good security with no false positives so far. No need for any on prem systems and very quick to get it going. No real administration is required once it's set up. The daily reports include a csv so that you don't miss any activity that happens while away for the weekend for instance. The price is great particularly for cash strapped startups. The people at CIRA are very flexible on terms and provide excellent support and training. Multiple profiles available, content filtering. **What do you dislike about CIRA DNS Firewall?** No reporting (with the exception of daily reports) or view of history. A report of blocks for a period whether it's a week or a month would help to show management what's happening within the organization and that we're getting value for this service. Even if it was just a csv. **Recommendations to others considering CIRA DNS Firewall:** It's a great way to add a layer of security and save budget for other security solutions. Having a log collector for your internal DNS will allow you to identify which systems attempted to go to malicious sites by search for URLs indicated on the DNS firewall console or in the daily reports. **What problems is CIRA DNS Firewall solving and how is that benefiting you?** We've been building our security from the ground up and had no DNS security or visibility into whether or not any of our systems were trying to access C2s. Seeing C2 traffic would have indicated that we'd need to hunt internally for compromised systems. I've also realized that this is a simple, inexpensive and effective layer of security that will protect the entire company at this layer. ### 5. Simple to install and provides benefits right away **Rating:** 4.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Higher Education | Enterprise (> 1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** July 28, 2021 **What do you like best about CIRA DNS Firewall?** Dashboard is simple to navigate and quick to load **What do you dislike about CIRA DNS Firewall?** More details on the DNS request in the logs would help locate potential issues. **What problems is CIRA DNS Firewall solving and how is that benefiting you?** We have 3rd party email and Exchange Online protection, plus EDR on endpoints. Even this overlap of security does not stop or detect all issues. The DNS firewall has been able to catch some campaigns specifically targeted to Canadian higher ed. ### 6. An easy to use DNS firewall **Rating:** 4.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Higher Education | Enterprise (> 1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** July 28, 2021 **What do you like best about CIRA DNS Firewall?** Ease of setup and low administrative burden but provides an additional layer of security, especially for our wireless network. **What do you dislike about CIRA DNS Firewall?** CIRA d-Zone firewall is not a feature-rich program. **What problems is CIRA DNS Firewall solving and how is that benefiting you?** Our wireless network is open to our student's unmanaged devices. CIRA d-Zone provides the ability to block C2C bot access and malicious URL access that our local firewalls and various other threat lists may not detect. ### 7. CIRA DNS Firewall is worth the small investment **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Government Administration | Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** July 28, 2021 **What do you like best about CIRA DNS Firewall?** It is straightforward to set up and manage. We use it as another security layer. A few times a month, it catches something our other systems missed. **What do you dislike about CIRA DNS Firewall?** I think it needs to bteer advertising and more exposure. Very few people I speak with have ever heard of it. **What problems is CIRA DNS Firewall solving and how is that benefiting you?** Provided excellent backup for our existing security systems. ### 8. An elegant extenstion of your current security implementation **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Dan P. | Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** August 31, 2020 **What do you like best about CIRA DNS Firewall?** The product is so easy to implement, and manage. Zero maintenance required. Very low number of false positives. Ability to customize profiles for various networks that we manage. We can Create filtering profiles for Students and faculty that are less restrictive than we might have for administrative staff. Global protection across all of our campus ensuring that all systems are protected against malware and phishing. Other products like the DNS filtering that can be implemented on our firewall break on SSL connections causing certificate errors without installing a certificate on the client machines. This solution works very well in a BYOD environment where it becomes more difficult to trust vendor certificates globally. DNS Firewall Instantly blocks access from infected systems to their C2 servers. **What do you dislike about CIRA DNS Firewall?** I wold love to see a tool set developed to correlate blocks against logged DNS queries on our windows and bind DNS servers. Quick start guides should include documentation for forwarding bind servers to CIRA D-Zone DNS Firewall servers. We would really appreciate a self service URL for end users to submit what they consider to be false positives. Perhaps this could be done via a button on the block page. I wold also like a bit more information displayed on the block paged such as the URL and IP that were blocked although I understand that this could be challenging due to the nature of the product, and being that the client hitting the blocked page are different from the server doing the recursive lookup. **Recommendations to others considering CIRA DNS Firewall:** Communication is key. Sell the product as protection rather than blocking. This will aid in user acceptance. At a minimum enable Malware protection and the available threat feeds. This provides a last line of defense for your systems and instantly neuters many malware etc from contacting their command and control servers. Provide a contact information on your custom block page to allow users to self report if they see continuous blocked connections. Branding, of block pages is important. Include screenshots in your initial communications and documentation so users will know what to expect. It is also important that end users know that blocked pages are legitimate. Try providing information to your user community about CIRA Canadian Shield as an offering that will allow them to protect their homes and families. We have found that this is an additional benefit now that much of our user base is working from home due to the covid-19 pandemic. **What problems is CIRA DNS Firewall solving and how is that benefiting you?** The primary purpose of using this service for us is to block phishing and malware. We are a university so in many ways blocking of access to internet sites is not something that received warmly. However protecting our users is required. This product allows us to implement a very non-intrusive protection that does a great job. Even systems that may have a malware installed are no longer able to call home to a C2 server. ### 9. Excellent Tool **Rating:** 4.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Ian T. | Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** August 17, 2020 **What do you like best about CIRA DNS Firewall?** Easy to use interface, cost effective and robust detection. Makes it easy to automatically add a blocking control that's based on a threat feed and also manually block sites that may be reported as malicious. **What do you dislike about CIRA DNS Firewall?** I found the interface a little confusing at first. Once I got the hang of it it was easy, but I wish there were faster ways to do common tasks like manually block a site. **Recommendations to others considering CIRA DNS Firewall:** Like most security tools, this application fills a specific need, which it does very well. However, it's a specific tool and not a suite of products. You need to think about this tool as part of an overall strategy of controls. **What problems is CIRA DNS Firewall solving and how is that benefiting you?** In addition to the automated blocking of known malware sites, we also use this as part of phishing response to help mitigate the impact of users clicking a phishing link. ### 10. Best service ever!! **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Ron L. | Enterprise (> 1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** August 17, 2020 **What do you like best about CIRA DNS Firewall?** The network I manage has over 1200 endpoints. Primarily k12 teachers, students and public libraries. This service has identified 10's of thousands of bots and malicious websites that would have gone unnoticed by the sector. **What do you dislike about CIRA DNS Firewall?** If a school division is using an additional layer of content filtering, it is also a cloud service and it also requires DNS forwarding so the D-Zone service cannot be used as well. **Recommendations to others considering CIRA DNS Firewall:** Highly recommend this product to ALL education institutions. **What problems is CIRA DNS Firewall solving and how is that benefiting you?** There is a wide range of technical expertise in the sector. This greatly minimizes impacts to their networks. We have had zero ransomeware attacks since implementing. ### 11. Set it and forget it security at it's finest. **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Trent D. | Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** June 26, 2020 **What do you like best about CIRA DNS Firewall?** D-Zone was very easy to implement. I routed all of our division's dns requests to D-Zone. Then went and tweaked the settings based on the IP address that the request was exiting on, and then just watched it work. I really like the weekly email reports just to keep tabs on the service. I breathe a sigh of relief every time I see the number of Malware and Phishing attempts that were blocked. I loved it so much, that I immediately set it up at my home when it became available. **What do you dislike about CIRA DNS Firewall?** The interface in the beginning was a bit difficult to understand. Having said that though, over the years it just keeps getting better. **Recommendations to others considering CIRA DNS Firewall:** Easy to implement, set it and forget it, it just works!!! **What problems is CIRA DNS Firewall solving and how is that benefiting you?** I will say it again.... I breathe a sigh of relief every time I get the weekly report and see the number of Malware and Phishing attempts that were blocked. We would occasionally get DNS issues with our previous DNS provider. The only time I have experienced no DNS resolution was when the Internet was down... Not their fault. ### 12. Not 100 percent **Rating:** 4.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Printing | Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** January 07, 2021 **What do you like best about CIRA DNS Firewall?** Web Filter where it works. I couldn't get it to work at a couple of networks. **What do you dislike about CIRA DNS Firewall?** I couldn't get it to work on some networks **What problems is CIRA DNS Firewall solving and how is that benefiting you?** I was looking for an extra layer of security. The web filter was an added bonus. ### 13. CIRA DNS Firewall **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Primary/Secondary Education | Enterprise (> 1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** August 17, 2020 **What do you like best about CIRA DNS Firewall?** As part of our multi layer approach to security, CIRA DNS was an easy fit to provide an additional layer of security at the DNS layer for the entire organization. We like that it is cloud based, easy to setup and seamless for our end users. The interface is easy to use. Once setup, you rarely need to do anything. **What do you dislike about CIRA DNS Firewall?** If I had to pick something it would be the addition of more granular reporting (ex. include IP info). **What problems is CIRA DNS Firewall solving and how is that benefiting you?** Adding an additional layer of security to our organization to further protect our staff and students. ### 14. Great way to start protecting the users **Rating:** 4.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Government Administration | Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** July 09, 2020 **What do you like best about CIRA DNS Firewall?** - Easy to implement / easy to manage - In our case, it offers a good "first level" of protection (or could be added to an existing solution depending on the case) - Very little overhead; once the configurations are done, you basically have nothing to do. - Simple, yet effective - No hardware required - No upgrades or updates required - CIRA team is easy to work with **What do you dislike about CIRA DNS Firewall?** There isn't much to dislike about the platform; maybe it would be nice to have access to some more reports but it's not a "dislike", would be more like a "nice to have" **Recommendations to others considering CIRA DNS Firewall:** We would not use the CIRA firewall as the only or main firewall for a corporate environment. However, we believe it's a good tool that can be used in two ways : - To filter traffic on a Public Guest Internet connection where there would not be any type of filtering if it would not be from the CIRA DNS Firewall AND/OR - As an additional layer of protection to your current corporate firewall **What problems is CIRA DNS Firewall solving and how is that benefiting you?** We are mainly using the CIRA DNS Firewall in our sites where we offer public guest Internet access (Typically larger sites like arenas, sports dome, community halls). Our main concern was to prevent kids for accessing content that was judged inappropriate. We also feel like it's allowing us to prevent people in general from accessing inappropriate content. ### 15. Easy to set up, work silently in the background **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** forrest w. | Sr. Manager, Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** August 17, 2020 **What do you like best about CIRA DNS Firewall?** The web filtering setup is simple, also they can add company networks for reducing the false alarm. **What do you dislike about CIRA DNS Firewall?** webportal interface is a little bit confusing, hope can be improved **What problems is CIRA DNS Firewall solving and how is that benefiting you?** Office users and VPN users can be protected by DNS Firewall, this is good. Hope we can get all users protected including the Work from Home ones ### 16. Another effective level of security that just works. **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Primary/Secondary Education | Enterprise (> 1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** July 28, 2020 **What do you like best about CIRA DNS Firewall?** The DNS firewall is simple to implement and monitor. It gives you information that allows you to dig into possible compromised devices. **What do you dislike about CIRA DNS Firewall?** There is nothing about the product at this point that I dislike. **Recommendations to others considering CIRA DNS Firewall:** This is an effective solution to social engineering hacks and compromised devices within you network. By redirecting the traffic the attacks become ineffective. **What problems is CIRA DNS Firewall solving and how is that benefiting you?** The DNS firewall adds a layer of protection against social engineered security threats, it allow us some security for those that can't help but click phishing links. ### 17. CIRA DNS Firewall Review **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Education Management | Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** August 05, 2020 **What do you like best about CIRA DNS Firewall?** Progressive protection for name resolution BEFORE clients access malicious sites. **What do you dislike about CIRA DNS Firewall?** No downside as far as our experience so far. **Recommendations to others considering CIRA DNS Firewall:** Evaluate cost vs return. **What problems is CIRA DNS Firewall solving and how is that benefiting you?** Educational sector protection for hundreds of clients. ### 18. Fantastic service, affordable for public sector organizations! **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Government Administration | Enterprise (> 1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** July 08, 2020 **What do you like best about CIRA DNS Firewall?** Easy to implement. Seamless to users. Adds an invisible but effective layer of security. **What do you dislike about CIRA DNS Firewall?** Reporting can be greatly improved to allow more granular results. **What problems is CIRA DNS Firewall solving and how is that benefiting you?** DNS security helps prevent problems before they start - if a domain is recognized as a threat, the connection is never made. We've seen this at play and it's been brilliant. ## CIRA DNS Firewall Discussions - [What is CIRA DNS Firewall used for?](https://www.g2.com/discussions/what-is-cira-dns-firewall-used-for) - [How to protect the work from home users](https://www.g2.com/discussions/30682-how-to-protect-the-work-from-home-users) - 1 upvote - [View CIRA DNS Firewall pricing details and edition comparison](https://www.g2.com/products/cira-dns-firewall/reviews?section=pricing&secure%5Bexpires_at%5D=2026-06-16+14%3A03%3A28+-0500&secure%5Bsession_id%5D=adbe7f8e-88fe-4e26-85af-8f84e6f0012e&secure%5Btoken%5D=6326ead5a716c29d7d409b523d94328614e85d718757e380874b47e2078c1b68&format=llm_user) ## CIRA DNS Firewall Features **Protection** - Quarantine - Continuous Monitoring - Guest Network Protection - BYOD Protection - Native DNS over HTTPS (DoH) **Functionality** - DNS Lookups - Threat Intelligence - Advanced Traffic Filtering **Administration** - Whitelisting - Policy Enforcement - Incident Reports - Multi-Network Management ## Top CIRA DNS Firewall Alternatives - [Cloudflare Application Security and Performance](https://www.g2.com/products/cloudflare-application-security-and-performance/reviews) - 4.5/5.0 (579 reviews) - [DNSFilter](https://www.g2.com/products/dnsfilter/reviews) - 4.6/5.0 (243 reviews) - [Cisco Umbrella](https://www.g2.com/products/cisco-umbrella/reviews) - 4.4/5.0 (266 reviews)