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Cisco Catalyst SD-WAN vs. Cisco Identity Services Engine (ISE)

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    Overview
    ProductRatingMost Used ByProduct SummaryStarting Price

    Cisco Catalyst SD-WAN

    Score8.7 out of 10
    N/ACisco Catalyst SD-WAN is a software-defined wide area network solution designed to simplify and optimize enterprise network connectivity in complex digital landscapes. It enables organizations to connect any user to any application, whether on-premises, in data centers, or across multiple clouds, with integrated capabilities for multicloud support, security, predictive automation, and enhanced network visibility—all built on a Secure Access Service Edge (SASE)-enabled…N/A

    Cisco Identity Services Engine (ISE)

    Score9 out of 10
    N/AThe Cisco Identity Services Engine (ISE) offers a network-based approach for adaptable, trusted access everywhere, based on context. It gives the user intelligent, integrated protection through intent-based policy and compliance solutions.N/A
    Pricing
    Cisco Catalyst SD-WANCisco Identity Services Engine (ISE)
    Editions & Modules
    No answers on this topic
    No answers on this topic
    Offerings
    Pricing Offerings
    Cisco Catalyst SD-WANCisco Identity Services Engine (ISE)
    Free Trial
    NoNo
    Free/Freemium Version
    NoNo
    Premium Consulting/Integration Services
    NoNo
    Entry-level Setup FeeNo setup feeNo setup fee
    Additional Details——
    More Pricing Information
    Community Pulse
    Cisco Catalyst SD-WANCisco Identity Services Engine (ISE)
    Considered Both Products
    Cisco
    Chose Cisco Catalyst SD-WAN
    We already had the infrastructure in place to use Cisco Catalyst SD-WAN. Using products from other vendors would have necessitated using additional equipment or virtual appliances.
    Incentivized
    Chose Cisco Catalyst SD-WAN
    Silver Peak is a pretty solid product as well. It does not offer as many customizations, but that also makes onboarding significantly easier. It's a tradeoff between the amount of supported features and the complexity of the dashboard. Similarly if you are willing to …
    Incentivized
    Chose Cisco Catalyst SD-WAN
    Complex networks, segmentation and scalability
    Incentivized
    Chose Cisco Catalyst SD-WAN
    Most of the Cisco SD-WAN capabilities were better than FortiGate's, especially the AAR
    Incentivized
    Cisco
    Chose Cisco Identity Services Engine (ISE)
    When comparing Cisco Identity Services Engine and Aurba ClearPass, Cisco Identity Services Engine provides more complex graphic user interface - it is easy to get lost within it, but on the other hand you can find everything you need. Cisco Identity Services Engine is very …
    Incentivized
    Key User Insights
    Would buy again
    96%
    Would buy again
    133 Answers
    97%
    Would buy again
    144 Answers
    Delivers good value for the price
    94%
    Delivers good value for the price
    116 Answers
    97%
    Delivers good value for the price
    128 Answers
    Happy with the feature set
    97%
    Happy with the feature set
    135 Answers
    96%
    Happy with the feature set
    142 Answers
    Lived up to sales and marketing promises
    91%
    Lived up to sales and marketing promises
    93 Answers
    93%
    Lived up to sales and marketing promises
    99 Answers
    Implementation went as expected
    87%
    Implementation went as expected
    109 Answers
    84%
    Implementation went as expected
    115 Answers
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    Cisco Meraki SD-WAN
    Score8.6 out of 10
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    VMware SD-WAN
    Score7.9 out of 10
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    Score9.6 out of 10
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    User Ratings
    Cisco Catalyst SD-WANCisco Identity Services Engine (ISE)
    Likelihood to Recommend
    8.7
    (150 ratings)
    9.0
    (146 ratings)
    Likelihood to Renew
    8.9
    (4 ratings)
    9.4
    (4 ratings)
    Usability
    8.7
    (67 ratings)
    7.9
    (6 ratings)
    Availability
    8.0
    (1 ratings)
    9.4
    (4 ratings)
    Performance
    8.0
    (1 ratings)
    9.0
    (1 ratings)
    Support Rating
    8.3
    (15 ratings)
    7.3
    (7 ratings)
    Implementation Rating
    -
    (0 ratings)
    8.4
    (4 ratings)
    Configurability
    10.0
    (1 ratings)
    8.0
    (1 ratings)
    Contract Terms and Pricing Model
    8.0
    (1 ratings)
    8.4
    (2 ratings)
    Ease of integration
    -
    (0 ratings)
    7.2
    (4 ratings)
    Product Scalability
    9.0
    (1 ratings)
    8.0
    (1 ratings)
    Vendor post-sale
    8.0
    (1 ratings)
    10.0
    (1 ratings)
    Vendor pre-sale
    7.0
    (1 ratings)
    9.0
    (1 ratings)
    User Testimonials
    Cisco Catalyst SD-WANCisco Identity Services Engine (ISE)
    Likelihood to Recommend
    Cisco
    It's great for connectivity. I think if you're looking at. There's a lot of players out there that do SD- WAN, you can do hosted solutions, you can do your own. If you're looking to do it yourself, I think this product works out well. I do know it's hosted elsewhere by some other companies, but for us, we want the control and we don't have a huge amount of sites, so being able to control that's important and the data that we can get out of the product, we can see just seeing the application experience through Cisco Catalyst SD-WAN, really gives us good information.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Cisco
    Well suited... I've used it for both wired and wireless access, and it's perfect for that. In addition to enforcing security on the port, you can also lock down east-west traffic. When you get to the point where you're configuring secure group tags and things like that, you can keep people from getting to places they shouldn't. Basically, you could turn your entire network into a firewall if you wanted to. You can secure access based on the identity of any given user through role-based authentication. For example, if you have salespeople and you don't want them accessing your financial or PCI environment, they authenticate as a salesperson and you can completely stop them from getting to any of that. That's really important, especially for us. Our payment card infrastructure servers are heavily locked down. Granted, in our situation, we firewall all that off anyway, but you still don't want some random individual to be able to even attempt that sort of thing. That's what it's really good for. I'm trying to think of a weakness. I don't know. We don't really struggle with it. There's nothing that I use it for where I wish it were better, at least not that I can think of offhand. I'm sure there are things, I just can't think of anything off the top of my head.
    Incentivized
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    Pros
    Cisco
    • We are able to use a multiple different circuits to go into the cloud, so we are not relying on just one particular private wireless. We're relying on wine circuits, ethernet, ethernet out. So it provides us that flexibility where we didn't have that before. Provides security that is very robust and flexible and scalable and it provides us with, the biggest thing is redundancy, where we have backup. For example, we have a Starlink for nuclear power plants. If our main circuits go down, we have that. And without Cisco Catalyst SD-WAN it would be very hard to actually achieve, to accomplish true redundancy. So we're happy with Cisco Catalyst SD-WAN in that regard.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Cisco
    • manageable scaled administrative access to network devices as needed
    • Great use as a radius server which allows proper authentication and authorization into the network
    • Multiple conditions that can be utilized to grant users access based on their role in the organization
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Cons
    Cisco
    • I will say the way we use it now, and I think what happened was the way it was deployed, it was fine, but unfortunately over the course of the years we've gotten a little out of hand with our device templates and feature templates. I think if there's any form of feedback that I would give to Cisco is how do we find ways to improve the environment as it stands so we get to a certain point with the environment and then we don't know how to undo it or fix it or optimize the environment. Because right now we're in a position where we're playing a lot of catch up and clean up and if there was a way or some tool or feature that we can take advantage of that would allow us to optimize that environment where we will kind of corner ourselves into a lot of problems in the future. There's some feature or something that we could take advantage of that will allow us to optimize that environment and not let it get out of control pretty easily. That would be my suggestion.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Cisco
    • Trustsec needs more documentation and configuration best practice examples
    • The licensing model can be difficult to explain and understand for customers
    • Difficult to get an accurate benchmark to know exactly how many Cisco Identity Services Engine nodes and the size of the deployment should be
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Likelihood to Renew
    Cisco
    I would rate SD-WAN highly because it has significantly improved network performance, reliability, and cost-efficiency for my organization. Its ability to optimize traffic dynamically, enhance security, and simplify management across multiple locations has been invaluable. With SD-WAN, we’ve reduced dependency on costly MPLS, improved cloud application performance, and gained greater control over our network infrastructure.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Cisco
    We are so very reliant on Cisco Identity Services Engine at this point that finding another solution would be a big hassle for us.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Usability
    Cisco
    The niche configurations are given equal focus as the standard use cases, which can make onboarding difficult in the beginning (ie why am I not using an entire tab of the portal), but aside from that part, the dashboard is relatively easy to navigate and apply the configuration. The metrics and analytics available are also nice to have in a single pane.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Cisco
    For us the solution is very easily useable on its own. Perhaps that has to do because we started using ISE in the 1.2 days and have seen it grow during the years. Policy creation, etc. is all very visible and thus easy to use. Deployment of multiple nodes is also incredibly easy and flexible. You can easily add or remove nodes as you wish.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Reliability and Availability
    Cisco
    I think if we could afford, we could have HA inplace but we planned out outage and workaround to avoid any outages.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Cisco
    We do have to occasionally reboot the servers when they get low on memory, but we're also a few versions behind. Availability has generally been pretty good though with no major outages in the time that we've had it implemented.
    Incentivized
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    Performance
    Cisco
    It does slow down over the period but it's same with other product. you need to clear/reboot services.
    Incentivized
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    Cisco
    yes it does. depending on where you coming from. Logs are pretty busy same as report. it also depending on devices count and design.
    Incentivized
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    Support Rating
    Cisco
    Al ser soluciones integradas del portafolio de soluciones de Cisco, el soporte es transversal a cada uno de los componentes implementados, teniendo el cliente la capacidad de resolver sus inconvenientes bajo una misma infraestructura que está totalmente homologada, satisfacciendo de esta manera, las necesidades del cliente asi como permitiendo, que este se concentre en su negocio. Since the Cisco SD-WAN tools are a part of Cisco’s broader portfolio of solutions, support cross-cuts to each of our deployed components, with our company as the customer having the ability to solve our problems through the same, approved infrastructure. Their support team easily satisfies the customer’s needs so that they continue to focus on business functions.
    Incentivized
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    Cisco
    Cisco support is second to none, both in terms of how you access support but also the knowledge of the individual support teams. If you focus on one technology and provide "manufacturer support" then you can rest assured that you are accessing Cisco's top individuals. I feel like this is a USP for Cisco support.
    Incentivized
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    Online Training
    Cisco
    No answers on this topic
    Cisco
    Training can only cover certain areas, there are a lot of areas training just can't cover. You have to learn by doing it.
    Incentivized
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    Implementation Rating
    Cisco
    I was late to participate but my team was very happy with the outcome.
    Incentivized
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    Cisco
    I think our system integrators lacks some competencies and this has led to an implementation that is still perfectible. (i.e. dedicating an interface for intra-cluster communication)
    Incentivized
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    Alternatives Considered
    Cisco
    We've used the old Cisco SD-WAN, which no longer exists. It was a lot more complex to configure what is now called Cisco Catalyst SD-WAN. So they've definitely come a long way in that it is a lot less complicated to set up and template based.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Cisco
    I think all give some visibility of device monitoring and management, but Cisco Identity Services Engine gives a good way to manage more details about the device in a centralized way that gives a wider range of monitoring and control than the other softwares individually. I don't think Cisco Identity Services Engine eliminates the need for these other software as of now, but there is potential for Cisco Identity Services Engine to be able to take over more of these roles.
    Incentivized
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    Contract Terms and Pricing Model
    Cisco
    I didn't take part of this decision but it always multiyear contract get best discount.
    Incentivized
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    Cisco
    Cisco ISE was competitively priced and Cisco was able to leverage some of our existing contracts to help ease the purchase.
    Incentivized
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    Scalability
    Cisco
    Really strength in scalability. Only thigs it's depends on some prototype Cisco product which you can't work with other Cisco products.
    Incentivized
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    Cisco
    It's fully customised and comprehensive. only thing is you need to know what you want. Proper research and planning would save lots of time and effort .
    Incentivized
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    Return on Investment
    Cisco
    • Our branch offices can connect to our enterprise network and the internet quickly and securely, which has helped to increase productivity and reduce downtime.
    • We have been able to reduce our dependence on expensive MPLS connections, and instead utilize a combination of broadband and LTE connections, which are more cost-effective
    • The centralized location improves network visibility and troubleshooting process
    Read full review
    Cisco
    • I don't know about negatives because we haven't seen it right now, but positive impact is one is the roadmap we have. And now since we are going ahead with doing the deployment of Cisco ISE, we see that we are getting closure to, so at the end of the day, we have to make sure that operationally we stay excellent. So that's where operational excellence comes in. Cisco ISE is basically addressing that for us. Right now we are in a situation if there is a WIFI issue or if there is an authentication issue, it gets really difficult to isolate the problem. But with Cisco ISE , this functionality is going to come in. So we believe that it would be a good ROI.
    Incentivized
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    ScreenShots

    Cisco Identity Services Engine (ISE) Screenshots

    Screenshot of Cisco Identity Services Engine (ISE)