Cisco Identity Services Engine (ISE) review from a Junior perspective
February 12, 2026
Cisco Identity Services Engine (ISE) review from a Junior perspective
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Overall Satisfaction with Cisco Identity Services Engine (ISE)
Cisco Identity Services Engine (ISE) is used as our main RADIUS authentication server. It is a very powerfull tool and it can be very personalized for any company needs. Main issue currently is that Cisco Identity Services Engine (ISE) stills use the MAC address to do an Intune look up against Entra ID in order to retrieve Entra attributes for AuthZ, which cause problems because more a more devices uses MAC address randomization
Pros
- Policy Enforcement
- Logs readability (specially RADIUS logs)
Cons
- Understanding the GUI at first is very complicated
- Very hard to calculate
Main thing that Cisco Identity Services Engine (ISE) does better than ClearPass is the "personas" system implemented. Managing a cluster in ClearPass is not that easy, but, I think that ClearPass is still a better choice for small companies (HQ and a couple of branches)
Do you think Cisco Identity Services Engine (ISE) delivers good value for the price?
Not sure
Are you happy with Cisco Identity Services Engine (ISE)'s feature set?
Yes
Did Cisco Identity Services Engine (ISE) live up to sales and marketing promises?
I wasn't involved with the selection/purchase process
Did implementation of Cisco Identity Services Engine (ISE) go as expected?
I wasn't involved with the implementation phase
Would you buy Cisco Identity Services Engine (ISE) again?
Yes
Comments
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