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Cisco Duo vs Defender by One Identity comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Jul 20, 2026

Review summaries and opinions

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:
 

Categories and Ranking

Cisco Duo
Ranking in Authentication Systems
2nd
Average Rating
8.8
Reviews Sentiment
6.9
Number of Reviews
156
Ranking in other categories
Single Sign-On (SSO) (3rd), Access Management (4th), ZTNA as a Service (2nd), Cisco Security Portfolio (1st), Multi-Factor Authentication (MFA) (1st), AI Data Analysis (3rd)
Defender by One Identity
Ranking in Authentication Systems
13th
Average Rating
8.6
Reviews Sentiment
7.6
Number of Reviews
5
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
 

Mindshare comparison

As of July 2026, in the Authentication Systems category, the mindshare of Cisco Duo is 4.0%, down from 9.1% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Defender by One Identity is 1.4%, up from 0.8% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Authentication Systems Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
Cisco Duo4.0%
One Identity Defender1.4%
Other94.6%
Authentication Systems
 

Featured Reviews

Charles Slaustas - PeerSpot reviewer
Information Technology Contractor at Insight global
Supports seamless authentication for users across multiple organizations and personal portals
The features I use in Cisco Duo include Duo Pushes to confirm my identity to the device, and eventually as MFA security was increased, I actually had to use exchange passcodes. Sometimes, I have to go into the site and get into Cisco Duo to retrieve the passcode, and many of them have been two-factor, where the sites send a passcode that I have to enter into Cisco Duo. It has been more of the latter. I have not seen issues with lagging or crashing on Cisco Duo's end; it was usually on the client end, often because someone set up a bad upgrade or there were connection issues with the Cisco Duo cloud through the administrative site.
Mahesh Malve - PeerSpot reviewer
Senior Business Development Associate at DigitalTrack Solutions ind pvt ltd
Advanced analytics have strengthened privileged access security and reduced incident response time
While One Identity Defender is a strong solution overall, there are a few areas where I feel it could be improved. One area is the user interface and dashboard customization. Although it is functional, making it more modern and allowing deeper customization would improve the user experience, especially for quick monitoring. Another improvement could be in reporting flexibility. While it provides good reports, having more custom report building options and easier export features would be helpful for different compliance and manageability needs. From an integration perspective, while One Identity Defender works well with core systems, having more out-of-the-box integrations with modern cloud services and SaaS platforms would reduce the need for custom configuration. In terms of support, the overall support is good, but faster response times for critical issues and more detailed troubleshooting documentation would help teams resolve problems more efficiently.

Quotes from Members

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:
 

Pros

"Looking back at my initial investment in Cisco Duo versus the total value it has delivered over time, that choice has paid off for my company massively."
"Cisco Duo has made us more secure. We've managed to stop some threats with it and keep our users and devices safe."
"The deployment and installation process for Cisco Duo is quite straightforward, which is an advantage."
"Cisco Duo has benefited our company overall by giving us the ability to have multi-factor authentication."
"Looking back, the biggest impact Cisco Duo has had on our company is enhancing our security posture."
"Another feature is the single pane of glass management. That's important for analytics and also for troubleshooting. It means there's one place that you go to at least start the troubleshooting process."
"For one of my clients, the ROI was somewhere between 25 to 27 percent in year one."
"The product is really amazing, and I think it is one of the best documentation sets I have ever seen."
"If you decide to activate this solution, your infrastructure will be centered around flexibility."
"We find that the product scales very well."
"One Identity Defender has good network protection."
"It's very fast, and it's easy to use because it's integrated with Active Directory."
"One Identity Defender has positively impacted our organization by improving overall security through the addition of MFA, which reduces the risk of unauthorized access and makes user authentication more controlled and reliable."
"We have definitely seen a positive ROI from using One Identity Defender, as our security team now spends about twenty to thirty percent less time on manual log analytics and investigations because the system automatically highlights high-risk activities, and we did not need to increase team size despite growing infrastructure as the tool helps us handle more security events with the same team."
 

Cons

"I believe Cisco Duo needs to be improved on the delay process because there is a delay when we send a Duo Push or when we are signing into any applications."
"It is good on the functionality side, but their pricing model is a little bit weird."
"It already integrates with lots of products, but it can integrate with more products. There should be easy integration with Cisco products because sometimes, it can be quite complicated."
"Duo Security should have more customized use cases. For example, if a client needs to have more customization, it would be better to connect directly with Duo's R&D to try to discuss the issues together in order to add customizations."
"To improve Cisco Duo, wherever the team can try to reduce the number of clicks an end user needs to go through to authenticate would be good."
"Cisco Duo is a really good product and I am very happy with it, but sometimes we have to authenticate multiple times, which may be part of our administration."
"Often, people do not receive expiration messages, and sometimes, for security reasons, accounts get disabled without notifying the end user, so they mistakenly think something has gone wrong when it really just needs to be re-enabled on the external system."
"Cisco Duo could be improved with more interesting rules or correlation rules between all the data sources such as Windows and Azure."
"The only reason it is not a ten is because response time can sometimes be slower for complex or escalated cases."
"We have some clients that are wanting to protect their Apache web servers with One Identity Defender but all the research I have done says cannot be done. It can only be oriented to an IIS server. One Identity Defender should have more integration with more types of web servers."
"The login capabilities could be better."
"One Identity Defender is a strong product, but there are a few areas where it can be improved."
"Maybe it could provide support for more web applications. It seems more focused on IIS web applications."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"I haven't seen it in a while, but it's at par with everything else licensing-wise."
"I only need the solution for IT staff, which makes it relatively cheap. If I deployed it for the whole company, it would be costly, so it depends on the number of users. Duo Security is affordable compared to other products in the segment."
"I haven't seen any information on the pricing in four years, so I can't comment on that."
"Cisco has the most expensive products because market leaders tend to charge a lot."
"From a business perspective, it is a little bit costly. The licensing is on a per-user basis."
"The licensing is very good because it does not cost a lot of money. It's affordable for all-sized customers, including enterprises. There is an additional cost for premium support."
"It is affordable for what's coming to the table with it, but in this day and age, the cost is looked at under a microscope, and companies need to very finely define what is needed versus what is critical. In some cases, it might not be cost-effective for a company to have it. In a lot of other cases, it is the cost of doing business."
"It's a bit confusing because we're on a three-year plan with a certain number of licenses, and we've gone over that number. They told us that when we renew, they will add all these licenses. We've expanded quickly, so everyone's kind of scared because no one knows what the bill is with the long pricing cycle."
Information not available
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
11%
Manufacturing Company
9%
Comms Service Provider
8%
Outsourcing Company
7%
Outsourcing Company
16%
Construction Company
14%
Comms Service Provider
11%
Non Profit
7%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business62
Midsize Enterprise26
Large Enterprise78
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business8
Midsize Enterprise1
 

Questions from the Community

How does Duo Security compare with Microsoft Authenticator?
We switched to Duo Security for identity verification. We’d been using a competitor but got the chance to evaluate Duo for 30 days, and we could not be happier. Duo Security is easy to configure a...
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Duo Security?
My experience with the pricing, the setup cost, and the licensing of Cisco Duo is that it is really inexpensive in the first place, but the value that I get in return is hard to beat, especially wh...
What needs improvement with Duo Security?
For the next release, Cisco Duo could be improved by adding touchless authentication and biometric features.
What needs improvement with One Identity Defender?
One Identity Defender is a strong product, but there are a few areas where it can be improved. First, the user interface and reporting dashboards could be made more intuitive and customizable for f...
What is your primary use case for One Identity Defender?
One Identity Defender strengthens identity and access security through MFA, helping us ensure that only authorized users can access critical systems, especially for privileged accounts, with a focu...
What advice do you have for others considering One Identity Defender?
My advice for others looking into using One Identity Defender would be first to clearly define your use case, especially whether you need MFA mainly for privileged access, remote users, or both, as...
 

Also Known As

Duo Security
No data available
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Information Not Available
Bakersfield Police Department, Village of Westmont, Illinois
Find out what your peers are saying about Cisco Duo vs. Defender by One Identity and other solutions. Updated: June 2026.
906,852 professionals have used our research since 2012.