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Cisco Identity Services Engine (ISE) vs Symantec Privileged Access Manager comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive Summary

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 Identity Services Eng...
Average Rating
8.2
Reviews Sentiment
6.7
Number of Reviews
143
Ranking in other categories
Network Access Control (NAC) (1st), Cisco Security Portfolio (1st)
Symantec Privileged Access ...
Average Rating
7.8
Reviews Sentiment
7.0
Number of Reviews
53
Ranking in other categories
Privileged Access Management (PAM) (18th)
 

Mindshare comparison

Cisco Identity Services Engine (ISE) and Symantec Privileged Access Manager aren’t in the same category and serve different purposes. Cisco Identity Services Engine (ISE) is designed for Network Access Control (NAC) and holds a mindshare of 25.1%, down 30.7% compared to last year.
Symantec Privileged Access Manager, on the other hand, focuses on Privileged Access Management (PAM), holds 1.6% mindshare, up 1.6% since last year.
Network Access Control (NAC)
Privileged Access Management (PAM)
 

Featured Reviews

SunilkumarNaganuri - PeerSpot reviewer
Enhanced device administration hindered by complex deployment and security limitations
Cisco Identity Services Engine (ISE) needs to improve the profiling preauthentication. They are very poor in asset classification and should focus on improving the preauthentication profiling, especially for NAC use cases. This will give them a roadmap for software-defined access (SDA) use cases and network segmentation. Threat detection capabilities are very weak. Additionally, the product is vulnerable and has many bugs.
Muzi Lubisi - PeerSpot reviewer
Secure management of sensitive servers and seamless applications with direct linking
The credential injection feature is highly valued, particularly for RDP sessions. A majority of customers use it for RDP, and a couple for Linux servers. The broader capabilities, including access to multiple systems, web-based applications, and clustering, have never posed an issue. The threat analytics aspect is also a robust feature that analyzes all pertinent information.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"The endpoint profiling feature is among the most valuable because it keeps me from having to manually maintain a MAC address bypass list to track endpoints. I can have ISE profile them for me and then put them in the right bucket."
"It has allowed us to pull in multiple authentication databases, then centralize them into a captive portal system."
"The core point is that Cisco ISE is the same globally compared to FortiAuthenticator. Whether I deploy in China, the US, South Africa, or wherever, I'm can get all the capabilities. It allows me to directly integrate with 365, and from a communications point of view, that is a good capability."
"There is good integration with third-party systems like antivirus patch management, MDM."
"The most valuable feature is the integration with StealthWatch and DNA as one fabric."
"Cisco ISE is a comprehensive solution that allows you to control access to network resources granularly based on policies."
"Cisco Identity Services Engine (ISE) is very good at device administration."
"It's flexible and stable. It's been good as a standard environment to run."
"Symantec PAM is easier to deploy compared to its competitors, such as BeyondTrust."
"You can do A2A integration. You can have your own script, which can then run outside of PA to retrieve the password and perform other tasks."
"For me, it is the robust API which is the most valuable feature. This allows for low maintenance costs and allows applications to automatically connect. This is great to automate security of the DevOps pipeline for shared secrets across environments. Also, being on Linux and a virtual appliance is great."
"We know we can scale up with what we have, and we probably will not need to buy any further appliances down the road."
"The key benefits are we improve our governance. We ensure we can build more trust in the way we run and operate our environment, and most of all is the accountability."
"The agent-based credential management solution allows clients to programmatically use the agent to collect passwords during runtime from Symantec Privileged Access Manager."
"Whoever built it from the ground up, they understand how an organization is laid out."
"The two factor authentication, and the single most important capability was it supported PIV and CAC as one of the two factors. That was pretty huge for us."
 

Cons

"The interface could be more user-friendly and the ability to apply rules to MAC addresses, for example, if I wanted to allow a certain MAC address access at a particular time I cannot make this adjustment."
"They could incorporate some AI features."
"I would definitely improve the deployment and maybe a little bit of the support. Our first exposure to ISE had a lot of issues."
"The licensing scheme is complex and could use enhancement to provide more options."
"Difficult to figure out the protocols and nodes in order to implement correctly."
"Cisco ISE's performance could be better, faster, and more robust."
"I don't like the fact that we can see the logs only for 24 hours. Maybe that happens because of the way we set it up."
"The initial setup was a little bit complex. It's not that simple because it requires a lot of prerequisites for the solution to get a hold on."
"Bring more technology into the portfolio and being able to collapse those products into a much more integrated way."
"They need to do a little bit more on the mainframe side.​"
"What I hope happens with the new product CA PAM is to keep all the useful features that exist in PA, but what I’ve noticed with many new products is the UI gets polished but systems lags stability and performance or it adds additional complexity instead of simplifying the user experience."
"The service account management functionality needs to be extended to application pools, SQL database, PowerShell scripts, service account discovery, etc."
"We have to do a lot of manual work to automate features."
"It's difficult to locate the reports, there are limits on what reports can be run from the GUI, and the report formats are lacking."
"They should include some assignments in the test environment to explore the product's features."
"Instead of just giving passwords to the user based on job function, from auditing perspective, turn that cycle around. That would really help from an auditing standpoint."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"ISE has always been expensive compared to other products in terms of what it does on a user level."
"Licensing is a disaster. It's a mess and I hope they fix it soon."
"Hardware appliances are expensive...Now moving to DNA-styled licensing, we have subscription-based licensing for everything. I hope it will continue to be fair, but we will have to wait and see."
"I think licensing costs roughly $2,000 a year. ISE is more expensive than Network Access Control."
"The technology is good, but to use some of the other features, and capabilities, they request that we purchase the Cisco DNA Center. As a result, the bundled price is a little high."
"That's where things got a bit more complicated. Previously, it was a one-time purchase and we just had to renew support. These days, there's a subscription model, which is supposed to be easier and cheaper as well, but it's more pricey"
"The price of Cisco ISE (Identity Services Engine) is expensive and we are thinking about changing to FortiGate."
"The SMARTnet technical support is available at an additional cost."
"It is reasonably priced."
"The prices are not low, but one can ask for a discount. It’s not the cheapest PAM solution."
"The version we are using is affordable compared to BeyondTrust, which is maybe three to four times as expensive, but it depends on the features."
"Appliances are relatively cheap, don’t skimp. Make sure you have redundancy, high availability, and enough appliances to manage the concurrent workload."
"It is more expensive than other solutions on the market."
"Don’t go with an agent model. Don’t go with a model that has you buying a thousand different parts. Go with PAM that gives you everything, or you’ll just be paying costs of implementing another tool that PAM would have just given you up front."
"I would prefer better licensing options for the 20-100 users we have at a given time."
"Cost-wise, CA was better compared to others in the market. ​"
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Computer Software Company
15%
Educational Organization
15%
Financial Services Firm
9%
Government
8%
Computer Software Company
17%
Comms Service Provider
13%
Financial Services Firm
12%
Manufacturing Company
11%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
 

Questions from the Community

Which is better - Aruba Clearpass or Cisco ISE?
Aruba ClearPass is a Network Access Control tool that gives secure network access to multiple device types. You can adapt the policies to VPN access, wired, or wireless access. You can securely ...
What are the main differences between Cisco ISE and Forescout Platform?
OK, so Cisco ISE uses 802.1X to secure switchports against unauthorized access. The drawback of this is that ISE cannot secure the port if a device does not support 802.1x. Cameras, badge readers, ...
How does Cisco ISE compare with Fortinet FortiNAC?
Cisco ISE uses AI endpoint analytics to identify new devices based on their behavior. It will also notify you if someone plugs in with a device that is not allowed and will block it. The user exper...
What do you like most about Symantec Privileged Access Manager?
We can check the activities in the server for fragile files and documents in case of any issues.
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Symantec Privileged Access Manager?
Due to the nature of the solution, it is hard to gauge, but compared to competitors, the pricing is very good. I would rate it as an eight and a half out of ten.
What needs improvement with Symantec Privileged Access Manager?
Recent releases need improvement in webpage management. For instance, navigating through a webpage that acts like a wizard, where I proceed to the next page and enter more information, is not handl...
 

Also Known As

Cisco ISE
CA PAM, Xceedium Xsuite, CA Privileged Access Manager
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Aegean Motorway, BC Hydro, Beachbody, Bucks County Intermediate Unit , Cisco IT, Derby City Council, Global Banking Customer, Gobierno de Castilla-La Mancha, Houston Methodist, Linz AG, London Hydro, Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Molina Healthcare, MST Systems, New South Wales Rural Fire Service, Reykjavik University, Wildau University
NEOVERA, Telesis, eSoft
Find out what your peers are saying about Cisco, Hewlett Packard Enterprise, Fortinet and others in Network Access Control (NAC). Updated: June 2025.
860,592 professionals have used our research since 2012.