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Cisco Secure Workload vs Orca Security comparison

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Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Oct 9, 2024

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

Qualys TotalCloud
Sponsored
Ranking in Cloud Workload Protection Platforms (CWPP)
8th
Average Rating
8.6
Reviews Sentiment
7.3
Number of Reviews
39
Ranking in other categories
Vulnerability Management (11th), Container Security (11th), Cloud Security Posture Management (CSPM) (8th), SaaS Security Posture Management (SSPM) (1st), Cloud-Native Application Protection Platforms (CNAPP) (6th)
Cisco Secure Workload
Ranking in Cloud Workload Protection Platforms (CWPP)
16th
Average Rating
8.6
Reviews Sentiment
7.7
Number of Reviews
15
Ranking in other categories
Cloud and Data Center Security (7th), Microsegmentation Software (4th), Cisco Security Portfolio (8th)
Orca Security
Ranking in Cloud Workload Protection Platforms (CWPP)
6th
Average Rating
8.8
Reviews Sentiment
7.0
Number of Reviews
35
Ranking in other categories
Vulnerability Management (10th), Container Security (8th), API Security (3rd), Cloud Security Posture Management (CSPM) (6th), Cloud-Native Application Protection Platforms (CNAPP) (5th), Data Security Posture Management (DSPM) (7th), Cloud Detection and Response (CDR) (2nd), AI Security (3rd)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of June 2026, in the Cloud Workload Protection Platforms (CWPP) category, the mindshare of Qualys TotalCloud is 1.5%, up from 1.2% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Cisco Secure Workload is 2.1%, down from 3.0% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Orca Security is 4.9%, down from 6.8% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Cloud Workload Protection Platforms (CWPP) Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
Orca Security4.9%
Qualys TotalCloud1.5%
Cisco Secure Workload2.1%
Other91.5%
Cloud Workload Protection Platforms (CWPP)
 

Featured Reviews

RO
IT Security Expert at Alior Bank S.A.
Unified risk scoring has improved our cloud visibility and simplifies remediation priorities
Qualys TotalCloud provides unified vulnerability and threat assessment across both IAS and SaaS. This solution provides a single prioritized view of risk, which helps reduce the work I would have to do. We are no longer based on CVSS; we are based on Qualys risk scoring, which is based on CVSS plus internal findings made by Qualys, and then assigns its own score. The TruRisk insight feature has found a small number of assets with high vulnerability scores, though I am cautious since some information is classified. Qualys TotalCloud has positively impacted our bank's performance, and we have definitely seen benefits after implementing this solution.
Raj Metkar - PeerSpot reviewer
Director, Head of Networks at MUFG, EMEA
Discover internal application dependencies and create a dependency map
We actively seek improvements in integrating the Infoblox DDI platform with Cisco Secure Workload. This integration allows Cisco Secure Workload to learn about our networks and network tags, providing valuable insights into vulnerabilities related to the operating system and various applications installed on our servers. Recently, Cisco announced a new product called HyperShield, an AI-based autonomous micro-segmentation solution. While Cisco has not stated that HyperShield will replace Cisco Secure Workload, it represents a natural evolution for the company. HyperShield features dynamic policy discovery and enforcement; however, once policies are enforced, they do not change until a discovery occurs, requiring a re-enforcement process. This new platform operates autonomously, minimizing the need for user or security engineer intervention. I would have expected Cisco to incorporate more automatic discovery and enforcement features within the existing Cisco Secure Workload product. Instead of enhancing the current product, they have introduced a new solution. Cisco plans to honor existing Tetration licenses, allowing users to transition to HyperShield without additional costs, reflecting the investment enterprises have already made. From Cisco’s perspective, this represents a natural progression in their product line. While the product name changes, it seems more of a rebranding effort. The enhancements are greater autonomy, improved discovery, and automatic enforcement, which are now being introduced in HyperShield. Cisco Secure Workload offers automatic policy enforcement but cannot adjust policies dynamically as the application needs to change. Having used the platform for the past five years, the recent announcement has been reassuring. Cisco has confirmed that our investment in the platform will not go to waste. They will honor our existing licenses, providing a natural migration path to the new solution without any disruption
reviewer2800203 - PeerSpot reviewer
Assistant Manager at a manufacturing company with 10,001+ employees
Cloud posture management has improved remediation and optimizes costs with contextual risk insights
Since I have not used Orca Security for 10 months, I am uncertain what areas still need improvement, as they may have rolled out features that addressed issues I faced in the past. However, I can say the tool is good. A few things could potentially be improved, particularly regarding false positives and the UI. What I observed is that they release updates to the platform without notifying the customer. Every time the UI is upgraded, they release something without notification. This could be a slight improvement. If they released some kind of notification to just inform the customer about UI changes, the customer would be aware of the changes that Orca Security is making in the backend.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"I appreciate Qualys TotalCloud's ability to onboard any type of device with ease, including containers."
"I would definitely recommend Qualys TotalCloud to other users."
"If I had to say something positive about the product that brings me the biggest benefit, I would say it has accurate reports, gets new update CVEs, zero-day attack detection, and is easy to manage with its GUI."
"Once you have your vulnerabilities fixed and your patches pushed out using Qualys TotalCloud, then you are able to eliminate threats and cyber risk."
"We were able to realize its benefits within 24 to 48 hours."
"It is a cloud-native app that integrates with both IaaS and SaaS. It seamlessly integrates with other platforms."
"The most valuable feature of Qualys TotalCloud is the visibility it provides."
"Qualys TotalCloud has improved our security posture."
"By using Tetration insight, we are able to get the latency on our level accounts and we can determine whatever the issue is with the application latency itself."
"It's stable."
"The most valuable feature is micro-segmentation, which is the most important with respect to visibility."
"This product does everything that you need it to do and more and does a lot to provide visibility in a network environment, save time and money, and make the organization IT operate in a much more streamlined fashion."
"Secure Workload's best feature is that it's an end-to-end offering from Cisco."
"A complete and powerful micro-segmentation solution."
"Generally speaking, Cisco support is considered one of the best in the networking products and stack."
"The most valuable feature of this solution is security."
"The best features of Orca Security include its ability to perform a lot of security controls without requiring any installation of agents, making it very easy to set up."
"The initial setup is very easy."
"For me, it's a no-brainer to have Orca running in your cloud."
"Orca gives you great visibility into your assets. It shows you the issues and the things that you need to attend to first, by prioritizing things. You can see a lot of information that is not always visible, even to DevOps, to help you know about the machines and their status. It's very easy to see everything in a single dashboard. That makes it a very useful tool."
"Once our organization is configured, any cloud account under that organization is automatically detected in Orca Security, along with all the assets associated with it."
"With its Cloud Security Posture Management capability, we have the ability to read across all of our cloud-based environments, which includes AWS and Azure. We have visibility into those environments. Seeing all vulnerabilities and configurations is really powerful for us, but ultimately, the ability to use the API to query across the fleet to understand what is the current state, what is the patch level, which ones are potentially exposed for a new CVE that just came out is even more valuable. It allows us to gather really specific intelligence through simple queries."
"It covers our entire multi-cloud environment in a single view and tells us everything we need to know about our vulnerability footprint."
"With Orca, I feel confident that I have full coverage of all of my resources."
 

Cons

"It has been working very well, but it would be helpful if the dashboard could generate reports tailored to specific compliance needs. For example, in India, we have to comply with RBI and SEBI guidelines. It w"
"The onboarding process is a bit difficult. In the initial phase, it is very difficult to understand the features, what the dashboard contains, and what criteria they are using."
"Some major banks and insurance companies require an on-premises solution for comprehensive vulnerability management, which TotalCloud does not offer."
"Their customer support needs improvement."
"There is room for improvement in the support."
"The main area needing improvement is integration. Although the team is strengthening TotalCloud, integration can be enhanced with SIEM, SOAR, ITSM, and other sources."
"Two areas for improvement in Qualys TotalCloud are the speed of the public cloud platform and vulnerability detection."
"In my opinion, what can be improved in Qualys TotalCloud includes pricing and container scanning."
"I'd like to see better documentation for advanced features. The documentation is fairly basic. I would also like to see better integration with other applications."
"It has an uninviting interface."
"There was a controversy when Cisco reduced the amount of data they kept, and the solution became quite cost-intensive, which made its adoption challenging….Although they have modified it now, I preferred the previous version, and I wish all the functionality were back under the same product."
"The emailed notifications are either hard to find or they are not available. Search capabilities can be improved."
"A feature that I was looking for was emailed alerts and notifications so we'd get them right away."
"The scalability of this solution needs to be improved."
"The product must be integrated with the cloud."
"The entire interface could be improved; it's ugly and uninviting, and Tetration tends to be a lot more cumbersome and not very intuitive compared to the biggest competitor's modern-looking GUI."
"They can expand a little bit in anti-malware detection. While we have pretty good confidence that it's going to detect some of the static malware, some of the detections are heuristics. There could be a growth in the library from where they're pulling their information, but we don't get a lot of those alerts based on the design of our products. In general, that might be an area that needs to be filled since they offer it as a service within it."
"There is one issue that I encountered: when Orca Security provides CVEs and we attempt to implement its solutions, sometimes those solutions are not available on the cloud and cannot be implemented."
"Orca Security can be improved as it is very good at posture, but it does not detect attacks or behavioral attacks in the cloud on its own; it depends on other security features or logs like GuardDuty from Amazon, lacking its own intelligence to detect and respond to attacks."
"The solution could improve by making the dashboards more elaborative and more descriptive."
"The timeout settings could be made more customizable, as sometimes if I leave the office early, it's still running unless manually turned off."
"In the future, I'd like to see Orca work better with third-party vendors. Specifically, being able to provide sanitized results from third parties."
"I would be happy if they offered more automatic remediation options."
"I experienced some problems with custom tags in Orca Security where I tried to separate the environment for business units so I could ask the tech lead responsible for that vulnerability to fix them."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"As a middle management member, I do not have direct pricing knowledge, but based on the knowledge from our meetings, its pricing is competitive."
"It isn't cheap, but it's reasonable. It helps us to manage things with very few resources."
"Qualys TotalCloud is cost-efficient and was selected for its value compared to other products."
"While Qualys TotalCloud's pricing is currently acceptable, it is becoming increasingly expensive and may soon be considered overpriced."
"The cost is high, but it meets our organizational needs."
"Qualys TotalCloud is expensive, but it offers a premier solution with no headaches."
"Qualys TotalCloud offers competitive pricing given its comprehensive suite of features, including integration, assessment, remediation, and detection capabilities, all within a single platform."
"The pricing for TotalCloud is attractive and competitive in the market. Given the features, especially the dashboard, I have no concerns regarding pricing."
"The price is outrageous. If you have money to throw at the product, then do it."
"The price is based on how many computers you're going to install it on."
"Regarding price, Cisco Secure Workload can be expensive if you don't have a budget. If you're not doing micro-segmentation, every extra security measure or enforcement you're putting on top of your existing environment will be an extra cost. It's not a cheap solution at all. But from my point of view, if you need to do micro-segmentation, this is one of the best tools I've seen for it. I can't compare that to Microsoft's solution because I haven't looked into it. I've looked into VMware and Cisco. Those are the only two that I know of. I didn't know that Microsoft could do micro-segmentation at all. Maybe they can, but I haven't heard anything about it."
"The cost for the hardware is around 300k."
"It is not cheap and pricing may limit scalability."
"The pricing is a bit higher than we anticipated."
"Pricing depends on the scope of the application and the features. Larger installations save more."
"The most expensive solution is Palo Alto. They claim to be very robust. The next most expensive is Wiz, followed by Orca and all the rest."
"While it's competitive with Palo Alto Prisma, I think Orca's list price is very high. I would advise Orca to lower it because, at that price, I might consider alternatives like Wiz, which also offers agentless services."
"The price is a bit expensive for smaller organizations."
"Orca Security charges are based on cloud workloads. So, it's based on workloads. If we look at one feature, it might be expensive."
"Orca Security is cheaper compared to other solutions in the same space."
"Orca is very competitive when compared to the alternatives and is not the most expensive in the market, that's for sure."
"Its license is a bit expensive."
"We have a total of 25 licenses for this solution. The solution is on a pay-and-you-use model."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Manufacturing Company
18%
Financial Services Firm
14%
Construction Company
7%
Comms Service Provider
7%
Manufacturing Company
14%
Financial Services Firm
10%
Government
9%
Computer Software Company
8%
Financial Services Firm
15%
Computer Software Company
11%
Manufacturing Company
10%
Construction Company
6%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business10
Midsize Enterprise3
Large Enterprise29
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business5
Midsize Enterprise3
Large Enterprise8
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business16
Midsize Enterprise8
Large Enterprise11
 

Questions from the Community

What needs improvement with Qualys TotalCloud?
Areas that need improvement in every solution include the remediation part. The remediation steps should be simple en...
What is your primary use case for Qualys TotalCloud?
Our use case involves the assets that we have under cloud, the assets exposed to the internet, and the internal appli...
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Cisco Secure Workload?
CloudStrike offers antivirus capabilities and firewall features for servers and VDI but lacks automatic policy discov...
What needs improvement with Cisco Secure Workload?
We actively seek improvements in integrating the Infoblox DDI platform with Cisco Secure Workload. This integration a...
What is your primary use case for Cisco Secure Workload?
When we onboarded Cisco Secure Workload, the usual use case was to discover internal application dependencies and cre...
What needs improvement with Orca Security?
Orca Security could benefit from more agentic workflows, where agentic workflows could be integrated with Orca Securi...
What is your primary use case for Orca Security?
Orca Security serves as a centralized solution within our organization that offers scanning of all issues found in ou...
What advice do you have for others considering Orca Security?
The advice I would give is that you can make good use of the issues depending on different organizational use cases. ...
 

Also Known As

Qualys TotalCloud with FlexScan
Cisco Tetration
No data available
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Information Not Available
ADP, University of North Carolina Charlotte (UNCC)
BeyondTrust, Postman, Digital Turbine, Solarisbank, Lemonade, C6 Bank, Docebo, Vercel, and Vivino
Find out what your peers are saying about Cisco Secure Workload vs. Orca Security and other solutions. Updated: June 2026.
900,644 professionals have used our research since 2012.