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Illumio vs ShieldX comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Oct 14, 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

Illumio
Ranking in Microsegmentation Software
1st
Average Rating
8.2
Reviews Sentiment
6.0
Number of Reviews
17
Ranking in other categories
Cloud and Data Center Security (3rd), Cloud Workload Protection Platforms (CWPP) (11th)
ShieldX
Ranking in Microsegmentation Software
11th
Average Rating
9.2
Number of Reviews
4
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
 

Mindshare comparison

As of May 2026, in the Microsegmentation Software category, the mindshare of Illumio is 24.7%, down from 29.2% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of ShieldX is 1.7%, up from 0.3% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Microsegmentation Software Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
Illumio24.7%
ShieldX1.7%
Other73.6%
Microsegmentation Software
 

Featured Reviews

Irfan Sharfi - PeerSpot reviewer
Security Professional at a tech vendor with 10,001+ employees
Micro-segmentation has transformed endpoint protection and now isolates internal threats effectively
Illumio can be improved in several areas based on our feedback. Sometimes, the PCE experiences slowness, especially when deploying around 300,000 endpoint devices. When these devices communicate within the network, loading the map or connections can cause latency, which needs improvement for a more user-friendly and faster experience. Regarding improvements to the interface, I believe we can add more features to the graphical user interface, such as proper logs. While the logs currently indicate what was blocked or allowed, clicking on a specific log should provide more information, such as which extra-scope rule is causing a denial, offering better analysis for troubleshooting.
MP
IT Director at park holidays uk
Proactively monitors, blocks, and reports what it has blocked; and self-updates meaning there is zero maintenance
The most valuable feature is the automatic scaling. With its microservices, it scales both up and down, depending on traffic and throughput. The traffic through our website depends on holiday bookings. It's very quiet in November through January, and then our traffic picks up quite rapidly and, at our peak, we will take in excess of a million pounds of business a day through our website. The UI was also one of the huge selling points. My web development manager was blown away with the detail and the granularity that you can get out of the UI. It is a very strong and informative UI, with the amount of data it provides. Uptime on the system has been 648 days and we do very little to it because it self-updates and alerts. It does everything that we need it to do, so the administration side of it is zero. One of the beauties about ShieldX is that it's such a good "fire-and-forget" product.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"The Explorer allows you to know the traffic between source and destination."
"Customer support is excellent."
"Illumio does more than general security product, it provides East-West traffic flow visibility and auditorial log which benefits on daily operation and periodical auditing."
"The features that I have found most useful is the ability to centralize all the rules and then distribute them across various locations. However, I've encountered challenges related to tagging policies, which can be complex to devise. It's a matter that requires careful consideration and stakeholder involvement before implementing such policies."
"The product provides visibility into how the applications communicate and how the network protocols are being used."
"The strongest aspect of Illumio is the visual traffic interface, which allows us to see all traffic that communicates with our servers and allied companies."
"Everything is valuable in Illumio."
"I would recommend Illumio to all sizes of companies."
"ShieldX has been designed from the very beginning to work well in cloud environments. It understands autoscaling, automation, and auto-configuration. These are the things which are important in today's operating environment."
"ShieldX makes it a lot easier and a lot simpler to define your policies and define your rules, and that greatly reduces the opportunity for user error."
"Once you install it you can virtually forget about it; it's very low-maintenance and high-protection."
"We were able to see what devices are talking to each other, giving us more visibility."
"The UI was also one of the huge selling points. My web development manager was blown away with the detail and the granularity that you can get out of the UI. It is a very strong and informative UI, with the amount of data it provides."
"For other security professions who are looking for something which is low in cost that does microsegmentation, they should look at ShieldX."
"It has helped us tighten our security posture. Now, staff can only access things that they should be accessing."
"The Adaptive Intention Engine is fantastic. It allows us to develop security policies using the language of our internal customers. It's machine-learning applied to security workflows. That allows us to much more easily construct the policies that will protect those workflows."
 

Cons

"The product’s agents don't work very well in OT environments."
"Illumio supports both on-prem and cloud environments, but I think the GUI interface could be more user-friendly."
"Illumio requires me to create policies for each type of traffic, and for new users, the policy design can be a bit complex."
"There should be an option to upgrade from the console to the latest version instead of performing manual upgrades. This would be more helpful to streamline processes."
"One area for improvement regarding Illumio might be making the policy management even more intuitive."
"Technical support could be better. When we get a reply from support engineers, it is not kind or empathetic."
"I have not had the chance to experiment deeply with it."
"We need more details on areas where there is an error or a traffic blockage. I would like the tool to offer a more detailed view."
"The one criticism I might have is there should be a bit more customer care, with regular review meetings on it or regular reports."
"With any kind of tool like ShieldX, where you're in the cloud instead of a traditional firewall, you're using CPU resources in those environments to provide the protection. So there's a cost associated with CPU resources."
"There should be a bit more customer care, with regular review meetings on it or regular reports. It would be nice to have a quarterly or biannual review of what ShieldX has blocked."
"They need to be consistent in performance and capabilities over time, given the fact that this is new and I want to see where this goes in the next year or so."
"We are having some issues with their LDAP and integrating it with the Active Directory. We can't seem to set it up."
"We are having some issues with their LDAP and integrating it with the Active Directory."
"With any kind of tool like ShieldX, where you're in the cloud instead of a traditional firewall, you're using CPU resources in those environments to provide the protection. So there's a cost associated with CPU resources. I'm pressing upon them to make the product much more efficient and use less CPUs to do the same thing."
"I would like better reports and in-depth reporting."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"There is a subscription needed to use Illumio Adaptive Security Platform and we pay every three years. Overall the solution is expensive."
"The product's pricing is around 10,000-15,000 USD. The pricing is on a yearly basis."
"ShieldX also enables us to migrate to cloud environments faster. That is an important part of it for sure because it takes the exact same policies that we would apply to our on-premise environment and enables us to simply apply them to the cloud. It becomes one policy for both on-prem and for the cloud."
"Security policies are now applied as applications are going up. Because it's automated, we don't have the three to four week delay. The insertion of applications in the cloud for us dropped from an average of three to four weeks to a couple of days."
"We are very happy with the pricing and licensing. It's about getting a site-wide license. One of the challenges that we've had with our previous vendor had been the cost of licensing."
"For other security professions who are looking for something which is low in cost that does microsegmentation, they should look at ShieldX. It might not be the big name out there, but it does everything that you are looking for in microsegmentation at a very low price."
"ShieldX ensures that we can have the separation needed for our environment to avoid drastically increasing the cost on the licensing side. From this perspective, it's been very positive and helpful."
"We are actually expecting our costs to drop in the coming year, but it is just a matter of the licensing expiring. That is going to happen in the next six months or so. Then, we will start to see a decrease in overall spend."
"For a three-year deal we paid £55,000 plus tax... But, and this is a big "but," this was over two years ago. ShieldX had only just hit the market. We were the first company in Europe to buy ShieldX."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
18%
Computer Software Company
11%
Manufacturing Company
8%
Insurance Company
6%
No data available
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business4
Midsize Enterprise1
Large Enterprise12
No data available
 

Questions from the Community

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Illumio Adaptive Security Platform?
It will be the same price as the Akamai price for Guardicore. It's expensive, that's true. But when you compare it to firewalls, then it may not be that expensive.
What needs improvement with Illumio Adaptive Security Platform?
Illumio does not have much in terms of application dependency mapping features. They lack layer 7 process level segmentation, which is a limitation. In Guardicore, you have the layer 7, the process...
What is your primary use case for Illumio Adaptive Security Platform?
Illumio's use case compared to Akamai is exactly the same. For the purpose of micro-segmentation, it is the same.
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Also Known As

Illumio Adaptive Security Platform, Illumio ASP
APEIRO, ShieldX APEIRO
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Plantronics, NTT Innovation Institute Inc.
Iowa State University
Find out what your peers are saying about Illumio vs. ShieldX and other solutions. Updated: April 2026.
893,221 professionals have used our research since 2012.