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NordLayer vs Portnox comparison

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Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Jun 3, 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

NordLayer
Ranking in Network Access Control (NAC)
20th
Ranking in ZTNA
19th
Average Rating
8.0
Reviews Sentiment
6.2
Number of Reviews
1
Ranking in other categories
Secure Web Gateways (SWG) (35th), Internet Security (15th), Enterprise Infrastructure VPN (23rd), ZTNA as a Service (24th), Customer Identity and Access Management (CIAM) (32nd), Secure Access Service Edge (SASE) (24th)
Portnox
Ranking in Network Access Control (NAC)
5th
Ranking in ZTNA
8th
Average Rating
8.2
Reviews Sentiment
6.9
Number of Reviews
41
Ranking in other categories
Passwordless Authentication (1st)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of September 2026, in the Network Access Control (NAC) category, the mindshare of NordLayer is 1.1%, up from 0.3% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Portnox is 7.7%, up from 4.6% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Network Access Control (NAC) Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
Portnox7.7%
NordLayer1.1%
Other91.2%
Network Access Control (NAC)
 

Featured Reviews

Christophe Derdeyn - PeerSpot reviewer
Partner delaware Singapore at delaware Singapore
A convenient and easy tool with an incredibly high number of dialing points
The solution is convenient and easy. It has an incredibly high number of dialing points for pretty much every single country in the world. It has a few additional security features. It has a function that prevents unsecured access if my connection were to drop for any reason. It’s something I like. It has threat protection features. It can protect my web connection and files against malicious downloads and trackers.
Maurice Mwaura - PeerSpot reviewer
Product Manager at Applied Principles Limited
Unified access control has improved compliance visibility and simplified passwordless access
There is work to be done when it comes to making the solution more seamless. For example, when a user is denied access, they would need a way to maybe self-resolve themselves, perhaps a way to generate a ticket on their own, something around resolutions. When it comes to users using the product, that is where good products are differentiated from products that are a bit of a challenge. Portnox has much to do in terms of their reporting. The generated reports need improvement. Things that other tools would say are normal are usually not present. For example, there is a page called NAS devices or NAS network that is able to show the switches that have been managed. Currently, there is no way of generating an easy report or an easy way of just generating something to tell the customer what they have been able to achieve so far. This is not done yet and is still very manual. I think there is work to be done there. More integrations around the various products being used would be beneficial. So far I have not encountered any major challenge. Where there was a challenge, I think support came in and helped us resolve. In fact, most of the challenges are not with the product; they are with the customer environment. I think that is just to update their documentation where they have come across a new vendor for easier integrations in the future.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"The solution is convenient and easy."
"Portnox provides excellent security by following Zero Trust security principles."
"The product's initial setup phase was straightforward."
"The solution has a valuable reporting feature."
"The most valuable features of this solution are the agent features; I like the fact that you can take your device anywhere and still have that visibility from anywhere because it's agent-based."
"Portnox is better than other solutions that I tried before, at least with Cisco, because it has lots of features that are not included in Cisco, so it is the best for me."
"The simplicity of the product is commendable."
"The visibility of the product is excellent."
"Most customers feel value immediately upon deployment; they are able to see what is connected and apply the policies."
 

Cons

"The tool is not perfectly stable."
"The Wi-Fi integration could be done better from their end. If there is an improvement, it should be around having more functions on the integration with the Wi-Fi controller I used, which was a UniFi controller, also on-prem."
"It might be beneficial to improve the ease of integrating the product with firewalls."
"There is room for improvement regarding Portnox's pricing strategies."
"During my daily use, I noticed that if you have many devices being managed by a particular server, any device being managed by that server takes quite a bit of time to respond."
"Previously, the support team was quite small, which made it challenging to get timely technical assistance."
"One thing they can look at is increasing the number of support staff so that there will be more people supporting the solution than they currently have."
"The solution did have some stability issues, however, all I had to do was restart it."
"However, problems arise when the same MAC address is requested for a different project. Our current system only finds authenticated MAC addresses, making it difficult to troubleshoot when the same device is used for multiple purposes."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

Information not available
"The pricing is a bit high, possibly due to the cloud features and running instances across regions like the US, Asia, and Europe."
"The users are not very happy with the new licensing option where there is only a subscription license. There is no perpetual license."
"The cost of Portnox Clear is reasonable."
"Pricing is not cheap. It is based on licenses per port. After licensing is purchased, you only pay for support."
"The vendor price is fair."
"The licensing module should be reviewed to count the number of devices instead of port numbers of total switches. There is a case for this where not all ports for a switch are used by devices. Unused ports are calculated in the license, then the customer pays for license for those unused ports."
"It's not cheap. It's not expensive. It's in the middle."
"Portnox CORE's pricing is adequate and cheaper compared to other complex solutions. Its licensing costs are yearly and include support. Cost is calculated per device."
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Top Industries

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

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
No data available
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business20
Midsize Enterprise10
Large Enterprise15
 

Questions from the Community

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What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Portnox Clear?
The pricing and setup cost as well as licensing is a bit high compared to the competition. If it were better, we could also have some pricing specific or special discounts to cater for SMBs.
What needs improvement with Portnox Clear?
If the MSSP offering could be the primary push or primary concern, it would be the best thing that could happen. Based on the Tanzanian market, AI governance is something that is coming through. Fo...
What is your primary use case for Portnox Clear?
Portnox is for the network access control use case. The use case focuses on wired network access, specifically how users are connecting to the network and how we are checking their security posture...
 

Also Known As

No data available
Access Layers Portnox, Portnox CLEAR
 

Interactive Demo

Demo not available
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Hostinger, Shutterstock, USMobile, Soundcloud, Calendly, whatagraph.
Sallie Mae, Roku, Vuori, Legal Zoom, Anaplan, Aecon, H.I.G. Capital, McLaren Construction Group, PFCU, UK Mortgage Lending Limited, CCC Intelligent Solutions
Find out what your peers are saying about Hewlett Packard Enterprise, Cisco, ThreatLocker and others in Network Access Control (NAC). Updated: September 2026.
913,806 professionals have used our research since 2012.