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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
40
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 helped to free up staff time and resources for other IT security priorities and IT work."
"If your team is burnt out on managing legacy on-prem network access control or wants to move to a pure cloud model, Portnox should definitely be on your shortlist."
"The cloud-based feature of Portnox is excellent."
"Portnox saves me about fifty percent of my time."
"The Vidahost feature is currently in action, and it appears to be providing valuable data insights."
"Portnox ensures system compliance through policy enforcement, including antivirus updates, Windows operating system updates, and system patches, helping network administrators maintain system health and security across the network."
"Most customers feel value immediately upon deployment; they are able to see what is connected and apply the policies."
"The product's initial setup phase was straightforward."
 

Cons

"The tool is not perfectly stable."
"Portnox has some difficulties with stability; sometimes there are glitches, and settings are not clear."
"There is room for improvement regarding Portnox's pricing strategies."
"From a resource perspective, the OEM can do better in terms of resource utilization."
"One area for improvement would be deeper reporting and analytics capabilities for Portnox, particularly for long-term trend analysis and compliance reporting."
"On the performance side, we have occasionally run into some random RADIUS timeouts and weird intermittent Wi-Fi authentication delays."
"Allowing for a search of MAC addresses in the interface, whether they are authenticated on the network or not, would be beneficial. Currently, it only finds authenticated MAC addresses, which complicates troubleshooting when the same MAC address is used for different requests."
"One of the things for the on-premise is that sometimes you click on it and it takes a while for it to respond."
"It could be a little cheaper."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

Information not available
"Pricing is quite reasonable."
"It's not cheap. It's not expensive. It's in the middle."
"The pricing is a bit high, possibly due to the cloud features and running instances across regions like the US, Asia, and Europe."
"It is not bad. It is a bit on the high side, but considering the cloud features and how much it costs to run the instance in the cloud, it is not unreasonable. We do have RADIUS servers for the US, Asia, and Europe."
"Pricing is not cheap. It is based on licenses per port. After licensing is purchased, you only pay for support."
"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."
"The users are not very happy with the new licensing option where there is only a subscription license. There is no perpetual license."
"The solution is very expensive and I would rate it 10 out of 10."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Comms Service Provider
12%
Outsourcing Company
9%
Construction Company
9%
Healthcare Company
8%
Manufacturing Company
14%
Financial Services Firm
12%
Healthcare 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?
Overall, our experience with Portnox pricing, setup cost, and licensing has been very positive. One of the key advantages is the cloud-native licensing model, which eliminates the need for signific...
What needs improvement with Portnox Clear?
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. If you log into Port...
What is your primary use case for Portnox Clear?
Portnox was primarily used for network access control, which granted access to enterprise devices based on specific parameters that we set. A specific example of how I used Portnox for network acce...
 

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: August 2026.
912,022 professionals have used our research since 2012.