Akamai Guardicore Segmentation vs Cisco Secure Workload vs VMware NSX comparison

Akamai and Cisco are both solutions in the Cloud and Data Center Security category. Akamai is ranked #1 with an average rating of 8.0, while Cisco is ranked #8 with an average rating of 9.5. Akamai holds a 23.2% mindshare in CDCS, compared to Cisco’s 13.6% mindshare. Additionally, 87% of Akamai users are willing to recommend the solution, compared to 100% of Cisco users who would recommend it.

Akamai Guardicore Segmentation

Read 18 Akamai Guardicore Segmentation reviews

8,424 Views
5,644 Comparison Views

87% willing to recommend

Cisco Secure Workload

Read 15 Cisco Secure Workload reviews

4,623 Views
3,190 Comparison Views

100% willing to recommend

VMware NSX

Read 105 VMware NSX reviews

7,202 Views
3,601 Comparison Views

88% willing to recommend

Akamai Guardicore Segmentation

Cisco Secure Workload

VMware NSX

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Executive Summary

We performed a comparison between Akamai Guardicore Segmentation, Cisco Secure Workload, and VMware NSX based on real PeerSpot user reviews.

Find out what your peers are saying about Akamai, SentinelOne, VMware and others in Cloud and Data Center Security.

To learn more, read our detailed Cloud and Data Center Security Report (Updated: August 2025).

Buyer's Guide

Cloud and Data Center Security

August 2025

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Helped 866,300 peers since 2012

Review summaries and opinions

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

Mindshare comparison

As of August 2025, in the Cloud and Data Center Security category, the mindshare of Akamai Guardicore Segmentation is 23.2%, down from 23.5% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Cisco Secure Workload is 13.6%, up from 12.4% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of VMware NSX is 12.1%, down from 18.2% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.

Cloud and Data Center Security Market Share Distribution
Product	Market Share (%)
Akamai Guardicore Segmentation	23.2%
VMware NSX	12.1%
Cisco Secure Workload	13.6%
Other	51.1%

Cloud and Data Center Security

Featured Reviews

Uday Varma

Solution Architecht at Inspira Enterprise

Offers granular control and ease of policy creation with features like telemetry and micro-segmentation but incident tagging is missing

Our customers use the solution for micro-segmentation within the data center or cloud environments. One customer uses it for their on-premises infrastructure, deployed at the code level across their massive network. Another customer uses it in a data center to monitor microsegmentation for their 500-node workload. Moreover, Akamai Guardicore Segmentation has helped our customers manage and secure traffic between different applications or workloads. Earlier, they were using VMware NSX-v, which offered good logging for distributed services on an analytical level. However, Akamai Guardicore Segmentation provides them with better overall visibility and granular control over-segmentation, even for inter-application and inter-routing traffic.

Read full review

Raj Metkar

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

Read full review

MagdyRaafat

Services Presales Solutions Architecture - UAE & Gulf at Dell Technologies

Enhanced security and streamlined management drive efficient connectivity

Open source is a standard solution where you take a gray box or white box and put the software from your end. You can do programming with Ansible and make the network work in the software-defined mode, providing automation and management capabilities. I am currently working with VMware. It integrates easily with everything and can work with any system. When discussing micro-segmentation, it enhances security, providing more secure data in your data center while allowing for extra layers of security outside your data center. If you have an ACI, there is communication between locations, keeping your data secure in your data center and throughout the path it takes, such as to SD-WAN or the cloud. I work with cloud solutions including AWS, Azure, GCP, and private cloud. My overall rating for VMware NSX is 8.5 out of 10.

Read full review

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"Guardicore Centra offers the best coverage specifically in backward compatibility with legacy operating systems."

"The most valuable feature is the visibility of processes and connections."

"That is primarily because I've seen increased rules. It's kind of caught us a little off guard. With GuardiCore, I have had to deal with their technical support and engineering team in Israel. They are amazing. They are very quick to adapt."

"The solution is very scalable, especially when connected to the cloud resources."

"The label-based segmentation is the most valuable feature."

"I found the solution to be stable."

"This tool greatly helps in understanding the footprint of the attacks."

"The interface and dashboard are amazing."

More Akamai Guardicore Segmentation pros

"The solution offers 100% telemetry coverage. The telemetry you collect is not sampled, it's not intermittent. It's complete. You see everything in it, including full visibility of all activities on your endpoints and in your network."

"Secure Workload's best feature is that it's an end-to-end offering from Cisco."

"The only use case I can see that makes sense is micro-segmentation. I think there are other use cases for it. The main purpose of the product is to do micro-segmentation by collecting IP. That could be done by installing an agent, and then you have all the communication coming in and out. You could also use some flow sensors installed in the network that receive a copy of the traffic and then report that back to the system."

"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."

"Instead of proving that all the access control lists are in place and all the EPGs are correct, we can just point the auditor to a dashboard and point out that there aren't any escaped conversations. It saves an enormous, enormous amount of time."

"It's stable."

"The most valuable feature of the solution is that we don't have to do packet captures on the network."

"The most valuable feature is micro-segmentation, which is the most important with respect to visibility."

More Cisco Secure Workload pros

"Technically, VMware NSX is more advanced technology-wise when compared to others. We have been studying it and so far, so good. We know that the NSX product is superior when it comes to software virtualized networks. </p> <p>If you are looking to work with new and future technologies, then NSX is one of the best options. It costs less for power consumption since it will be a virtual network and not a pure physical network that consumes more energy."

"We are happy with the scalability."

"The most valuable features of VMware NSX are the tight integration with the VMware Hypervisor natively and the management console. We have a lot of other integrations where you are able to see the virtual machine's end-to-end visibility."

"Has a great firewall."

"VMware NSX's overlay network is its most valuable feature, as it aligns with any network philosophy and allows for efficient addressing mechanisms. Additionally, the ability to extend the on-premise network into the provider space is beneficial. There are many features provided."

"The security offered by VMware NSX is the most valuable, plus it's a feature-rich product that's straightforward to install and configure."

"I am impressed with the tool's protection."

"NSX's stand-out function is the distributed firewall. The firewall system is just top-notch, and I haven't seen another solution like it."

More VMware NSX pros

Cons

"The product needs a few features like enhanced user policies and payload-level inspection to improve the offering."

"Clients would like to see that the security policies of GuardiCore can continue to be comparable to all the major firewall players out there."

"The maps could go a bit faster. They are useful but slightly slow."

"Supports become difficult when it's for a big organization. For a small organization, medium organization, it still makes sense, however, for a big organization, it makes life difficult."

"I would rate the stability a six out of ten, where one is low and ten is high stability."

"The long-term management of the security policies could be improved with some kind of automation platform, something like Chef or Puppet or Ansible, to help you manage the policies after day-one... to then manage the policies and changes to those policies, going forward, through some type of automation process is not turning out to be really easy."

"Needs more customization of honeypots and a vaster catalog of systems able to be mimicked."

"The dashboard needs improvement. It should be more flexible so that I can easily see what I want or need to see."

More Akamai Guardicore Segmentation cons

"They should scale down the hardware a bit. The initial hardware investment is two million dollars so it's a price point problem. The issue with the price comes from the fact that you have to have it with enormous storage and enormous computes."

"It has an uninviting interface."

"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."

"The interface is really helpful for technical people, but it is not user-friendly."

"It is not so easy to use and configure. It needs a bunch of further resources to work, which is mainly the biggest downside of it. The deployment is huge."

"The product must be integrated with the cloud."

"There is some overlap between Cisco Tetration and AppDynamics and I need to have a single pane of glass, rather than have to jump between different tools."

"It is highly scalable, but there is a limitation that it is only available on Cisco devices."

More Cisco Secure Workload cons

"The ticket support response time from VMware could be improved. Often, callbacks are delayed, which can be problematic if the servers are in production."

"The network-extending capabilities for the physical environment need improvement."

"Since most people are very much used to physical networking, they find it difficult to use VMware NSX in the initial stage."

"The solution is quite complex. You need to keep your thinking cap on and know what you are doing: Go to the training and listen to the solution architects when they come in because they have a lot of knowledge."

"VMware NSX can improve the migration tools from the older environments to the new environment. For example, the NSX-V has become a legacy solution, it's out of support, but customers are able to keep using it. For migration purposes, it's better for them to provide a proper tool. It will be easy to migrate from an old environment to a new one."

"The support needs improvement."

"The next release of NSX should try to make Kubernetes and container integration a little easier than it is now. It's quite a complicated process."

"In the next release, they should enhance the visual interface. With NSX-T, it's difficult to communicate between the public cloud and the container."

More VMware NSX cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

"GuardiCore has made some new changes to the license now. We've seen monthly and annual licenses based on a subscription. We have a few clients that pay anywhere from $25,000 a year."

"The pricing is too high."

"The solution is reasonably priced and I would rate it a six out of ten. The tool's licensing costs are yearly."

"The price is the same as other products in the market. There's no price argument to choose one or the other product, it will cost the customer approximately the same."

"The customer would complain about the cost."

"Guardicore Centra provides better value for money than NSX, was the other solution that we looked at, which was too expensive for what it does."

"This is not a cheap solution but you have to consider the bigger picture, which is what it is giving you."

"Akamai Guardicore Segmentation is expensive."

More Akamai Guardicore Segmentation pricing and cost advice

"Pricing depends on the scope of the application and the features. Larger installations save more."

"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."

"The pricing is a bit higher than we anticipated."

"It is not cheap and pricing may limit scalability."

"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."

"The price is pretty high."

"The subscription is on a yearly basis."

"We haven't had to hire a dedicated network engineer because NSX handles 90 percent of it. The reduced overhead in terms of managing networks has been the biggest plus."

"I'm unable to give information on the pricing or licensing cost of VMware NSX because I've never been someone who looks into the economic part of any security or virtualization solutions. That's handled by an entirely different team, and I don't even have the slightest idea about the costs associated with the solution, though I've heard pricing for VMware NSX is on the higher side."

"The solution is very expensive."

"VMware NSX is a cheaper product compared to its competitor, Cisco."

"The product pricing ranges from medium to expensive. I rate the pricing a seven out of ten."

"It is an expensive product, but cheaper than some competing solutions."

More VMware NSX pricing and cost advice

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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Financial Services Firm

17%

Computer Software Company

15%

Manufacturing Company

Insurance Company

Computer Software Company

23%

Manufacturing Company

11%

Financial Services Firm

Government

Computer Software Company

15%

Financial Services Firm

12%

Manufacturing Company

Government

Company Size

By reviewers

Large Enterprise

Midsize Enterprise

Small Business

By reviewers
Company Size	Count
Small Business	6
Midsize Enterprise	3
Large Enterprise	9

By reviewers
Company Size	Count
Small Business	5
Midsize Enterprise	3
Large Enterprise	8

By reviewers
Company Size	Count
Small Business	33
Midsize Enterprise	23
Large Enterprise	68

Questions from the Community

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Guardicore Centra?

I would rate the pricing a six out of ten, where one is cheap and ten is expensive. I know other micro-segmentation t...

See all answers

What do you like most about Guardicore Infection Monkey?

Initially, I liked the telemetry part. But later, we used the microsegmentation features that we were able to deploy ...

See all answers

What needs improvement with Guardicore Infection Monkey?

When we have more than one interface, we can only have one policy for both interfaces. Normally, you have assets with...

See all answers

What do you like most about Cisco Secure Workload?

The product provides multiple-device integration.

See all answers

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...

See all answers

What needs improvement with Cisco Secure Workload?

We actively seek improvements in integrating the Infoblox DDI platform with Cisco Secure Workload. This integration a...

See all answers

What are the biggest differences between Cisco ACI and VMware NSX?

There are some very major differences between both the Products and to name a few. -Cisco ACI have physical network g...

See all answers

What are the biggest differences between Cisco ACI and VMware NSX?

Once you know your way around the Cisco ecosystem, using Cisco ACI is not so difficult. It is a global product, so wh...

See all answers

What do you like most about VMware NSX?

The product has valuable features for security and network extension.

See all answers

Comparisons

Illumio vs Akamai Guardicore Segmentation

Compared 43% of the time

Cisco ACI vs Akamai Guardicore Segmentation

Compared 3% of the time

Zero Networks vs Akamai Guardicore Segmentation

Compared 3% of the time

Trend Micro Deep Security vs Akamai Guardicore Segmentation

Compared 3% of the time

CrowdStrike Falcon Cloud Security vs Akamai Guardicore Segmentation

Compared 3% of the time

More Akamai Guardicore Segmentation Competitors

Cisco Hypershield vs Cisco Secure Workload

Compared 22% of the time

Illumio vs Cisco Secure Workload

Compared 16% of the time

Cisco ACI vs Cisco Secure Workload

Compared 9% of the time

Prisma Cloud by Palo Alto Networks vs Cisco Secure Workload

Compared 6% of the time

Trend Micro Deep Security vs Cisco Secure Workload

Compared 3% of the time

More Cisco Secure Workload Competitors

Illumio vs VMware NSX

Compared 18% of the time

Nutanix Flow Network Security vs VMware NSX

Compared 16% of the time

Cisco ACI vs VMware NSX

Compared 6% of the time

Cisco Catalyst SD-WAN vs VMware NSX

Compared 4% of the time

Trend Micro Deep Security vs VMware NSX

Compared 2% of the time

More VMware NSX Competitors

Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

Akamai Guardicore Segmentation

August 2025

Download Akamai Guardicore Segmentation product report

Buyer's Guide

Cisco Secure Workload

August 2025

Download Cisco Secure Workload product report

Buyer's Guide

VMware NSX

August 2025

Download VMware NSX product report

Also Known As

Guardicore Centra, GuardiCore

Cisco Tetration

VMware Nicira, Lastline Defender

Overview

Akamai Guardicore Segmentation is a software-based microsegmentation solution that provides the simplest, fastest, and most intuitive way to enforce Zero Trust principles. It enables you to prevent malicious lateral movement in your network through precise segmentation policies, visuals of activity within your IT environment, and network security alerts. Akamai Guardicore Segmentation works across your data centers, multicloud environments, and endpoints. It is faster to deploy than infrastructure segmentation approaches and provides you with unparalleled visibility and control of your network.

Akamai

Cisco Secure Workload is a cloud and data security solution that offers a zero-trust policy of keeping an organization’s application workloads safe and secure throughout the entire on-premise and cloud data center ecosystems.

Cisco Secure Workload will consistently provide protection by discovering workload process anomalies, stopping threats immediately, minimizing the risk threat surface, and aborting any lateral movement.

Today’s ecosystems are very elastic, and in the application-focused dynamic of today’s aggressive marketplace, Cisco Secure Workload delivers a robust security solution that works effectively with today’s most popular applications. The solution uniquely surrounds each and every workload to ensure organizations are able to keep their data, network, and applications safe and secure at all times. Cisco Secure Workload ensures that enterprise organizations can maintain secure applications by consistently building firewalls around every workload level throughout the entire ecosystem. The solution can manage applications that are deployed on containers, virtual machines, or bare-metal servers.

Cisco Secure workload is able to meet an organization's busy needs and offers flexible options such as Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) and on-premises options. Using the Secure Workload SaaS options, users receive all the benefits of Cisco Secure Workload protection without the hassle of having to deploy and maintain the platform on premises. Users are responsible for acquiring the necessary software licensing and deploying software agents. Using SaaS, Secure Workload runs in the cloud and is operated and maintained by Cisco. This option offers the ability to scale easily and is a popular choice for SaaS-first and SaaS-only clients. Many organizations find they get the best TCO and achieve the best productivity and profitability using the SaaS options.

When choosing on-premises options, organizations choose between hardware-based appliance models (large or small form factors). Platform selection is dependent on scalability goals, the desired fidelity level of flow telemetry, and the actual number of workloads. When a user chooses to configure Cisco Secure Workload for a conversation-only flow telemetry for all workloads, each platform has the capability to scale up vertically twice the default platform scale. Additionally, with Secure Workload, it is possible for the platform to be scaled horizontally in order to satisfy the demands of extra large widely distributed enterprise environments using federation capabilities.

Cisco Secure Workload also provides a robust disaster recovery (DR) tool, which helps to make it a complete, comprehensive solution. The DR allows for continuous restore and backup capabilities that enable users to quickly remediate operations and data to a standby cluster in the event of a drastic failure or disaster.

Reviews from Real Users

“The solution offers 100% telemetry coverage. The telemetry you collect is not sampled, it's not intermittent. It's complete. You see everything in it, including full visibility of all activities on your endpoints and in your network. Other valuable features include vast support for annotations, flexible user applications, machine learning, automatic classification, and hierarchical policies.” - CTO at a tech vendor

Cisco

VMware NSX is a sophisticated solution utilized for micro-segmentation, network security, software-defined networking, and private cloud construction. It aids in the transition from physical to virtual infrastructure, ensuring efficient network virtualization and security of production workloads.

VMware NSX empowers organizations to manage network functions, implement distributed firewalls, and enhance security within virtual environments. Crucial for disaster recovery and load balancing, it supports cloud-native application development and enterprise clients. Its ease of use, scalability, and seamless integration with existing VMware solutions ensure streamlined network management and swift deployment. Despite its extensive features, areas like pricing, routing functionality, and compatibility with certain platforms require attention.

What are the key features of VMware NSX?

Ease of Use: Simplifies network management with an intuitive interface.
Scalability: Adapts to growing infrastructure needs seamlessly.
Micro-Segmentation: Enhances security by dividing networks into smaller, manageable segments.
Integration: Seamlessly works with existing VMware solutions and third-party applications.
Dynamic Routing: Optimizes network traffic efficiently.
Security Options: Offers robust firewall features and security measures.
Automation: Facilitates quick deployment through comprehensive automation capabilities.
High Bandwidth: Ensures high-performance network operations.

What benefits and ROI should users look for?

Enhanced Network Security: Superior protection for virtual environments.
Efficient Disaster Recovery: Reliable support for business continuity.
Reduced Deployment Time: Fast implementation and configuration.
Improved Network Management: Centralized and streamlined control of network resources.

VMware NSX is widely implemented across industries such as finance, healthcare, and manufacturing. Organizations in these sectors utilize it to bolster security, enhance network efficiency, and support cloud-native applications. By extending on-premise networks into provider spaces and managing virtual access networks, VMware NSX significantly optimizes infrastructure operations.

VMware

Sample Customers

Santander, Frontier Airlines, OpenLink, Intermountain Healthcare, Cellcom, BancoBASE

ADP, University of North Carolina Charlotte (UNCC)

City of Avondale, Lumeta, Kroll Ontrack, Heartland Payment Systems, Baystate Heallth, Exostar, Tribune Media, iGATE, NTT Communications, Synergent, California Natural Resources Agency, Bloomington Public Schools, Columbia Sportswear, Join Experience S.A, Schuberg Philis

Buyer's Guide

Cloud and Data Center Security

August 2025

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