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Axiad Conductor vs Cisco Duo comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Mar 16, 2025

Review summaries and opinions

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

ROI

Sentiment score
7.4
Axiad Conductor reduces help desk interactions by 35%, saves labor hours, and cuts user costs by up to 15%.
Sentiment score
7.4
Cisco Duo enhances security, boosts staff morale, saves costs, and improves operations, despite perceived productivity impacts.
I think Cisco Duo offers a good return on investment for startups, newer organizations, or those utilizing cloud-based applications.
I have not seen ROI with Cisco Duo; probably the opposite, because it impedes productivity time to be able to get into the system.
From my point of view, the biggest return on investment when using Cisco Duo is the security and the ease of setting it up.
 

Customer Service

Sentiment score
8.3
Axiad Conductor's customer service is praised for responsiveness, expertise, and successful feature integration, though occasional delays occur.
Sentiment score
7.5
Cisco Duo's support is highly rated for expertise and solutions, but some users note delays and improvement needs.
They got back to us quickly, were nice, and gave us what we needed.
Other support sections have failed miserably because of the lack of response time.
I would rate the technical service and customer support of Cisco Duo a ten out of ten.
 

Scalability Issues

Sentiment score
8.1
Axiad Conductor scales well up to 100,000 users but faces cost challenges beyond, maintaining robust and seamless integration.
Sentiment score
8.1
Cisco Duo is scalable, easily integrates across sites, and supports thousands of users without disruptions, adapting to various applications.
I believe Cisco Duo is very scalable because it is cloud-based.
We started out with just the basics, getting a token, and then we changed to push, and now, we have added the offline mode.
It scales easily because it is just tied into our identity provider, and it grows along with that.
 

Stability Issues

Sentiment score
8.0
Axiad Conductor is praised for its flawless, stable performance in credential management, with minimal downtime and no unplanned outages.
Sentiment score
8.4
Cisco Duo is highly stable and reliable, with minimal downtime and quick issue resolution, maintaining productivity efficiently.
When there is a bigger problem, we get notifications from Cisco Duo saying, 'Hey, we have a problem,' and that has helped us.
It is very reliable, easy to use, and I don't have too many issues with it.
There has been no downtime, crashes, or performance issues with Cisco Duo.
 

Room For Improvement

Users seek Axiad Conductor enhancements, including modern design, Canadian hosting, and FIDO U2F support, amidst macOS update challenges.
Cisco Duo needs telephony credit, integration, deployment, and user interface improvements, plus better licensing, documentation, and older app compatibility.
Cisco should allow easier integration with third-party equipment because Cisco's own equipment is expensive.
There needs to be consideration for how to launch Cisco Duo with a handheld device that is not native, where you can install the application.
There has to be a way to make the whole process of push notifications easier, so that when I have my phone with me, I do not have to do anything.
 

Setup Cost

Axiad Conductor offers affordable annual pricing with low-cost per-user licensing and efficient management, ensuring lower total ownership costs.
Cisco Duo's pricing is competitive, flexible, straightforward, and suited for large enterprises, with premium support and moderate setup costs.
The approximate cost is around eighty dollars per user.
Licensing is straightforward and convenient for higher education because student populations are included.
I am pleased that the prices remained stable after Cisco acquired the solution.
 

Valuable Features

Axiad Conductor simplifies authentication management with user-friendly features, efficient onboarding, and seamless integration, crucial for security compliance.
Cisco Duo is praised for its versatile multi-factor authentication, integration, user-friendly interface, and adaptability to hybrid environments.
From a management perspective, I appreciate that we can enroll or control devices on the back end for people who get a new phone and forget to handle Cisco Duo properly and need to add a new device.
The benefit of having a complete passwordless environment in our organization is that it's gotten people away from using the sticky note under their keyboard - which is a huge problem.
A valuable feature of the solution is its hybrid structure, which involves proxy agents running on-premises while other services are on the cloud.
 

Categories and Ranking

Axiad Conductor
Ranking in Authentication Systems
12th
Ranking in Multi-Factor Authentication (MFA)
5th
Average Rating
9.6
Reviews Sentiment
7.7
Number of Reviews
6
Ranking in other categories
Privileged Access Management (PAM) (17th), Identity and Access Management as a Service (IDaaS) (IAMaaS) (13th), Passwordless Authentication (3rd)
Cisco Duo
Ranking in Authentication Systems
2nd
Ranking in Multi-Factor Authentication (MFA)
2nd
Average Rating
8.8
Reviews Sentiment
7.9
Number of Reviews
74
Ranking in other categories
Single Sign-On (SSO) (2nd), ZTNA as a Service (6th), Cisco Security Portfolio (3rd)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of June 2025, in the Authentication Systems category, the mindshare of Axiad Conductor is 0.5%, up from 0.2% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Cisco Duo is 9.6%, down from 11.8% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Authentication Systems
 

Featured Reviews

TonyVentura - PeerSpot reviewer
Eliminated the drudgery of having to run our own PKI environment
One of the things that we find the most valuable is not actually a feature, but it's the fact that we are not managing the environment ourselves. Because it is a managed solution in the cloud, it takes away a lot of the drudgery of having to run our own PKI environment. And the product has proven itself to be incredibly flexible and has been able to address all of our pain points. That's why we bought it. And even while we've been going through it, new pain points or challenges keep coming up, and Axiad has been able to deal with all of them. It was very impressive in terms of its utility right from the get-go, and has shown its ongoing utility when we have reached these catch points, issues it has been able to resolve. And when it comes to enrolling a user, it's super easy with One Click Issuance. It's far easier than the solution we replaced. I haven't put a stopwatch on it, but I'm sure it takes less than a minute with Axiad, whereas before it was taking three to five minutes. It's so easy now that we can offload the process to our clients who can self-enroll. Previously, we would have to do the enrollment process because it was so complicated. In addition, it's super simple for deploying and managing authentication devices. Our IT department is rather small, so all the incremental wins that we can get are hugely important to us.
Chandan Tripathi - PeerSpot reviewer
Starts quickly with quick deployment but needs more support for older applications
Cisco Duo ( /products/cisco-duo-reviews ) is quick to deploy and easy to start. A valuable feature of the solution is its hybrid structure, which involves proxy agents running on-premises while other services are on the cloud. This setup makes it scalable, as the deployment section is in the cloud, allowing the installation of agents according to needs.
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Computer Software Company
22%
Government
12%
Manufacturing Company
9%
University
8%
Computer Software Company
21%
Manufacturing Company
9%
Financial Services Firm
6%
Government
6%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
No data available
 

Questions from the Community

What do you like most about Axiad Cloud?
The life cycle management of credentials is the aspect that we have found to be the most useful... The differentiator that Axiad provided was the ability to provide users a way to self-serve the up...
What is your primary use case for Axiad Cloud?
Our use case is credential management for one of the business units. Axiad provides credential management for those users, including the creation of new credentials and life cycle management of the...
What advice do you have for others considering Axiad Cloud?
You have to understand the number of users and the number of devices that are going to use the solution. I'm saying that because of my experience with the licensing part. That's my one gripe. If yo...
How does Duo Security compare with Microsoft Authenticator?
We switched to Duo Security for identity verification. We’d been using a competitor but got the chance to evaluate Duo for 30 days, and we could not be happier. Duo Security is easy to configure a...
What do you like most about Duo Security?
They are users who, as mentioned before, utilize RDPAP and MDPAP. It includes functionalities related to finance, specifically in single sign-on.
 

Also Known As

Axiad Cloud
Duo Security
 

Overview

Find out what your peers are saying about Axiad Conductor vs. Cisco Duo and other solutions. Updated: May 2025.
856,873 professionals have used our research since 2012.