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Axiad Conductor vs Portnox comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Jun 22, 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
7.3
Portnox CORE improved network visibility, security, and efficiency, reducing costs and enhancing decision-making through detailed analytics and automated features.
If you were moving from a traditional on-premise NAC that was 100% managed by the IT department, there would be great savings in going to a cloud-based NAC with Portnox.
 

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
7.3
Portnox customer service is highly rated for responsiveness and efficiency, with room for improvement in local services and communication.
I was seeing weird things, and they were able to explain things to me and help me quickly find a resolution.
They resolved issues quickly and provided clear explanations.
They respond very immediately and provide detailed, amazing support.
 

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
7.5
Portnox is scalable and flexible, supporting growth efficiently, though larger setups may require more resources, rated seven to ten.
 

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
7.6
Portnox offers reliable uptime, though CORE users report issues with vendor support and configuration, while Clear performs smoothly.
The product itself is available and its uptime is 100%.
In the four years that I used Portnox, if it crashed or the server crashed, that would not have been more than once.
 

Room For Improvement

Users seek Axiad Conductor enhancements, including modern design, Canadian hosting, and FIDO U2F support, amidst macOS update challenges.
Portnox can improve with better GUI, integration, scalability, support, licensing, false positives, documentation, and Wi-Fi and AI analytics.
Ideally, we should be able to search for any MAC address in the database, regardless of its authentication status, to see all its associated groups and potential conflicts.
When I'm doing filtering at times, it doesn't filter the items properly.
It was a seamless integration, but we did experience some difficulties initially where mobile phones were being locked out until we figured out how to set footprints for mobile phones that would be able to connect using Portnox to access the Wi-Fi in the environment.
 

Setup Cost

Axiad Conductor offers affordable annual pricing with low-cost per-user licensing and efficient management, ensuring lower total ownership costs.
Portnox offers scalable, competitive pricing based on ports, with annual fees, appreciated value, but no perpetual license option.
If you compare Portnox with all other well-known standard products, it is the cheapest.
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 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.
 

Valuable Features

Axiad Conductor simplifies authentication management with user-friendly features, efficient onboarding, and seamless integration, crucial for security compliance.
Portnox provides scalable, agentless network visibility with intuitive dashboards and automated security integration, enhancing efficiency and endpoint compliance.
It's notable how Portnox has improved operational efficiency.
Additionally, it has a great detection and alert tool that is easy to filter and identify any rogue agents or rogue endpoints in our network.
We use Meraki for our switching, making it simple to point all our networks and offices to Portnox.
 

Categories and Ranking

Axiad Conductor
Ranking in Passwordless Authentication
3rd
Average Rating
9.6
Reviews Sentiment
7.7
Number of Reviews
6
Ranking in other categories
Authentication Systems (12th), Privileged Access Management (PAM) (17th), Identity and Access Management as a Service (IDaaS) (IAMaaS) (13th), Multi-Factor Authentication (MFA) (5th)
Portnox
Ranking in Passwordless Authentication
1st
Average Rating
8.0
Reviews Sentiment
7.4
Number of Reviews
22
Ranking in other categories
Network Access Control (NAC) (6th), ZTNA (11th)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of June 2025, in the Passwordless Authentication category, the mindshare of Axiad Conductor is 6.6%, up from 4.8% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Portnox is 14.9%. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Passwordless Authentication
 

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.
Scott Kerr - PeerSpot reviewer
It is seamless and integrates well with our Azure setup
We use devices like PLCs and controllers, and when we receive a request to allow one on the network, we bypass typical authentication, associate it with a group account, and push it to a firewalled VLAN. 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. Ideally, we should be able to search for any MAC address in the database, regardless of its authentication status, to see all its associated groups and potential conflicts.
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Computer Software Company
22%
Government
12%
Manufacturing Company
9%
University
7%
Manufacturing Company
15%
Computer Software Company
13%
Financial Services Firm
12%
Healthcare Company
7%
 

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...
What do you like most about Portnox CORE?
It's easy to manage and troubleshoot thanks to the lightweight components.
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Portnox CORE?
It's not cheap. It's not expensive. It's in the middle, so I'll probably give it a seven out of ten, where one is cheap and ten is expensive.
What needs improvement with Portnox CORE?
We have been having some issues with it. That's why we're considering migrating to Portnox Clear due to some limitations with CORE. At the end of the day, Portnox Clear's capabilities are much more...
 

Comparisons

 

Also Known As

Axiad Cloud
Access Layers Portnox, Portnox CLEAR
 

Interactive Demo

Demo not available
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Information Not Available
Data Realty, Royal London, Wales Millennium Centre, McLaren Construction Group, EL AL Israeli Airlines, 
Find out what your peers are saying about Axiad Conductor vs. Portnox and other solutions. Updated: June 2025.
859,129 professionals have used our research since 2012.