Cisco ACI vs Cisco Secure Workload comparison

Cisco ACI and Cisco Secure Workload are both solutions in the Cloud and Data Center Security category. Cisco ACI is ranked #7 with an average rating of 9.0, while Cisco Secure Workload is ranked #9 with an average rating of 9.5. Cisco ACI holds a 4.7% mindshare in CDCS, compared to Cisco Secure Workload’s 13.2% mindshare. Additionally, 85% of Cisco ACI users are willing to recommend the solution, compared to 100% of Cisco Secure Workload users who would recommend it.

Cisco ACI

Read 102 Cisco ACI reviews

3,819 Views
2,521 Comparison Views

85% willing to recommend

Cisco Secure Workload

Read 15 Cisco Secure Workload reviews

4,428 Views
3,055 Comparison Views

100% willing to recommend

Cisco ACI

Cisco Secure Workload

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Executive SummaryUpdated on Jul 27, 2025

Cisco ACI and Cisco Secure Workload compete in the realms of network automation and security. Cisco Secure Workload seems to have an edge in security features, making it favorable for those seeking extensive security capabilities.

Features: Cisco ACI focuses on network automation with application-centric infrastructure, seamless cloud integration, and extensive network visibility. Cisco Secure Workload prioritizes security in multi-cloud environments, offering workload protection, micro-segmentation, and sophisticated threat analytics.

Room for Improvement: Cisco ACI could enhance its security features and simplify configuration processes to make it more versatile. Better cloud-native support might also improve its competitive edge. Cisco Secure Workload could benefit from simplifying its deployment and further streamlining its management processes. Adding more integration capabilities with other platforms could also enhance its usability.

Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: Cisco ACI is known for straightforward deployment utilizing existing infrastructures and good integration support. Cisco Secure Workload's deployment, while more complex due to its advanced features, benefits from strong customer service that helps navigate these complexities.

Pricing and ROI: Cisco ACI typically offers lower initial setup costs and quick network efficiencies. Cisco Secure Workload, with higher initial costs, provides ROI through enhanced security and protection, justifying the investment for those prioritizing security.

To learn more, read our detailed Cisco ACI vs. Cisco Secure Workload Report (Updated: September 2025).

Buyer's Guide

Cisco ACI vs. Cisco Secure Workload

September 2025

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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

Cisco ACI

Ranking in Cloud and Data Center Security

7th

Average Rating

8.0

Reviews Sentiment

6.5

Number of Reviews

102

Ranking in other categories

Network Virtualization (1st), Software Defined Networking (SDN) (2nd)

Cisco Secure Workload

Ranking in Cloud and Data Center Security

9th

Average Rating

8.6

Reviews Sentiment

7.7

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

Cloud Workload Protection Platforms (CWPP) (14th), Microsegmentation Software (4th), Cisco Security Portfolio (8th)

Mindshare comparison

As of October 2025, in the Cloud and Data Center Security category, the mindshare of Cisco ACI is 4.7%, down from 6.5% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Cisco Secure Workload is 13.2%, up from 12.2% 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 (%)
Cisco ACI	4.7%
Cisco Secure Workload	13.2%
Other	82.1%

Cloud and Data Center Security

Featured Reviews

Rahul Khandelwal

Network Technical Manager at KPMG

Enables streamlined data center management with automation and application-centric design

The main features of Cisco ACI that I really appreciate are the application-centric and network-centric designs, allowing you to create your network according to your application. That's helpful, and it's good for one-time implementation. The automation capabilities are really helpful. We deployed one data center using Terraform, and after deployment, many automation features are available, which can be very helpful. Based on my experience, Cisco ACI provides substantial capability; you can design your network accordingly and it's part of the SDN family, providing many benefits to the organization, especially when moving from traditional network infrastructure. Many organizations are actually using the old traditional Nexus infrastructure or some old data center devices. It gives you significant control and one-time implementation capabilities, and it also provides better performance and security. Functionality-wise, Cisco ACI provides integration using automation. We implemented it through Terraform, which was easy. Those features are available, so I don't think any new features are needed right now; something new could come up, but they have implemented many improvements over the years.

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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

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"It offers multitenancy. The opportunity to install it on the same platform with a huge amount of customers."

"The stability is perfect. We have had no problems with Cisco ACI."

"The most valuable feature is the data center communication."

"With its programmability, you can do stuff to policies to make them more flexible, allowing you to connect devices in new ways."

"I like features like policy control and micro-segmentation."

"Cisco ACI can separate networks with a buoy interface. That is the most valuable feature."

"With ACI, if you need more capacity you can just buy more and plug them in without needing to do anything else. All of the sudden that infrastructure is there for me to use, configure, and add stuff to."

"The most valuable features are the ease of setup for redundancy, as well as centralized control."

More Cisco ACI pros

"Scalability is its most valuable feature."

"The product provides multiple-device integration."

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

"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."

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

"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."

"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."

"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."

More Cisco Secure Workload pros

Cons

"I would like to see the data center unification of Cisco ACI with Cisco DNA into a single platform to deliver the data center and campus sides."

"The additional features I would like to see included in the next releases are support for our policy-based routing. There are endpoint issues that are there now in the code. Hopefully, these will get fixed in the future code."

"The initial setup was fairly complex and it looks terrifying when you first log in. That's one thing about ACI. It takes a bit to wrap your mind around how it works. It's not overly complicated once you understand the concepts, but someone who has never worked with anything like ACI, will initially find it difficult to grasp the complexity of it."

"I think that technical support tickets should be escalated sooner."

"Cisco ACI, segmentation-wise, could be more flexible, which is an area for improvement. The solution could be improved in terms of macro or micro-segmentation for many access lists and contracts. The process becomes very messy in the end."

"An area for improvement in Cisco ACI is security, which Cisco needs to enhance in the solution. Though Cisco ACI uses a whitelist model, you must purchase an external product, such as a security firewall solution, to make whitelisting work, which the customer could find expensive. For example, you're a customer who has Cisco ACI, and the solution doesn't have IP-based filtering, so as a customer, you've purchased Cisco ACI. However, you still need to buy another product for security, and some customers wouldn't like that. However, some customers prefer to go with Cisco ACI because of its scalability and flexibility versus other solutions such as Juniper and Aruba. Technical support for Cisco ACI also needs improvement, particularly in product knowledge."

"The CLI needs to be improved."

"Deploying Cisco ACI was a little complex because we needed to add a lot to the fabric. You need to configure some servers, connect everything, make templates, and deploy switches. It takes five people to deploy and maintain."

More Cisco ACI cons

"There was a controversy when Cisco reduced the amount of data they kept, and the solution became quite cost-intensive, which made its adoption challenging….Although they have modified it now, I preferred the previous version, and I wish all the functionality were back under the same product."

"Secure Workload is a little complicated to use, and the dashboard isn't intuitive, so it takes a while to learn how to use it."

"There's room for improvement when it comes to Cisco Secure Workload. A couple of internal areas could be refined a little bit. They are trying to solve it, depending on where you suppose the agent is. Suppose you have the agent on both the server and the client, which could be the front-end server or web server connecting to the. In that case, if those two are communicating on RPC, the server can look into its configuration. It could go down and find the configuration file on the FTP server and then set the policies to it. But there are a lot of different FTP servers out there. It's also a complex case for the tool to support all FTP servers."

"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."

"The multi-tenancy, redundancy, backup and restore functionalities, as well as the monitoring aspects of the solution, need improvement. The solution offers virtually no enterprise-grade possibility for monitoring."

"The integration could be better, especially with different types of solutions."

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

"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."

More Cisco Secure Workload cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

"If you compare the licensing and total cost of ACI, it's cheaper than NSX because of the licensing fees. If you are going for full NSX features it will be too expensive, especially the next-generation firewalling feature."

"Once you sign for the start kit implementation, you have to go all the way through to the implementation, even if you are experiences issues."

"The pricing is pretty good for new technology."

"Yearly, we pay around one point two million for the solution."

"I don't believe there is any licensing required."

"It saves time and resources."

"Cisco's pricing is very expensive."

"On a scale from one to ten, where one is cheap and ten is expensive, I rate the solution's pricing an eight out of ten."

More Cisco ACI pricing and cost advice

"The price is based on how many computers you're going to install it on."

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

"The cost for the hardware is around 300k."

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

"The price is outrageous. If you have money to throw at the product, then do it."

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

"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."

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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Computer Software Company

17%

Financial Services Firm

11%

Manufacturing Company

Government

Computer Software Company

21%

Manufacturing Company

12%

Financial Services Firm

10%

Government

Company Size

By reviewers

Large Enterprise

Midsize Enterprise

Small Business

By reviewers
Company Size	Count
Small Business	21
Midsize Enterprise	18
Large Enterprise	87

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

Questions from the Community

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 gear (9K Switches) where the Code runs in ACI Policy Mode & the UCS server wh...

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 when you change one interface, changes are automatically reflected on every switch...

See all answers

What do you like most about Cisco ACI?

The flexibility of adding new components with minimal impact on existing services running in the data center is a key benefit of this ACI-based solution.

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 discovery. This raises questions about the resources required to discover and write po...

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What needs improvement with Cisco Secure Workload?

See all answers

Comparisons

VMware NSX vs Cisco ACI

Compared 19% of the time

Akamai Guardicore Segmentation vs Cisco ACI

Compared 13% of the time

HPE SDN vs Cisco ACI

Compared 11% of the time

Illumio vs Cisco ACI

Compared 10% of the time

Juniper Contrail Networking vs Cisco ACI

Compared 6% of the time

More Cisco ACI Competitors

Cisco Hypershield vs Cisco Secure Workload

Compared 21% of the time

Akamai Guardicore Segmentation vs Cisco Secure Workload

Compared 15% of the time

Illumio vs Cisco Secure Workload

Compared 15% of the time

VMware NSX vs Cisco Secure Workload

Compared 9% of the time

Prisma Cloud by Palo Alto Networks vs Cisco Secure Workload

Compared 5% of the time

More Cisco Secure Workload Competitors

Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

Cisco ACI

October 2025

Download Cisco ACI product report

Buyer's Guide

Cisco Secure Workload

October 2025

Download Cisco Secure Workload product report

Also Known As

No data available

Cisco Tetration

Overview

Cisco ACI provides advanced capabilities with features like seamless integration with VMware and APIs for programmability. It offers centralized management for streamlined operations, efficient micro-segmentation, and robust security, addressing modern data center needs.

Cisco ACI brings automation to data center infrastructure, enabling transitions from legacy to modern environments with centralized management. Organizations benefit from optimized server farms, seamless integration with VMware, and support for Kubernetes, making it suitable for large-scale environments. Offering support for healthcare, finance, and public sectors, Cisco ACI facilitates tasks such as virtual networking and multi-site connectivity with application-centric and network-centric designs.

What are the key features of Cisco ACI?

Seamless Integration with VMware: Ensures smooth operation with existing virtualized environments.
Programmability via APIs: Offers flexibility in network configuration and management through APIs.
Centralized Management: Provides a unified view of the network, simplifying oversight.
Automation: Reduces manual configuration workload, speeding up deployment.
Scalability: Adapts to growing network demands with ease.
Robust Security: Enhances protection against threats with comprehensive security measures.
Efficient Micro-Segmentation: Improves network segmentation for security and efficiency.

What benefits or ROI should users look for when evaluating Cisco ACI?

Streamlined Operation: Reduced complexity in network management.
Enhanced Performance: Improved network and application efficiency.
Cost Efficiency: Better resource allocation reduces operational costs.
Improved Security: Advanced features for increased protection.
Scalability: Allows growth without significant redesigns.

In the healthcare industry, Cisco ACI supports secure and efficient data management, accommodating regulatory needs and enhancing patient data handling. Financial institutions benefit from robust security and seamless integration with existing infrastructures, facilitating smooth transaction processing. In the public sector, it's utilized for reliable network management and servicing a diverse range of applications.

Cisco

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

Sample Customers

Bowling Green State University, du, Qatar University

ADP, University of North Carolina Charlotte (UNCC)

Buyer's Guide

Cisco ACI vs. Cisco Secure Workload

September 2025

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