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 #6 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 4.9% mindshare in CDCS, compared to Cisco Secure Workload’s 13.1% 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

4,164 Views
2,748 Comparison Views

85% willing to recommend

Cisco Secure Workload

Read 15 Cisco Secure Workload reviews

4,569 Views
3,153 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: July 2025).

Buyer's Guide

Cisco ACI vs. Cisco Secure Workload

July 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

6th

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 (9th)

Mindshare comparison

As of September 2025, in the Cloud and Data Center Security category, the mindshare of Cisco ACI is 4.9%, down from 6.7% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Cisco Secure Workload is 13.1%, up from 12.0% 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	4.9%
Cisco Secure Workload	13.1%
Other	82.0%

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

"The centralized management of the entire network data center, in this case with ACI, is the most valuable feature. By having access to some powerful APIs you can build your own tool to speak to the ACI controller, then with that, you can deploy things really fast. Having the option to build your own tools and then using the centralized management of the ACI to push the configuration to the network devices is very valuable."

"The routing of traffic is one of our main focuses when utilizing Cisco ACI."

"This product improved the way our company functions by enabling us to establish our goal of moving to a zero-trust model. That's how Cisco ACI helps us the most."

"The most valuable features of Cisco ACI are micro-segmentation, the VXLAN, and the ACI flattening services."

"It has reduced our day-to-day operations by at least half."

"Automation features have been most beneficial for managing complex networks."

"Because we can use automation processes with this platform, we have been able to free up our IT department's time."

"The initial setup was trivially simple and easy. It builds itself because it is automation. You don't have to do too much."

More Cisco ACI pros

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

"A complete and powerful micro-segmentation solution."

"The most valuable feature of this solution is security."

"Scalability is its most valuable feature."

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

"Generally speaking, Cisco support is considered one of the best in the networking products and stack."

"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 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."

More Cisco Secure Workload pros

Cons

"So far we've had very few issues, a couple of routing things that were glitches within ACI."

"In the new version of 4.0, the management groups for updating the software is not the best way to do it. It was better in 3.2."

"It would be good if Cisco ACI had some cross-domain orchestrator that could rule all the pillars in the customer network or interconnect more easily with the compass environment."

"For Multipod we need Layer 3 devices that support multicast. Customers ask: "Why can't ACI do that? Why do we need a dedicated Layer 3 device for this?" If they go for Multi-Site there is no need for that, ACI can do it. So Cisco needs to increase the Multipod features in ACI."

"Our problems with Cisco ACI are mainly related to the contracts and how to manage them easily in the platform. Cisco also needs to improve the log files and the complexity of the graphical interface."

"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 product needs to be more visible on the Internet and have the ability to be integrated into more software developments."

"It's a very complex system, as it should be. It's a new way of thinking about networking. Cisco ACI adds complexity. Cisco ACI is extremely complex. That's not necessarily a complaint, as much as it is a fact."

More Cisco ACI cons

"It has an uninviting interface."

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

"The product must be integrated with the cloud."

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

"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 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."

"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."

"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."

More Cisco Secure Workload cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

"Price is always an issue."

"Pricing for Cisco ACI could be expensive if you're not a gold partner. If you're a gold partner, you'll get reasonable pricing, but to become a gold partner, you must cross several layers. For example, at least twenty engineers within your organization have to be certified, with each certification priced at £2,000 minimum, so this would make some companies think twice about the product. If you're going for Aruba and Juniper products, on the other hand, you can quickly get the partner status, and you can start selling the product. As a gold partner, you can get up to seventy percent discount on Cisco ACI, for example, while an ordinary partner gets ten percent off. Cisco ACI is expensive for both customers and partners, but I'm rating pricing for the product as four out of five because even if the price is costly, you get a lot of benefits from the product. Cisco ACI isn't the best, price-wise, but it's still a good solution. If you're in a small organization, you may be unable to afford it. Cisco ACI is best for enterprises but not SMBs because Cisco ACI and its required resources are 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."

"This is an expensive solution."

"Cisco is much more expensive than other vendors, especially when it comes to the licensing."

"It is quite expensive. It is not at all on the cheap or medium side."

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

"We used Cisco Professional Services for the deployment. They were outstanding, but very expensive."

More Cisco ACI pricing and cost advice

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

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

"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."

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

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

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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Computer Software Company

20%

Financial Services Firm

10%

Manufacturing Company

Healthcare Company

Computer Software Company

23%

Manufacturing Company

11%

Financial Services Firm

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...

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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?

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Comparisons

VMware NSX vs Cisco ACI

Compared 20% of the time

Akamai Guardicore Segmentation vs Cisco ACI

Compared 13% of the time

HPE SDN vs Cisco ACI

Compared 12% of the time

Illumio vs Cisco ACI

Compared 10% of the time

Juniper Contrail Networking vs Cisco ACI

Compared 7% of the time

More Cisco ACI Competitors

Cisco Hypershield vs Cisco Secure Workload

Compared 22% of the time

Akamai Guardicore Segmentation vs Cisco Secure Workload

Compared 16% of the time

Illumio vs Cisco Secure Workload

Compared 16% 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 6% of the time

More Cisco Secure Workload Competitors

Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

Cisco ACI

September 2025

Download Cisco ACI product report

Buyer's Guide

Cisco Secure Workload

September 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

July 2025

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