Cisco Duo vs Cisco Secure Workload comparison

Cisco Duo and Cisco Secure Workload are both solutions in the Cisco Security Portfolio category. Cisco Duo is ranked #4 with an average rating of 8.5, while Cisco Secure Workload is ranked #8 with an average rating of 9.5. Cisco Duo holds a 8.2% mindshare in CSS, compared to Cisco Secure Workload’s 7.8% mindshare. Additionally, 96% of Cisco Duo users are willing to recommend the solution, compared to 100% of Cisco Secure Workload users who would recommend it.

Cisco Duo

Read 76 Cisco Duo reviews

6,450 Views
323 Comparison Views

96% willing to recommend

Cisco Secure Workload

Read 15 Cisco Secure Workload reviews

4,428 Views
354 Comparison Views

100% willing to recommend

Cisco Duo

Cisco Secure Workload

Comparison Buyer's Guide

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Executive Summary

We performed a comparison between Cisco Duo and Cisco Secure Workload based on real PeerSpot user reviews.

Find out in this report how the two Cisco Security Portfolio solutions compare in terms of features, pricing, service and support, easy of deployment, and ROI.

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

Buyer's Guide

Cisco Duo vs. Cisco Secure Workload

September 2025

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Helped 869,202 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:

Categories and Ranking

Cisco Duo

Ranking in Cisco Security Portfolio

4th

Average Rating

8.8

Reviews Sentiment

7.1

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

Single Sign-On (SSO) (4th), Authentication Systems (2nd), Access Management (5th), ZTNA as a Service (5th), Multi-Factor Authentication (MFA) (2nd)

Cisco Secure Workload

Ranking in Cisco Security Portfolio

8th

Average Rating

8.6

Reviews Sentiment

7.7

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

Cloud and Data Center Security (9th), Cloud Workload Protection Platforms (CWPP) (14th), Microsegmentation Software (4th)

Mindshare comparison

As of October 2025, in the Cisco Security Portfolio category, the mindshare of Cisco Duo is 8.2%, up from 3.5% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Cisco Secure Workload is 7.8%, up from 6.0% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.

Cisco Security Portfolio Market Share Distribution
Product	Market Share (%)
Cisco Duo	8.2%
Cisco Secure Workload	7.8%
Other	84.0%

Cisco Security Portfolio

Featured Reviews

Thomas Botts

Senior Network Engineer at a educational organization with 1-10 employees

Managing security policies effectively with seamless authentication

The feature of Cisco Duo that I prefer the most is the policies, being able to control what we need to within the policies. You can get pretty granular. There isn't a lot of training that goes on in school districts. Email is an easy way where many people give out their credentials, so the level of protection is something that we definitely need in a school district. Cisco Duo's strong security authentication system has been easy when logging in, although the teachers don't appreciate it as much. We have it configured so users essentially just hit accept. If it sees any sort of built-in risk, then it steps up authentication. It's pretty easy. I appreciate it. I've encountered advantages with Cisco Duo in that it has stopped significant pushback from teachers. It has prevented credential sharing and unauthorized access. We've seen a huge decrease since we've rolled it out across the entire district.

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

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"What I appreciate the most is that you can push a notification with your phone and log in to your computer."

"The feature I like the most about Cisco Duo is that it allows us to authenticate users before they can connect to our network from outside of our company."

"The ease of deploying Cisco Duo Security and onboarding has greatly benefited our customers."

"The anti-phishing feature is the most valuable."

"The product is reliable and easy to use."

"The two-factor login is great. I receive a message and just have to press okay."

"The feature of Cisco Duo that I prefer the most is the policies, being able to control what we need to within the policies."

"I appreciate the simple login feature of Cisco Duo; being able to log into your actual page and then having all your apps there is convenient."

More Cisco Duo pros

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

"The product offers great visibility into the network so we can enforce security measures."

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

"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."

"It's stable."

"The product provides multiple-device integration."

"Scalability is its most valuable feature."

More Cisco Secure Workload pros

Cons

"I would appreciate seeing Cisco Duo improved with a tighter integration with Active Directory to secure not just Remote Desktop to a server, but all the remote levels of connection that you can make to a server."

"Improving Cisco Duo might involve alerting us about telephony credits when people receive texts. We hit zero at one point, and we were running around in circles without any idea until I discovered it."

"It is easy to use when logging in, but at times, there's a delay in getting the pop-up on a phone, requiring users to occasionally retry authentication depending on backend services."

"More automation and device insights would be helpful in achieving a seamless single pane of glass. Having the additional capability to streamline processes would also make things better."

"To improve Cisco Duo, the biggest consideration is the licensing standpoint; the most common issue I've found is customers not setting up the Active Directory sync properly, leading to inflated licensing usage when they try to delete inactive users that are still being charged."

"An enhancement they might make is if they can log it to Splunk since they're big into Splunk. Instead of me having to go into that portal to look at things when someone is trying to log in and they forgot their password, I can look in and tell them they forgot their password or didn't respond to the prompt."

"The pain point for us at one point was the Duo Authentication Proxy since we're on-premises and not in the cloud. We had to have a proxy machine that's in our DMZ to talk to Duo for us. The configuration of that was a little complicated."

"I'm unsure how to disable the ping notification sound on my phone when using Cisco Duo. I don't know how to silence it."

More Cisco Duo 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."

"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 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."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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."

More Cisco Secure Workload cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

"From a reseller perspective, it's still challenging to explain the whole license strategy to a client, so we really have to be ahead of that for all the true forward conversations."

"Cisco has the most expensive products because market leaders tend to charge a lot."

"Its price is reasonable. It is not highly expensive."

"You pay per user when using this solution and the pricing is fair."

"I haven't seen it in a while, but it's at par with everything else licensing-wise."

"It's a bit confusing because we're on a three-year plan with a certain number of licenses, and we've gone over that number. They told us that when we renew, they will add all these licenses. We've expanded quickly, so everyone's kind of scared because no one knows what the bill is with the long pricing cycle."

"With regard to pricing, for a small business buying a one off, it's pretty expensive. If it's an enterprise that has thousands of employees, however, it's really nothing to protect your data because if your network goes down or it's breached, you're losing millions of dollars every minute. When it comes to a large enterprise, it's priced where it should be because you're talking business to business. You're not talking business to consumer."

"I rate the product pricing a seven out of ten."

More Cisco Duo pricing and cost advice

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

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

"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."

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

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

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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Computer Software Company

18%

Manufacturing Company

10%

Government

Financial Services Firm

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	27
Midsize Enterprise	16
Large Enterprise	36

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

Questions from the Community

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...

See all answers

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.

See all answers

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Duo Security?

My experience with the pricing, setup cost, and licensing of Cisco Duo is honestly above my pay grade. I don't know any of that.

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...

See all answers

What needs improvement with Cisco Secure Workload?

See all answers

Comparisons

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Compared 13% of the time

Microsoft Entra ID vs Cisco Duo

Compared 11% of the time

Fortinet FortiToken vs Cisco Duo

Compared 10% of the time

Yubico YubiKey vs Cisco Duo

Compared 7% of the time

Cisco Identity Services Engine (ISE) vs Cisco Duo

Compared 6% of the time

More Cisco Duo 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 15% of the time

Cisco ACI vs Cisco Secure Workload

Compared 10% of the time

VMware NSX vs Cisco Secure Workload

Compared 10% of the time

More Cisco Secure Workload Competitors

Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

Cisco Duo

October 2025

Download Cisco Duo product report

Buyer's Guide

Cisco Secure Workload

October 2025

Download Cisco Secure Workload product report

Also Known As

Duo Security

Cisco Tetration

Overview

Cisco Duo is a cloud-based identity security tool offering easy and wide-ranging access protection for users and devices worldwide. It assures identity-first security with clear visibility across multi-cloud, hybrid, and on-premises environments.

Cisco Duo provides robust multi-factor authentication and seamless integration capabilities with existing infrastructures. Appreciated for its stability and speed, it supports distributed workforces by securing VPN access, corporate networks, and cloud services. Duo’s comprehensive identity ecosystem supports easy deployment and management through a single-pane-of-glass management interface. It seamlessly merges with popular platforms like Active Directory and Office 365 across diverse hardware.

What are Cisco Duo’s Essential Features?

Multi-Factor Authentication: Offers secure access with options like push notifications and hardware tokens.
Seamless Integration: Easily fits with existing systems and third-party applications.
User-Friendly Management: Provides centralized control with a single-pane-of-glass interface.
Wide Compatibility: Supports broad applications and devices, enhancing security management.
Stable and Fast: Reliable speed and intuitive interaction for users across platforms.

What Benefits and ROI Can Cisco Duo Users Expect?

Enhanced Security: Increases protection with versatile MFA options for critical resources.
Ease of Use: Simplifies deployment and management with intuitive interfaces.
Scalability: Adapts to growing needs with broad compatibility and integration support.
Support for Distributed Workforces: Ensures secure remote access for teams anywhere.

Cisco Duo finds extensive applications across education, finance, retail, and government sectors by fortifying network and application access security. Organizations leverage it for its MFA capabilities, integrating with ERP systems, ensuring protected connectivity with VPN and cloud-based services, crucial in maintaining secure and efficient operations.

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

Information Not Available

ADP, University of North Carolina Charlotte (UNCC)

Buyer's Guide

Cisco Duo vs. Cisco Secure Workload

September 2025

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