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Cisco Duo vs Okta Workforce Identity comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Jun 15, 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
Cisco Duo enhances security, boosts staff morale, saves costs, and improves operations, despite perceived productivity impacts.
Sentiment score
7.2
Okta Workforce Identity offers high ROI through enhanced security, reduced IT burdens, automation, and improved scalability and reliability.
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
7.5
Cisco Duo's support is highly rated for expertise and solutions, but some users note delays and improvement needs.
Sentiment score
7.4
Okta Workforce Identity offers responsive customer service, though delays occur; many benefit from fast, knowledgeable support and web resources.
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.
They are very supportive; they just open a ticket, and they support us very professionally.
We had an issue with the Okta Workforce Identity dashboard once in 2023 when we had an outage, but it recovered in a few minutes.
 

Scalability Issues

Sentiment score
8.1
Cisco Duo is scalable, easily integrates across sites, and supports thousands of users without disruptions, adapting to various applications.
Sentiment score
7.6
Okta Workforce Identity is highly scalable, supporting growth without performance issues, making it ideal for medium to large enterprises.
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
8.4
Cisco Duo is highly stable and reliable, with minimal downtime and quick issue resolution, maintaining productivity efficiently.
Sentiment score
8.1
Okta Workforce Identity is praised for its stability and reliability, with users noting minimal issues and quick recovery from outages.
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.
Okta Workforce Identity is a stable product.
 

Room For Improvement

Cisco Duo needs telephony credit, integration, deployment, and user interface improvements, plus better licensing, documentation, and older app compatibility.
Okta Workforce Identity needs UI improvements, better integration, enhanced support, and more features for effective user experience.
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.
It could improve in the governance part, particularly regarding better role management and workflow, as I feel it is tedious on Okta.
Okta should have at least a local peering partner for countries that align with or comply with GDPR, so there are no compliance or audit questions.
I believe that if we integrate the workflows section into the main Okta Workforce Identity dashboard, it can be very useful.
 

Setup Cost

Cisco Duo's pricing is competitive, flexible, straightforward, and suited for large enterprises, with premium support and moderate setup costs.
Okta Workforce Identity is costly but valued by larger enterprises for its comprehensive features and straightforward setup.
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

Cisco Duo is praised for its versatile multi-factor authentication, integration, user-friendly interface, and adaptability to hybrid environments.
Okta Workforce Identity enhances security and efficiency through centralized management, Single Sign-On, automation, and seamless integration with applications.
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.
For the end user, it is beneficial as they do not have to remember a password or keep the password on a post-it for different applications; they just authenticate once to access several services and service providers.
You can only log in if you have the access, which protects the applications by avoiding cross-site scripting.
Okta enables multi-factor authentication, which enhances security, especially for SaaS applications.
 

Categories and Ranking

Cisco Duo
Ranking in Single Sign-On (SSO)
4th
Ranking in Authentication Systems
2nd
Ranking in ZTNA as a Service
7th
Average Rating
8.8
Reviews Sentiment
7.9
Number of Reviews
74
Ranking in other categories
Cisco Security Portfolio (4th), Multi-Factor Authentication (MFA) (2nd)
Okta Workforce Identity
Ranking in Single Sign-On (SSO)
2nd
Ranking in Authentication Systems
6th
Ranking in ZTNA as a Service
11th
Average Rating
8.4
Reviews Sentiment
7.0
Number of Reviews
67
Ranking in other categories
Privileged Access Management (PAM) (7th), Identity and Access Management as a Service (IDaaS) (IAMaaS) (3rd), Access Management (4th)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of July 2025, in the Single Sign-On (SSO) category, the mindshare of Cisco Duo is 5.9%, down from 7.5% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Okta Workforce Identity is 10.9%, up from 10.2% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Single Sign-On (SSO)
 

Featured Reviews

Thomas Botts - PeerSpot reviewer
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.
Tor Nordhagen - PeerSpot reviewer
Extremely easy to work with, simple to set up, and reasonably priced
The drawback of this solution is that in our shops, many staff members sometimes have to be borrowed from one shop to another and the solution does not really support having multiple roles. The user experience we would like to have when a person works in shop A which pays their salary is that they should have access to pretty much everything. Maybe you have somebody who is a manager in that shop A, he should be able to order new wear, he should be able to change the pricing, he should be able to empty the cash registry, and ship it to the bank. But when for instance, in COVID, people had to fill in for people in shops where a lot of people were sick, then they had to actually use user accounts of people that work in shop B. If you were employed in shop A, you could not work in shop B without borrowing somebody else's user ID and password. Which is really bad. We haven't been able to work around that and Okta Workforce Identity does not have a solution for it. We are now piloting their identity governance solution. Obviously, it's easy to give somebody access, give them an account, and give them roles, but it's hard to maintain that. For example, if you moved from, say working in a shop to working in a warehouse. But why do you still have all this shop access? The solution has until now not had anything to really support the process of taking away access. But now we are in a better release program of Okta's identity governance solution. Although it's very basic, the solution has started on a journey, but identity governance is something that Okta Workforce Identity really needs to improve. The ability or the options in the solution for changing the look and feel are not good enough because in our partner portal, essentially what they have is an ugly admin interface. The admin interface is good enough for us technical people because that's all we need. We work with the product and we're able to see the data but when it comes to presenting the service portal, Okta Workforce Identity does not have any capabilities really for making it look pretty. To add branding and different graphical user interface elements than Okta basic for essentially delegated admin for the business-to-business portal is horrifying because you're essentially using the tech admin. The only option we had and used, was to take the tech admin console and strip it. so that a vendor that has some goods that are sold in the shops, when they want to add a user on their side, say a driver or a packer on their side who should know how much they've packed in a truck to come to our warehouse, then the user interface that this vendor is using, these functional people will then have to use an extremely basic user interface.
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Computer Software Company
20%
Manufacturing Company
9%
Government
6%
Financial Services Firm
6%
Computer Software Company
14%
Manufacturing Company
10%
Financial Services Firm
9%
Government
7%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
 

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...
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.
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.
What do you like most about Okta Workforce Identity?
Okta has introduced the Universal Directory. It has custom attribute capability and user permissions to read/write on their profiles or hide them. Profile sources and identity profile sourcing are ...
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Okta Workforce Identity?
Pricing for Okta is reasonably not that much, however, I don't have access to the commercial aspect.
What needs improvement with Okta Workforce Identity?
Areas for improvement with Okta Workforce Identity would be in the governance place; for me, it is light. Okta is mostly focused on execution and runtime, which means maintaining authentication and...
 

Also Known As

Duo Security
No data available
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Information Not Available
FedEx, Zoom, Takeda, Lululemon Athletica, GrunHub, jetBlue, McKensson, Bain & Company, Engie, Peloton, Sonos, T-Mobile, Hewlett Packard, MGM Resorts, Ally Financial, Priceline, Albertsons, Itercom, Classy, FICO, Kensho, Live Nation, Drata, Rotary, and others.
Find out what your peers are saying about Cisco Duo vs. Okta Workforce Identity and other solutions. Updated: July 2025.
863,901 professionals have used our research since 2012.