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Cisco Duo vs RSA Adaptive Authentication comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Mar 9, 2025

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 Authentication Systems
2nd
Average Rating
8.8
Reviews Sentiment
7.9
Number of Reviews
61
Ranking in other categories
Single Sign-On (SSO) (2nd), ZTNA as a Service (6th), Cisco Security Portfolio (6th), Multi-Factor Authentication (MFA) (1st)
RSA Adaptive Authentication
Ranking in Authentication Systems
26th
Average Rating
6.8
Number of Reviews
6
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
 

Mindshare comparison

As of May 2025, in the Authentication Systems category, the mindshare of Cisco Duo is 9.7%, down from 11.8% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of RSA Adaptive Authentication is 0.5%, up from 0.5% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Authentication Systems
 

Featured Reviews

RyanDeppe - PeerSpot reviewer
Helps reduce the risk of a breach and is easy to deploy and onboard
For our customers, Duo Security is a significant advantage because it provides them with a straightforward method to implement MFA across their entire environment. Moreover, once we delve into the more advanced features of Duo Security, it enables us as a partner to engage in ongoing discussions regarding security strategies with our customers. Initially, we may only introduce them to MFA during the onboarding process. However, as their security strategy evolves, we can leverage Duo to perform additional tasks such as risk-based assessments and deployments, thereby assisting in the development of their security measures. Duo Security helps secure our infrastructure. It serves as our gateway layer of protection, allowing us to understand who is logging in and why. We conduct risk-based assessments on each user to determine whether their actions are appropriate or not. Duo Security is not a comprehensive security solution, but it is undoubtedly a crucial component, a critical layer of security. This aspect resonates with our customers consistently. Their ability to reduce the risk of a breach is of utmost importance. It serves as the primary line of defense. Currently, credential gathering and leaks are widespread in the market. By implementing an MFA solution like Duo Security, we can effectively prevent these issues. When we put a stop to credential harvesting, it becomes much harder for attackers to infiltrate and navigate our network. Therefore, Duo Security acts as an excellent first line of defense. User authentication and device verification are the methods through which we envision our customers navigating in order to prevent identity-based attacks. Initially, when we employ Duo Security, it is a straightforward implementation of multi-factor authentication. As we progress, we enhance security measures by incorporating device risk assessment and potentially even regional assessment. This includes considerations such as whether the login is being attempted from a specific IP address. These gradual enhancements contribute to the establishment of an additional layer of protection. Thus, it is not necessary to implement a completely disruptive strategy right from the start. Instead, it is possible to gradually adopt and integrate this approach, following a crawl, walk, or run methodology. The Duo Security self-service portal helps free up our customers' IT staff time, allowing them to focus on other projects. As a Cisco partner, we have received feedback from our customers that the portal is highly interactive, enabling them to easily navigate and resolve issues. After setting up their Duo environment, we rarely receive callbacks for assistance, as the portal is intuitive and empowers users to handle everything they need on their own. The appealing aspect of Duo Security is its ability to establish trust for every access request, regardless of its origin. It is a cloud-based solution with excellent API integrations. It doesn't matter where or how a user logs in; Duo will be there to protect the user, whether it's through MFA, risk assessment, or similar methods. It is extremely beneficial to our customers that Duo Security considers all resources as external. Our customers frequently inquire about a zero-trust model, and this is a key component of it. Unfortunately, I would love to say that there is a simple solution for zero trust where we can just deploy this solution and be done with it. But that's not the case. It requires a layered approach, and that's what we convey to our customers. Duo Security is definitely a part of that. Duo Security has helped improve our customers' cybersecurity resilience. Internally, it protects our users from accessing sales operations-based environments. Additionally, our customers use it regularly to protect business-critical applications.
AR
It stops fraud in banks and reduces their costs
RSA Adaptive Authentication is one of the most used tools for stopping fraud in the world. The tool is very good variable to take into account when deciding what product to choose. I think RSA is best options in this field since the tool is a really good piece of engineering.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"It was a simple way of providing two-factor authentication for remote access when we hit the COVID pandemic. It was very easy and quick to get it going."
"The two-factor authentication is valuable because that is the use case for which we are using it."
"Another feature is the single pane of glass management. That's important for analytics and also for troubleshooting. It means there's one place that you go to at least start the troubleshooting process."
"Regarding the valuable features, I would say that Duo Security is easy to use, has speed, and is dependable."
"It is really scalable. It is easy once you get an application in. You can import users from Active Directory and enroll users really fast."
"The most valuable feature is the ability for users to connect securely to the office using the VPN."
"Multifactor authentication and secure two-factor authentication are the most valuable features. It's been around for a while, but now it's becoming an enforced behavior as opposed to something that you used to do as optional."
"For me and my customers, the best feature is that it's very easy to integrate with the existing infrastructure. It takes a few minutes to configure it."
"Ingestion of logs and raising alert space on those logs are the most valuable features."
"The most valuable feature is the stock tokens. That works the best for us."
"The capability to manage your business policy related to security when required without vendor involvement."
"Our customer are seeing value from the product, as they experience cost reductions. They can stop fraud from their customers, then their customers can have a better experience from their services."
"Risk Engine’s risk score, eFN, GeoIP, and device binding all coming together in the Policy Rules to decide when to escalate to MFA."
 

Cons

"When you come to the push in Duo Security, there are some integrations where you have to use the code instead of the push functionality."
"They could just continue to add more integrations."
"For the back-end, there could be a few more security features applied."
"Duo was clearly purchased, and Cisco has a lot of other panels for their Firepower products, et cetera. They need to continue bringing it, Umbrella, and the endpoint pieces even more together and make the integration a little more seamless among all of them."
"The price of Cisco Duo could be better."
"Most of my colleagues from other companies use the Microsoft MFA solution because it's included in Office 365. Few people are considering Cisco Duo. That's the primary problem in our area. It's a solution mostly adopted by Cisco users."
"Duo Security should have more customized use cases. For example, if a client needs to have more customization, it would be better to connect directly with Duo's R&D to try to discuss the issues together in order to add customizations."
"There might be a little slowness, but that could be my connection."
"It has taken years to implement."
"The product is basically unusable. We need better ease of use; it's overly complicated."
"Better filters when searching for events. The current features for current filters when searching fraud events are not very comprehensive. You can only filter by certain fields in the transaction."
"RSA Adaptive Authentication lacks a mechanism to verify the identity of a new user in the Enrollment event workflow."
"Reporting modules is one of the major areas that can be improved further."
"I would like to see a more adaptive type of solution, something that we could use on our web pages..."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"Price-wise, the solution has been very, very reasonable...Licensing is the last thing I think about Duo Security because it's so easy, and I had no problems with it."
"The licensing is very good because it does not cost a lot of money. It's affordable for all-sized customers, including enterprises. There is an additional cost for premium support."
"I rate the product pricing a seven out of ten."
"The pricing is pretty competitive. It's pretty cheap. Anybody can adopt it."
"Their pricing model is a little bit weird. Currently, there is no price advantage in signing up for yearly contracts. There are no additional costs to the standard licensing costs."
"I only need the solution for IT staff, which makes it relatively cheap. If I deployed it for the whole company, it would be costly, so it depends on the number of users. Duo Security is affordable compared to other products in the segment."
"Our licensing fee is currently on an annual basis."
"Cisco has the most expensive products because market leaders tend to charge a lot."
"Customers need to deploy the solution in a very expensive infrastructure. RSA should should think about a less expensive infrastructure for customers because the solution costs around $100,000, and the infrastructure needed to support that solution may be even more expensive than that price."
"You may need to opt for second best if funding is low and the number of users is huge. However, the pricing is able to be negotiated if your user figures are huge."
"Keep the proxy service layer on premises. That consumes SaaS security services on the back-end."
"The pricing is $50 per head, yearly."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Computer Software Company
24%
Manufacturing Company
8%
Financial Services Firm
6%
Government
6%
Financial Services Firm
50%
Computer Software Company
13%
Manufacturing Company
6%
Comms Service Provider
4%
 

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.
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Also Known As

Duo Security
No data available
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Information Not Available
ADP, Ameritas, Partners Healthcare
Find out what your peers are saying about Cisco Duo vs. RSA Adaptive Authentication and other solutions. Updated: April 2025.
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