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Cisco Identity Services Engine (ISE) vs ForgeRock comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive Summary

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 Identity Services Eng...
Average Rating
8.2
Reviews Sentiment
6.7
Number of Reviews
143
Ranking in other categories
Network Access Control (NAC) (1st), Cisco Security Portfolio (1st)
ForgeRock
Average Rating
8.0
Reviews Sentiment
6.5
Number of Reviews
30
Ranking in other categories
Identity Management (IM) (13th), Access Management (11th), Customer Identity and Access Management (CIAM) (6th)
 

Mindshare comparison

Cisco Identity Services Engine (ISE) and ForgeRock aren’t in the same category and serve different purposes. Cisco Identity Services Engine (ISE) is designed for Network Access Control (NAC) and holds a mindshare of 25.1%, down 30.7% compared to last year.
ForgeRock, on the other hand, focuses on Access Management, holds 7.2% mindshare, up 6.9% since last year.
Network Access Control (NAC)
Access Management
 

Featured Reviews

SunilkumarNaganuri - PeerSpot reviewer
Enhanced device administration hindered by complex deployment and security limitations
Cisco Identity Services Engine (ISE) needs to improve the profiling preauthentication. They are very poor in asset classification and should focus on improving the preauthentication profiling, especially for NAC use cases. This will give them a roadmap for software-defined access (SDA) use cases and network segmentation. Threat detection capabilities are very weak. Additionally, the product is vulnerable and has many bugs.
Ahmet Murat Ülker - PeerSpot reviewer
Easy to use, but customizations can be complicated to handle
I would suggest others use the product after asking them to consider their use cases. SSO may be a use case for some, and using the product as an IDM tool may be a use case. At the moment, my company is not deploying all the components of ForgeRock itself. My company uses ForgeRock for OAuth 2.0. For example, my company is not deploying the IDM and identity gateway components. You should consider your use case and select the required components for that use case. My company does not use the SSO features of the tool. My company uses SSO to access ForgeRock's AM Console for individual users. My company does not use single sign on features of the product and instead, we use Auth0. I rate the tool a seven or eight out of ten.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"The best features are the scalability and the license structure."
"The user experience of the solution is great. It's a very transparent system."
"Cisco ISE's profiling and posturing features ensure that all devices are compliant with regulatory authorities."
"The most important feature for us is visibility in terms of user connections. It's the ability to see what devices are online for a particular user that helps a lot with our troubleshooting."
"The feature that I most like is that it can notify me whenever someone plugs in their device, which is not allowed. I get notifications for new laptop devices. I think the user interface looks good compared to previous versions."
"They have recently made a lot of improvements. My clients don't have much to complain about."
"The solution offers automation and real-time visibility, which aids in monitoring and troubleshooting issues with endpoints."
"At the moment, ISE seems to integrate very well with a number of other technologies."
"Easy to customize and adaptable to any environment."
"The product is easy to set up."
"The solution is very scalable. We have a lot of users that have been increasing over the years that we have been using it. We have approximately 20,000 users."
"ForgeRock products are customizable, and the out-of-the-box features are solid, too. I primarily use the OIDC compliance features. It's just a configuration. it's easy to set up and customize trees. We can add our own features if necessary. Banks and corporations have different standards and specific validations."
"The most valuable features are that it is easy to manage and it's stable."
"The product is easy to use in a development environment."
"We have found the identity and access management tools in the solution to be particularly useful for our organization."
"ForgeRock is an extensive product with many functionalities and capabilities, much more than many other tools combined."
 

Cons

"I'd like to see the logging be a bit more robust in terms of what it has baked in. If I want to do any in-depth searching, I have to export all the logs to an external platform like Elastic or LogRhythm and then parse through them myself. It would be nice if I could find what I want, when I want it, on the platform itself."
"I don't like the fact that we can see the logs only for 24 hours. Maybe that happens because of the way we set it up."
"The installation is not straightforward, it took us approximately one month."
"Sometimes, there are instances when Cisco ISE simply fails to function without any apparent reason, and regardless of the investigation we undertake, the logs indicate that everything is functioning properly, making it somewhat inexplicable."
"They should improve the documentation. There tends to be a lot of old text, or the new things aren't always up to what's been released on the code, and sometimes the documentation is inconsistent."
"The solution can lag somewhat as we have a large database."
"Documentation is probably the worst part of the software."
"Since we have started, we struggled a lot to implement this solution into our network, and we opened a case a couple of times. Up until this point, nothing else needs to be improved with this product."
"It should have a better user interface. Its flexibility should also be improved. It is not about simplifying; it is more about flexibility. Each company has its own requirements, and ForgeRock can provide more flexibility in terms of the use of existing modules to implement features for the customers."
"The product's support services in the French language are not free."
"We would like this solution to be developed for use with mobile applications."
"The identity management model needs a bit of improvement."
"Automatic Deployment needs improvement. it could be made easier."
"In an upcoming release, the solution could improve by limiting the need to do customizations."
"They should improve the solution by include reporting."
"As with any complex software platform, there is a learning curve to using ForgeRock, and it may require specialized expertise to implement and manage effectively."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The price can be lower, especially for subscriptions. It should be a lot cheaper to have a wide range of customers. The price should be comparable to competitive products like Forescout or Fortinet FortiNAC. Forescout is cheaper for customers looking for a cloud solution."
"There is a license to use this solution and the price is reasonable."
"It costs around 50,000 baht in the first year, but I'm unsure about the second year."
"It is fair."
"If you go directly with Cisco for the implementation it's very, very expensive."
"The solution’s pricing is okay."
"Licensing is a disaster. It's a mess and I hope they fix it soon."
"Over the years, licensing has been confusing and complicated because there are so many different licenses for each different product and each different iteration of the product."
"Its licensing is on a yearly basis, but it also depends on the contract that you have with the vendor. They have multiple types of contracts. There are additional costs to the standard licensing fees. If you need some of the features, you have to pay more."
"Its price is comparable to other products in the market."
"ForgeRock is an expensive solution."
"The pricing of the solution is fair but I do not have the full details."
"ForgeRock's pricing is more competitive than other products."
"It's a bit pricey and could be more competitive."
"The license is purchased annually per user. However, you can negotiate if you are signing for a longer period of time. When comparing this solution to others on the market it is priced fair, it is not at the top of the price range or at the bottom end."
"We have multiple clients we are looking at right now. We are at a very small number, however, the idea and the goal is to grow. We are looking at about $100,000 and $50,000 a minimum a month cost. That'd be minimum maybe in a couple of years."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Computer Software Company
15%
Educational Organization
12%
Financial Services Firm
9%
Government
9%
Financial Services Firm
23%
Computer Software Company
12%
Insurance Company
7%
Manufacturing Company
6%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
 

Questions from the Community

Which is better - Aruba Clearpass or Cisco ISE?
Aruba ClearPass is a Network Access Control tool that gives secure network access to multiple device types. You can adapt the policies to VPN access, wired, or wireless access. You can securely ...
What are the main differences between Cisco ISE and Forescout Platform?
OK, so Cisco ISE uses 802.1X to secure switchports against unauthorized access. The drawback of this is that ISE cannot secure the port if a device does not support 802.1x. Cameras, badge readers, ...
How does Cisco ISE compare with Fortinet FortiNAC?
Cisco ISE uses AI endpoint analytics to identify new devices based on their behavior. It will also notify you if someone plugs in with a device that is not allowed and will block it. The user exper...
What do you like most about ForgeRock?
The most valuable features of ForgeRock are social login and data protection.
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for ForgeRock?
Our company was considering switching back to Keycloak from ForgeRock, so as to not pay any license fees. ForgeRock also supports M-PIN and biometric features that Keycloak does not provide. My com...
What needs improvement with ForgeRock?
In the past, I saw that Splunk was integrated with a testing portal, and then it was integrated with Slack. I don't think ForgeRock directly supports integrations with Slack, making it an area wher...
 

Also Known As

Cisco ISE
ForgeRock Identity Platform, ForgeRock OpenIDM
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Aegean Motorway, BC Hydro, Beachbody, Bucks County Intermediate Unit , Cisco IT, Derby City Council, Global Banking Customer, Gobierno de Castilla-La Mancha, Houston Methodist, Linz AG, London Hydro, Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Molina Healthcare, MST Systems, New South Wales Rural Fire Service, Reykjavik University, Wildau University
Geico, Thomson Reuters, Salesforce, McKesson, Trinet, SKY, BNP Paribas, Deloitte, Capgemini, North Western University
Find out what your peers are saying about Cisco, Hewlett Packard Enterprise, Fortinet and others in Network Access Control (NAC). Updated: June 2025.
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