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Cisco Identity Services Engine (ISE) vs OneLogin by One Identity 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
142
Ranking in other categories
Network Access Control (NAC) (1st), Cisco Security Portfolio (1st)
OneLogin by One Identity
Average Rating
8.4
Reviews Sentiment
7.1
Number of Reviews
17
Ranking in other categories
Single Sign-On (SSO) (9th), User Provisioning Software (6th), Identity Management (IM) (11th), Identity and Access Management as a Service (IDaaS) (IAMaaS) (10th), Access Management (8th)
 

Mindshare comparison

Cisco Identity Services Engine (ISE) and OneLogin by One Identity 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 25.8%, down 31.3% compared to last year.
OneLogin by One Identity, on the other hand, focuses on Identity and Access Management as a Service (IDaaS) (IAMaaS), holds 2.0% mindshare, up 2.0% since last year.
Network Access Control (NAC)
Identity and Access Management as a Service (IDaaS) (IAMaaS)
 

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.
Pete Snell - PeerSpot reviewer
Staff and students can now reset their passwords using their enrolled two-factor device as the authentication mechanism
We've been a OneLogin customer for several years now. While I like the platform, there have been some challenges. A great example is the amount of work needed with that webhook for the enrollment user experience. This functionality is native to some competing products. That's one area where we've leaned on our account rep over the years. They shouldn't rely on the customer to make this experience better. This is one feature request that hasn't been implemented yet. At the same time, they've implemented other features we've requested. One is the ability to use a personal email address as a factor. Initially, they didn't have that. We pushed hard on our account team for about two years before it was finally released. It's a give-and-take. Some of the product's features aren't perfect, but we've had some success pushing fixes to the development team that needs to happen. They've done a decent job. However, there are some fixes that they don't have an interest in. A lot of what I described was before OneLogin was acquired by Quest/One Identity. Things have changed. It doesn't feel like they're driving the product as OneLogin was. It may be because it's a new product to them, and they're still trying to get the lay of the land, process feature requests, etc., but it's not moving as fast as before. We've been experiencing some pain points since the acquisition. For example, there have been some outages we didn't see previously, which are a big topic with my executive team. You have hundreds of applications relying on this service for login. If the service is unavailable, nobody can log into these applications. The issues have high visibility. It's gotten better, but it's still there. It raises questions about whether One Identity can support the platform they've acquired. How are they enhancing the product? And how are they supporting the product and the service in the future? Those are two essential questions. There are also lots of nice-to-haves, but that's the case with any product.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"Our clients like Cisco ISE because they already use various Cisco solutions. It's easy for them to use this solution because they have an engineer with Cisco certifications."
"Easy to use and provides good support"
"I like the guest access feature, which has been important for us."
"The valuable feature of the solution lies in its integration capabilities with other applications."
"They provide you multiple ways to achieve security, not only on-prem, but also when you have remote and guest workers. Especially post-pandemic, a lot of our customers have remote workers. So, it has been really helpful."
"The TACACS and RADIUS have been the most valuable features so far."
"The most valuable features are authentication, we have more granular control on the access policies for the administrators. The solution is easy to use, has a center point administration, and has a good GUI."
"For device administration, all devices have multifactor authentication in collaboration with IT, so it secures access to all of our devices. For guest and wireless access, it's a matter of a lowly manager who we give access to the portal and he can assign access to the guests, so it's a very simple process now. It keeps the IT focusing on their work, and gives the business people the right access."
"The most valuable feature is the ease with which we can manage the sign-on feature."
"Documentation."
"Once I made the OneLogin ID, it would essentially make user names and passwords for every application that we had."
"Ease of integration with AD."
"In my role, the most valuable features are two-factor authentication and self-service password reset. The most helpful feature for the institution as a whole is probably the single sign-on. As an IT director, I care about security and ease of use."
"OneLogin is efficient."
"When it comes to access management, the solution's single pane of glass is extremely important. The single pane of glass for access management enables collaborative work between IT and security. We have access to certain applications that require device trust. Based on the role, we can access those applications through OneLogin Desktop."
"The solution allows the user to search logs based on a specific time."
 

Cons

"The web interface needs improvement. The new web interface that they have is not as easy to manage and we find it to be very slow."
"ISE is a little clunky. The front-end feels like it is from the 1980s."
"The knocks I have against the product are the number of bugs that we encounter, constantly, and the amount of upgrading that we have to do."
"Cisco ISE's real-time data analytics for database logging could be improved."
"The compliance and posture don't always work. They should make it more stable. With each upgrade, we lose some functionality. We have to wait for another upgrade."
"If Cisco could grant more control, the features could be more focused on network and security administration, reducing the need for integration with other components."
"A lot of people tell you the hardware requirements for ISE are pretty substantial. If you're running a virtual environment, you're going to be dedicating quite a bit of resources to an ISE VM. That is something that could be worked on."
"I would like for the next release to be easier to implement and to limit its dependencies around ISE, Windows, the network as a whole, etc."
"I would like better reporting from SmartFactor Authentication when a user is not able to sign in due to a new location, new IP, new device, et cetera."
"I'd like OneLogin to have a customization section that displays the company's offerings, categorized by different topics."
"The solution keeps going down for many hours, which impacts the entire company. You can't access any applications. OneLogin Desktop has a huge problem where it locks your computers and you need to reset the whole computer, which is pretty insane."
"having a RESTful implementation instead of RPC would have been more desirable."
"They have downtime twice a year or once in six months. During the downtime, the SSO page did not come up. When users wanted to get to their email, they were redirected to the OneLogin page, but the page did not come up, and MFA and logins failed. It completely crippled us."
"In terms of managing the users on a large scale, it would be easier if they had some kind of user management portal."
"OneLogin offers a Virtual LDAP feature that we utilize, although it differs slightly from traditional LDAP servers."
"To offboard, you have to manually click on this checklist, each of the checkmarks. It would actually be really nice if, for offboarding someone, you just click "offboard" and it automatically runs a script to do that."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"In terms of the licensing and the pricing structure of the Cisco Identity Services Engine, there's been a huge advantage to our clients recently with the advent of the enterprise agreement."
"Pricing and licensing are not my expertise. As far as budgeting is concerned, we run an ELA with Cisco. It's a part of our ELA."
"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."
"The price of Cisco ISE (Identity Services Engine) is expensive and we are thinking about changing to FortiGate."
"ISE has always been expensive compared to other products in terms of what it does on a user level."
"Our customers pay for the license of Cisco ISE (Identity Services Engine). They have an annual subscription, rather than a monthly subscription."
"Cisco ISE's licensing can get pricey."
"Licensing has got much simpler since Cisco moved to the DNA model because we just have the three tiers, but it could always stand to be improved upon."
"OneLogin's pricing, from the perspective of the education sector, seems quite reasonable for the value it delivers."
"The pricing for OneLogin seems to be okay. The pricing and licensing are affordable. If you'd consider OneLogin to be expensive, it's worth it."
"The price of the licensing is fine."
"We were happy with the price we got when we signed up, but I don't know what will happen when the time comes to renew because it is a different company now. We haven't seen any pricing models or had that discussion yet. My renewal is a year and a half away. It's worth what we're paying for it. There's no way we could provide the level of service for cheaper or try to do the same in-house."
"The pricing and licensing are reasonable. It is much cheaper than other products."
"It was cheap in the beginning, and then it became very expensive. We were initially charged $2 per user per month, which was fine, but by the second year, they increased it to $5 per user. That became very expensive for us because we had about 1,500 users. At $2 per user, it comes out to be $3,000 a month, which is $36,000 a year. If we move to $5 per user, it comes out to be $7,500 a month. That made its cost so high. That is why we removed the product because the cost was high."
"While I wish OneLogin's pricing was more affordable, their licensing model, which is based on per user, is acceptable."
"Surprisingly expensive given the price of on-premise solutions."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Educational Organization
24%
Computer Software Company
14%
Financial Services Firm
8%
Government
7%
Computer Software Company
24%
Financial Services Firm
7%
Retailer
6%
Construction 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 needs improvement with OneLogin by One Identity?
There have been some outages over the years. The uptime has not been great recently, with some outages lasting six, seven, or eight hours. Improvement in the stability of the infrastructure would b...
What is your primary use case for OneLogin by One Identity?
We use OneLogin by One Identity to provide SAML authentication and single sign-on for all of our SaaS apps.
 

Also Known As

Cisco ISE
OneLogin, OneLogin Workforce Identity
 

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
OneLogin has thousands of customers across multiple industries and from around the globe such as Uber, Airbnb, Noom, Petco, Sony, Lucky Brand, Tesco, Airbus, Japan Airlines, Aetna, Compass, Kaplan, Susan G. Komen, AAA and PennyMac.
Find out what your peers are saying about Cisco, Hewlett Packard Enterprise, Fortinet and others in Network Access Control (NAC). Updated: April 2025.
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