No more typing reviews! Try our Samantha, our new voice AI agent.

Cisco Intersight vs ControlUp comparison

Why PeerSpot?
 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Oct 9, 2024

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
5.9
Cisco Intersight provides ROI by lowering staffing and operational costs through network consolidation and reduced manual tasks.
Sentiment score
7.2
Organizations achieve efficiency and cost savings with ControlUp, automating tasks, preventing disasters, and optimizing virtual environments.
It simplifies the onboarding of new hardware, reducing time spent on manual installations and configurations.
Systems Engineer at FNB South Africa
I have seen a return on investment, as we need fewer employees, and most of it can be done from one dashboard.
Chief Technology Officer & Co-Founder at a computer software company with 1-10 employees
This is having a 24/7 junior admin who's really smart, always there, always doing work, but you have to consume his work.
Senior Systems Administrator at a tech vendor with 10,001+ employees
Basically, what we were targeting is the response time of the virtual environment.
Senior IT Engineer Citrix at EDR Media LLC
 

Customer Service

Sentiment score
7.5
Cisco Intersight customer service is highly rated, though support quality varies due to regional differences and specific contracts.
Sentiment score
9.0
ControlUp's responsive, knowledgeable support enhances customer experience, offering integration flexibility and premium benefits for larger organizations.
For complex issues, it's challenging to get the right engineer quickly unless you have a specific contract like CX.
Senior Network Architect at ocp tech
On a scale of one to ten, I would rate the customer support a ten.
Chief Technology Officer & Co-Founder at a computer software company with 1-10 employees
I would rate the technical support by Cisco as an eight or nine, because Cisco TAC is one of the best TACs I work with.
Team Lead for Network & Security at Secure Services Mauritius Ltd
I was quite happy to work with ControlUp because the support is excellent.
Senior IT Engineer Citrix at EDR Media LLC
Basically, if I could take everything that you do, put it in a tool, and hand you that tool so you don't have to repeat your efforts, then you would be able to make good use of it.
Senior Systems Administrator at a tech vendor with 10,001+ employees
 

Scalability Issues

Sentiment score
7.7
Cisco Intersight provides efficient, seamless scalability, allowing remote management of complex environments with adaptable policies and high user ratings.
Sentiment score
7.6
ControlUp's cloud scalability eases expansion, though pricing concerns arise, highlighting the importance of strategic adaptability and monitoring.
I rate its scalability a ten out of ten due to its capability to manage multiple domains and automate service requests.
Systems Engineer at FNB South Africa
Scalability allows for creating server profiles quickly, mapping them to multiple servers, and removing them when scaling down.
Technical Marketing Engineer Hybrid Cloud Infrastructures at NetApp
Cisco Intersight scales straightforwardly with the growing needs of the organization.
Team Lead for Network & Security at Secure Services Mauritius Ltd
It scales very well; you just have to tell it what you're doing and size it for what you're asking.
Senior Systems Administrator at a tech vendor with 10,001+ employees
 

Stability Issues

Sentiment score
7.7
Cisco Intersight is mostly stable and reliable, with some challenges in upgrades and hardware-related performance issues.
Sentiment score
8.9
ControlUp is praised for its stability and effective monitoring, with most users finding it reliable and well-supported.
After five years, if I don't have access to the Cisco Intersight portal, how do I manage my servers if I want to conduct some test environments?
Team Lead for Network & Security at Secure Services Mauritius Ltd
Some steps are not included in the official documentation, which can create challenges.
Senior Network Architect at ocp tech
It is always accessible online, secure, and allows access from any location, following strict authentication standards.
Systems Engineer at FNB South Africa
 

Room For Improvement

Cisco Intersight needs improved migration, integration, usability, automation, and cost-effectiveness, with emphasis on stability and on-premise features.
ControlUp needs seamless integration, improved monitoring, GUI enhancements, and additional features for better automation and complete insights.
For how Cisco Intersight can be improved, I focus on two points: visual policies, which I believe is the most important improvement, and the possibility to work with local labs in a local infrastructure.
Consultant at SOSNET
There is a significant issue regarding migration from UCS Manager into Intersight without formatting the Fabric Interconnects (FI), which is problematic in a production environment.
System Presale at Bezeq
It would be great to have a chat session mode AI so that when I am on standby and encountering issues, I could engage with it, much like ChatGPT.
Systems Engineer at FNB South Africa
There is area for improvement, maybe in the reporting.
Senior Systems Administrator at a tech vendor with 10,001+ employees
 

Setup Cost

Cisco Intersight offers competitive pricing with free and paid tiers, offset by high initial costs and complex pricing structures.
ControlUp pricing involves annual agreements with varied costs; thorough evaluation of licensing options is essential for optimal use.
The pricing is fair and reasonable, particularly for enterprises.
Systems Engineer at FNB South Africa
Cisco Intersight's license cost is very high compared to AWS and Azure solutions, which have lower initiation costs.
Technology Architect at University of Helsinki
The pricing is solid for what we get.
Chief Technology Officer & Co-Founder at a computer software company with 1-10 employees
It is expensive.
Senior IT Engineer Citrix at EDR Media LLC
 

Valuable Features

Cisco Intersight enhances data center management through automation, integration, predictive analysis, and AI-driven insights, reducing manual work.
ControlUp offers efficient ROI, real-time insights, robust automation, and proactive management with AI-enhanced performance monitoring and comprehensive visibility.
This solution has provided time savings and required fewer people to operate this tool, rather than direct cost savings.
Sr. Network Engineer at Saudi Business Machines - SBM
It provides visibility into other products and storage, and is beneficial for environments where Cisco and other vendors coexist, allowing full visibility of the entire infrastructure.
System Presale at Bezeq
It also provides predictive analysis, predicting data leaks and making it easy to scale up servers remotely without requiring physical interference.
Technology Architect at University of Helsinki
Everything works exactly the way it's meant to, a dream come true for anyone who's administering systems because it gives you all the information that you want and all the actions you want to take, all in one place.
Senior Systems Administrator at a tech vendor with 10,001+ employees
It's not only monitoring, but it's also detecting, and it could even fix problems with a lot of automation that you can put in place to fix problems automatically before you even detect them.
Senior IT Engineer Citrix at EDR Media LLC
 

Categories and Ranking

Cisco Intersight
Ranking in IT Infrastructure Monitoring
10th
Average Rating
8.2
Reviews Sentiment
6.9
Number of Reviews
22
Ranking in other categories
Cloud Management (5th)
ControlUp
Ranking in IT Infrastructure Monitoring
30th
Average Rating
8.6
Reviews Sentiment
7.6
Number of Reviews
13
Ranking in other categories
Digital Experience Monitoring (DEM) (6th)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of October 2026, in the IT Infrastructure Monitoring category, the mindshare of Cisco Intersight is 1.6%, down from 1.7% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of ControlUp is 0.8%, down from 1.1% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
IT Infrastructure Monitoring Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
Cisco Intersight1.6%
ControlUp0.8%
Other97.6%
IT Infrastructure Monitoring
 

Featured Reviews

AS
Technical Marketing Engineer Hybrid Cloud Infrastructures at NetApp
Centralized policies have simplified hybrid operations and now support automated workflows
The challenge could be if there are any bugs. Most of the time, you may feel that the TCAM resources are getting full on the Nexus just because of some bug or the configuration is not supported. Or sometimes, if there are any vulnerabilities happening on the current running firmware, those are challenges we have. And if you talk about from the compute side, there were initial bugs such as a CPU throttle issue. Because of that, the chassis was not running in an optimum way. You may see performance issues during that time. For that, Cisco released a patch, and it got fixed. I think Cisco Intersight should allow more automation capabilities. It should be more open, and it should provide more automation capabilities. I think there is also a scope of making it a little bit simpler because a lot of policy and config sometimes becomes confusing for the user because it has a lot of config. Maybe they can do a little bit of simplification with Cisco Intersight.
Jean-CharlesMoriaud - PeerSpot reviewer
Senior IT Engineer Citrix at EDR Media LLC
Automation capabilities and proactive monitoring have improved infrastructure reliability and reduced troubleshooting time
ControlUp has a lot of automation in it. It detects problems and failures very well. It's not only monitoring, but it's also detecting, and it could even fix problems with a lot of automation that you can put in place to fix problems automatically before you even detect them. That's one of the strong points of ControlUp. All the automations, and there's a large customer-written automation. You can pick up those automations and use them on your environment, and it helps a lot. This is very good. It's not third-party, but it's external routines and automations that you can download from their website and implement on your side. That's one of the strong points of ControlUp. ControlUp, the way we implemented it, and the goal of ControlUp, is to be proactive instead of starting to work on a problem when it already happens. There are a lot of counters and monitors you can implement that will help you detect problems before they happen.
report
Use our free recommendation engine to learn which IT Infrastructure Monitoring solutions are best for your needs.
915,341 professionals have used our research since 2012.
 

Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Manufacturing Company
13%
Financial Services Firm
8%
Computer Software Company
8%
Healthcare Company
7%
Financial Services Firm
12%
Healthcare Company
10%
Manufacturing Company
9%
Computer Software Company
7%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business10
Midsize Enterprise4
Large Enterprise10
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business4
Midsize Enterprise2
Large Enterprise8
 

Questions from the Community

What needs improvement with Cisco Intersight?
Regarding improvements for Cisco Intersight, I would say more third-party integration is needed. At the moment it does have a basic integration of Pure Storage, so I can add my Pure Storage if I ha...
What is your primary use case for Cisco Intersight?
My main use case for Cisco Intersight is to register our Cisco UCS servers and apply profiles to our servers with configurations, firmware deployment automatically, and install the operating system...
What advice do you have for others considering Cisco Intersight?
I would rate Cisco Intersight a nine out of ten. I give it a nine because personally, I think it is one of the best management tools ever. I have worked before with different server vendors and dif...
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for ControlUp Real-time?
It is expensive. It is very expensive. I was working in a bank, and even in the bank, which was quite healthy, the ControlUp budget was something we had to defend very harshly.
What is your primary use case for ControlUp Real-time?
I was taking care of a Citrix infrastructure, and as ControlUp is the best monitoring tool for those environments, I was also using ControlUp to monitor those environments.
 

Also Known As

Intersight
No data available
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

EXMAR, RapidScale
B/E Aerospace, North Carolina SECU, Vancouver Island Health Authority, University of Florida
Find out what your peers are saying about Cisco Intersight vs. ControlUp and other solutions. Updated: September 2026.
915,341 professionals have used our research since 2012.