We performed a comparison between Cisco ISE (Identity Services Engine) and Fortra's Powertech Identity & Access Manager based on real PeerSpot user reviews.
Find out what your peers are saying about Cisco, HPE Aruba Networking, Forescout and others in Network Access Control (NAC)."The endpoint profiling feature is among the most valuable because it keeps me from having to manually maintain a MAC address bypass list to track endpoints. I can have ISE profile them for me and then put them in the right bucket."
"It has allowed us to pull in multiple authentication databases, then centralize them into a captive portal system."
"The authorization and accounts inside of ISE are very useful for us."
"SGTs are valuable because they make it easy to enforce policies, instead of pushing them across all the other platforms."
"The interface is pretty easy to use."
"The most valuable features are the ability to retrieve information about Active Directory user names, viewing the log files to see which MAC address tried to connect with the created SSIDs, portal designing for your company, hotspot tools, and creating network rules for WiFi access."
"The policy sets give us more granular groups for end-user access."
"Cisco ISE integrates with everything else."
"HelpSystems Powertech's feature that I have found most valuable is its flexibility. It is able to be extended. A lot of the products these days, especially the ones on the cloud, are limited and can't handle all the use cases. Often there is not even a way to customize the application to meet uncommon use cases and HelpSystems provides an infrastructure that lends itself to the ability to be customized."
"If I was going to improve anything, it would be the ease of migration. It's really difficult at the moment if you're looking to upgrade ISE 2.1 and you want to go to ISE 3.1 or 3.2, that whole upgrade path and, particularly, the licensing is quite a minefield to sort out."
"Cisco ISE is complex. The deployment and design of networks with it is so complex. If it could change it would be better."
"There are still some bugs in ISE that need to be worked out."
"There are issues with respect to the posture assessment function. It's been observed that customers are not receiving total access to the network because the assessment agent is glitchy and malfunctions from time-to-time. I would like to see refining of the compliance assessment and adding more detailed compliance of endpoints on the user end."
"When I work with customers to do my knowledge transfer, they're really overwhelmed with the navigation of the product and the number of things you can do with it. From a user interface standpoint, Cisco could focus on making certain tasks a bit more guided and easier for customers to walk through. That is, a user-friendly interface and streamlined workflows would be great."
"In order to make it a ten, it should be more user-friendly. You need somebody who is knowledgeable about it to use it. It's not easy to use. We have to rely heavily on technical support."
"The user interface could be improved to make it more user-friendly."
"Adding new devices was a little cumbersome. I haven't done it that many times, but I remember that adding new devices to the authentication piece of it was a little cumbersome. The way I was shown to do it, I thought it was odd because we had to go into the active device, copy the file down, export it, make some changes to it, and then reimport it as opposed to being able to click it and having a template to fill out."
"In terms of what could be improved, I would say the support of the product. It's hard to get support for it. I think this is emblematic of the fact that they don't have a lot of employees who have long-term experience with it."
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Cisco ISE (Identity Services Engine) is ranked 1st in Network Access Control (NAC) with 135 reviews while Fortra's Powertech Identity & Access Manager is ranked 38th in Privileged Access Management (PAM). Cisco ISE (Identity Services Engine) is rated 8.2, while Fortra's Powertech Identity & Access Manager is rated 5.0. The top reviewer of Cisco ISE (Identity Services Engine) writes "Gives us that extra ability to assist the end user and make sure that we are making them happy". On the other hand, the top reviewer of Fortra's Powertech Identity & Access Manager writes "Inexperienced support for old product, but good flexibility for use case customization". Cisco ISE (Identity Services Engine) is most compared with Aruba ClearPass, Fortinet FortiNAC, Forescout Platform, CyberArk Privileged Access Manager and Fortinet FortiAuthenticator, whereas Fortra's Powertech Identity & Access Manager is most compared with .
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