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Cisco Secure Access vs Sangfor NGAF comparison

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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 Secure Access
Ranking in Firewalls
12th
Average Rating
8.6
Reviews Sentiment
6.3
Number of Reviews
82
Ranking in other categories
Secure Web Gateways (SWG) (4th), Cloud Access Security Brokers (CASB) (2nd), ZTNA (3rd), Secure Access Service Edge (SASE) (2nd), Domain Name System (DNS) Security (2nd)
Sangfor NGAF
Ranking in Firewalls
31st
Average Rating
8.0
Reviews Sentiment
6.5
Number of Reviews
34
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
 

Mindshare comparison

As of November 2026, in the Firewalls category, the mindshare of Cisco Secure Access is 0.5%, up from 0.0% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Sangfor NGAF is 1.4%, up from 1.2% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Firewalls Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
Cisco Secure Access0.5%
Sangfor NGAF1.4%
Other98.1%
Firewalls
 

Featured Reviews

reviewer2788500 - PeerSpot reviewer
Network Operations Engineer at a media company with 1,001-5,000 employees
Secure access has unified zero trust and web protection while AI assistance automates tasks
From a feature perspective, I have not experienced any issues, drawbacks, or shortcomings. However, the cost of Cisco's products and licensing is high. My clients usually prefer cheaper options if possible. Mid-size or smaller businesses typically cannot afford Cisco Secure Access. Additionally, there is a steep learning curve, as it is very intensive. Someone with significant knowledge can work on it, but a new professional would have to spend considerable time to get accustomed to it. It is hard to find engineers who can work on it. Overall, we get what we pay for, as it is a pretty good feature and service. The pricing of Cisco's products and licensing is higher than competitors. If they could be more reasonable, that would help. The support offered for two years also has higher costs. Overall, the client's IT budget gets affected. It was challenging to learn because, as mentioned, it has a significant learning curve and requires considerable training to become proficient.
AK
Network Administrator at GC University Lahore
Leverage detailed reporting for effective attack management
We are hosting applications over the platform, including websites and NAT traffic from our side. Because it's deployed in our data center, which is fully operational, we have various applications hosted there, websites, FTP portals, making it quite comprehensive. Essentially, it performs all the…

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"I believe Cisco Secure Access is the best option on the market at the moment; it is the right and recommended choice."
"Cisco Secure Access does help me protect my company from threats like phishing and ransomware."
"After implementing Cisco Secure Access, I observed complete automation, a complete Zero Trust architecture, and complete automation of security."
"The feature of Cisco Secure Access I appreciate the most is the DNS functionality."
"Cisco Secure Access allows us to get a little deeper into some of the things, and having everything on one platform definitely helps, so I do not have to log into fifteen different things to access our switches."
"The return on investment in Cisco Secure Access is significant, providing substantial savings in time, data loss prevention, and management of protection, with time savings reaching up to 30% based on the processing time and retention policy of Cisco Secure Access, which is more than 30% better than others."
"It works well. It hasn't broken. While I don't know enough about all the features yet, it hasn't caused us any problems."
"If you have every solution with Cisco, you can see a very good ROI because you do not need to invest much on staffing for analyzing each and every console separately."
"SSL VPN is the best feature."
"When it comes to the price of firewall solutions, Sangfor NGAF takes the cake, as it is cheaper than Fortinet, Sophos, Check Point and Palo Alto."
"We are Sangfor Gold partners and I'd recommend this solution for the SMB market, as it is cost-effective and reliable."
"The level of support provided to local companies is good. They transform their application control and other settings according to that country."
"It offers application control features."
"The stability of Sangfor NGAF is good."
"Sangfor is a good solution that provides a WAF and firewall solution; most other vendors, like Sophos and Fortinet and Cisco, only provide one solution, and that's a valuable feature of Sangfor."
"I think this solution is a very good example of a proactive solution that can detect problems and immediately fix the problems or issues."
 

Cons

"I would assess the stability and reliability of Cisco Secure Access as having the worst thing about it being the VAs and their requirement of a full reinstall anytime something unusual happens to them if they go stale or any such thing."
"The AI element of Cisco Secure Access is just asking logs, and I think the AI element can certainly be improved."
"The ease of managing Cisco Secure Access is quite challenging; it is not user-friendly, and we have to involve too much time to review the information available in the dashboard, which can be confusing."
"There are times it feels difficult to navigate and get things configured, but that is coming from a CLI perspective."
"Regarding support, I do not know what happened to Cisco. I contact them, and the support has been a pain."
"Licensing is always a sore point with Cisco, which is probably the biggest contention, being ongoing licensing versus competitors."
"When you have planned works in your data center, I think you need to carry out some post-checks to ensure we are not affected as users."
"I chose eight because generally it works quite well, but there are some features that are a little limiting, and some of it would require advanced knowledge of the product to work significantly well."
"It does not offer any recommendations on how to mitigate or control attacks."
"Sangfor could improve by providing better real-time reporting, as the current reports don't offer the level of detail we need, especially for runtime insights."
"Sangfor NGAF could improve the policies and default criteria. They could be much better."
"I feel Sangfor should follow the hierarchy and close deals via resellers instead of closing it all with their own team."
"Scalability for any network device is not very easy in terms of vertical scalability."
"The support offered by the product has certain shortcomings where improvements are required. The knowledge levels and response time of the support team need improvement."
"The solution has too many bugs and these slow down the implementation."
"It would be ideal if the solution offered SD-WAN capabilities."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"For what you get, it's a fair price in comparison to other products."
"It is confusing. When you look at the prices, you have different licensing and years of licensing that you have to purchase. Additionally, it's unclear what service you get from those licenses regarding end-user support. We have a representative who has to walk me through it every time."
"The pricing, setup costs, and licensing for Cisco Secure Access have been very competitive compared to other platforms. I believe that if Cisco continues to improve costs or offers something similar to a Cisco credit, it would attract more customers."
"The solution has a TCO that is 32% to 50% less than Sophos, Fortinet, and SonicWall."
"In my opinion, the price of the tool is good in the Pakistani market. We can easily get discounts if needed."
"It costs about 8 to 10 thousand dollars per year for 500 users, standard licensing fees included."
"The product is very cost-effective compared to other brands or vendors."
"Sangfor NGAF is a cheaply priced product, especially if I consider the previous product that was used in my company."
"The price falls in the mid-range, neither exceptionally low nor high."
"We purchased one year technical support and return to factory support, and we also purchased one-year technical support services. So those were additional."
"If one is very cheap and ten is very expensive, I rate the tool's price as three out of ten."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Outsourcing Company
11%
Manufacturing Company
10%
Financial Services Firm
9%
Comms Service Provider
8%
Comms Service Provider
13%
Manufacturing Company
12%
Financial Services Firm
10%
Construction Company
7%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business31
Midsize Enterprise15
Large Enterprise45
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business15
Midsize Enterprise10
Large Enterprise10
 

Questions from the Community

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Cisco Secure Access?
In my experience with the Experience Insights feature or Digital Experience Monitoring of Cisco Secure Access, ThousandEyes is a fine tool, but currently, my experience with our customer is that it...
What is your primary use case for Cisco Secure Access?
We use Cisco SD-WAN in our own company for our own needs, and we are also selling this to our customers while performing operations for customer networks. My personal customer scope is the large en...
What advice do you have for others considering Cisco Secure Access?
Currently, AI Supply Chain Risk Management is not really an issue for us today. I would rate Cisco Secure Access a seven out of ten overall.
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Sangfor NGAF?
The licensing cost is quite high compared to other available firewalls in the market.
What needs improvement with Sangfor NGAF?
The cost of licensing is very high compared to other firewalls available here. There should be improvements in hardware scalability, allowing for more storage and memory capacity. Making the soluti...
What is your primary use case for Sangfor NGAF?
We are hosting applications over the platform, including websites and NAT traffic from our side. Because it's deployed in our data center, which is fully operational, we have various applicatio...
 

Also Known As

No data available
Sangfor NGAF Firewall Platform
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

1. IBM 2. Microsoft 3. Amazon 4. Google 5. Apple 6. Cisco Systems 7. Oracle 8. Intel 9. HP Inc. 10. Dell Technologies 11. Verizon Communications 12. AT&T 13. Comcast 14. T-Mobile 15. Sprint 16. Vodafone 17. Orange 18. BT Group 19. Deutsche Telekom 20. Telefonica 21. Nokia 22. Ericsson 23. Samsung Electronics 24. Sony 25. Panasonic 26. LG Electronics 27. Siemens 28. General Electric 29. Ford Motor Company 30. General Motors 31. Toyota Motor Corporation 32. Volkswagen Group
The Ministry of Science, Technology, and Innovation (Indonesia), Lawson, Inc. (Philippines), Universiti Sultan Zainal Abidin (Indonesia), TEK Automotive (Italy), etc.
Find out what your peers are saying about Cisco Secure Access vs. Sangfor NGAF and other solutions. Updated: November 2026.
921,523 professionals have used our research since 2012.