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Cisco Secure Workload vs Morphisec comparison

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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:
 

Categories and Ranking

Qualys TotalCloud
Sponsored
Ranking in Cloud Workload Protection Platforms (CWPP)
8th
Average Rating
8.6
Reviews Sentiment
7.1
Number of Reviews
46
Ranking in other categories
Vulnerability Management (11th), Container Security (11th), Cloud Security Posture Management (CSPM) (8th), SaaS Security Posture Management (SSPM) (2nd), Cloud-Native Application Protection Platforms (CNAPP) (7th)
Cisco Secure Workload
Ranking in Cloud Workload Protection Platforms (CWPP)
18th
Average Rating
8.6
Reviews Sentiment
7.7
Number of Reviews
15
Ranking in other categories
Cloud and Data Center Security (8th), Microsegmentation Software (4th), Cisco Security Portfolio (8th)
Morphisec
Ranking in Cloud Workload Protection Platforms (CWPP)
34th
Average Rating
9.2
Reviews Sentiment
7.4
Number of Reviews
21
Ranking in other categories
Vulnerability Management (57th), Endpoint Protection Platform (EPP) (45th), Advanced Threat Protection (ATP) (30th), Endpoint Detection and Response (EDR) (59th), Threat Deception Platforms (13th)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of September 2026, in the Cloud Workload Protection Platforms (CWPP) category, the mindshare of Qualys TotalCloud is 1.8%, up from 1.3% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Cisco Secure Workload is 2.0%, down from 2.7% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Morphisec is 0.9%, up from 0.2% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Cloud Workload Protection Platforms (CWPP) Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
Qualys TotalCloud1.8%
Cisco Secure Workload2.0%
Morphisec0.9%
Other95.3%
Cloud Workload Protection Platforms (CWPP)
 

Featured Reviews

reviewer2859021 - PeerSpot reviewer
Sr Security Engineer at a tech vendor with 5,001-10,000 employees
Risk-based triage has transformed container security and now prioritizes high-impact threats
The best features Qualys TotalCloud offers currently include managing cloud infrastructure and container security while facing major challenges such as alert fatigue. Traditional vulnerability scanners flag hundreds of CVEs on short-lived Kubernetes containers, some of which have no internet exposure or are gone before we can even triage them. I leverage Qualys TotalCloud to move beyond static CVSS. I use it to implement runtime exposure, correlation risk reprioritization, and shift-left integration. This notifies developers to fix a base image upstream rather than patching live ephemeral instances. In my work with cloud and container security, the biggest operational hurdle was alert fatigue. I use Qualys to shift left from static CVSS severity to context-aware risk prioritization. I correlated raw vulnerability data with real-time risk factors such as public network exposure, active runtime execution, or overly permissive IAM roles. This allows us to immediately drop the priority of isolated containers and escalate lower-severity CVEs that sit on an exposed, high-risk path. We can map these findings directly back to our CI/CD pipelines so developers can patch the root base images upstream. We have drastically cut down the signal-to-noise ratio, saved a lot of manual hours doing triage work, and ensured engineering effort goes directly towards high-impact risk reduction.
Raj Metkar - PeerSpot reviewer
Director, Head of Networks at MUFG, EMEA
Discover internal application dependencies and create a dependency map
We actively seek improvements in integrating the Infoblox DDI platform with Cisco Secure Workload. This integration allows Cisco Secure Workload to learn about our networks and network tags, providing valuable insights into vulnerabilities related to the operating system and various applications installed on our servers. Recently, Cisco announced a new product called HyperShield, an AI-based autonomous micro-segmentation solution. While Cisco has not stated that HyperShield will replace Cisco Secure Workload, it represents a natural evolution for the company. HyperShield features dynamic policy discovery and enforcement; however, once policies are enforced, they do not change until a discovery occurs, requiring a re-enforcement process. This new platform operates autonomously, minimizing the need for user or security engineer intervention. I would have expected Cisco to incorporate more automatic discovery and enforcement features within the existing Cisco Secure Workload product. Instead of enhancing the current product, they have introduced a new solution. Cisco plans to honor existing Tetration licenses, allowing users to transition to HyperShield without additional costs, reflecting the investment enterprises have already made. From Cisco’s perspective, this represents a natural progression in their product line. While the product name changes, it seems more of a rebranding effort. The enhancements are greater autonomy, improved discovery, and automatic enforcement, which are now being introduced in HyperShield. Cisco Secure Workload offers automatic policy enforcement but cannot adjust policies dynamically as the application needs to change. Having used the platform for the past five years, the recent announcement has been reassuring. Cisco has confirmed that our investment in the platform will not go to waste. They will honor our existing licenses, providing a natural migration path to the new solution without any disruption
Rick Schibler - PeerSpot reviewer
VP of Information Technology at Kentucky Trailer
Offers in-memory protection at a lower price than competitors
Morphisec's in-memory protection is probably the most valuable feature because it stops malicious activity from occurring. If something tries to install or act as a sleeper agent, Morphisec will detect and stop it. Morphisec's Moving Target Defense is critical to hardening our attack surface. If it detects something, it indicates whether it's valid. That means you've got a breach requiring investigation. It detects anomalies but doesn't necessarily point to what caused them. You still need to do that work. The solution is reasonably easy to administer. They made some changes last year, adding a cloud-based monitoring solution that makes deploying and monitoring our endpoints easy.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"I found the initial setup user-friendly."
"The dashboards are particularly valuable as they offer a comprehensive view of the environment, highlighting any misconfigurations."
"The best features in Qualys TotalCloud include the total asset management of the cloud environment. It is very easy to export the report and see the vulnerabilities related to the cloud specifically."
"The most valuable feature is the consolidated information that it provides from various platforms."
"Qualys TotalCloud's most valuable features are its security capabilities that help identify and mitigate risk factors."
"CSPM is currently the most used feature, and we are enjoying the new feature, FlexScan, which is valuable for Internet-facing VMs."
"By integrating TotalCloud, we have significantly reduced vulnerabilities in our deployment pipeline."
"I would definitely recommend it because it is easy to handle any cloud resources."
"The solution offers 100% telemetry coverage; the telemetry you collect is not sampled, it's not intermittent, it's complete, and you see everything in it, including full visibility of all activities on your endpoints and in your network."
"This product does everything that you need it to do and more and does a lot to provide visibility in a network environment, save time and money, and make the organization IT operate in a much more streamlined fashion."
"The product provides multiple-device integration."
"Scalability is its most valuable feature."
"A complete and powerful micro-segmentation solution."
"Secure Workload's best feature is that it's an end-to-end offering from Cisco."
"It's stable."
"Generally speaking, Cisco support is considered one of the best in the networking products and stack."
"I really like the integration with Microsoft Defender. In addition to having third-party endpoint protection, we're also enabling Defender... I like the reporting that we get from Defender, when it comes in. I like that it's one console showing both Morphisec and Defender where it provides me with full visibility into security events from Defender and Morphisec."
"In a month, we are saving the effort of four to five days, and earlier we used to have a dedicated person and now we don't need a dedicated resource, which has reduced our security spending and we are saving approximately $600 a month."
"Morphisec makes it very easy for IT teams of any size to prevent breaches of critical systems because of the design of their tool."
"The fact that Morphisec uses deterministic attack prevention that does not require human intervention has affected our security team's operations by making things much simpler. We don't have to really track down various alerts anymore, they've just stopped. At that point, we can go in and we can clean up whatever needs to be cleaned up. There are some things that Morphisec detects that we can't really remove, it's parts of Internet Explorer, but it's being blocked anyway. So we're happy with that."
"We have not had one machine that has been taken down due to malware now in almost four and a half years, with 600 machines that we don't have routine infections on because nothing can execute."
"Morphisec's in-memory protection is probably the most valuable feature because it stops malicious activity from occurring. If something tries to install or act as a sleeper agent, Morphisec will detect and stop it."
"What's valuable is really the whole kit and caboodle of the Morphisec agent."
"Morphisec also provides full visibility into security events for Microsoft Defender and Morphisec in one dashboard... in the single pane of glass provided by Morphisec, it's all right there at your fingertips: easy to access and easy to understand. And if you choose to go down further to know everything from the process to the hash behind it, you can."
 

Cons

"With the growing integration of AI, I would like Qualys to enhance its service offerings to better accommodate AI-related risks."
"There should be improvement from a dashboard perspective when collecting and showcasing data to lead management."
"TotalCloud could improve its scanning of niche devices like Wi-Fi dongles and USB modems because they are often untested. It covers everything else, like laptops, mobile devices, and Bluetooth IoT devices. They can improve on the small IoT devices because hackers and testers use these."
"There is room for improvement in vulnerability scanning, particularly for PaaS environments. Currently, Qualys does not have full access to these instances, which limits its effectiveness."
"The main area needing improvement is integration. Although the team is strengthening TotalCloud, integration can be enhanced with SIEM, SOAR, ITSM, and other sources."
"In my opinion, what can be improved in Qualys TotalCloud includes pricing and container scanning."
"To improve the user experience, reporting could be simplified for better comprehension by end users and project managers, facilitating issue resolution."
"I sometimes have difficulty detecting or uninstalling certain versions of applications, which I have to do manually."
"The emailed notifications are either hard to find or they are not available. Search capabilities can be improved."
"There is some overlap between Cisco Tetration and AppDynamics and there are few DC tools, it would be great to have a single pane of glass, rather than have to jump between different tools."
"It has an uninviting interface."
"The entire interface could be improved; it's ugly and uninviting, and Tetration tends to be a lot more cumbersome and not very intuitive compared to the biggest competitor's modern-looking GUI."
"I would have expected Cisco to incorporate more automatic discovery and enforcement features within the existing Cisco Secure Workload product."
"It is not so easy to use and configure. It needs a bunch of further resources to work, which is mainly the biggest downside of it. The deployment is huge."
"The problem is that we can only deploy the particular solution where we have the hardware with Cisco."
"The product should be easy to use, but it is not. Comparing it to other products, it was very complex."
"Morphisec is a venture startup. They are still early in their growth stage. They need to get mature on their customer support and on how they interface with system tools."
"If anything, tech support might be their weakest link. The process of getting someone involved sometimes takes a little time. It seems to me that they should have all the data they need to let me know whether an alert is legitimate or not, but they tend to need a lot of information from me to get to the bottom of something. It usually takes a little longer than I would expect."
"We sometimes have to depend on the support team to know what action we should take. If the solution for an alert can be built into the report that we are getting, it will save time, and the interaction with support would be less. At times, corrective action is required, but at times, we don't need to take any action. It would be good if we get to know in the report that a particular infection doesn't require any action. It will save us time and effort."
"We started in the Linux platform and we deployed to Linux. The licensing of that has been kind of confusing between Linux licensing and Windows licensing. The overall simplicity of licensing or offering an enterprise license to just cover everything and then we don't have to count needs improvement."
"The only area that really needs improvement is the reporting functionality. Gathering the detailed information that is in the system for an executive, or for me as a director, could be better. Some of the interface and reporting aspects are a little bit dated. They're working on it."
"The dashboard is the area that requires the most improvement. We have about, I would say 5,500 computers currently, and searching through all of those takes some time to filter. So as soon as you apply the filter, it takes a few seconds. It crunches, it thinks, and then it brings up the clients that match."
"We have only had four attacks in the last year, "attacks" being some benign PDF from a vendor that, for some reason, were triggered. There were no actual attacks. They were just four false positives, or something lowly like adware. There have been false positives with both the on-premises solution and the cloud solution."
"Morphisec is a venture startup. They are still early in their growth stage. They need to get mature on their customer support and on how they interface with system tools. For example, they need to get multifactor in place and an API for the major multi-factor systems, e.g., Okta, Duo, Ping, and Microsoft. They don't have them built in yet. They are working on them. It is just not there yet. Also, their stability, customer support, and processes need improvement, which is just part of maturity."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"Although Qualys TotalCloud is relatively expensive due to its unique automation features, its cost-effectiveness is rated an eight out of ten, with ten being the most costly."
"The pricing is comparable. It is built into our other product, so I cannot piecemeal it. It is a part of our subscription."
"The pricing for TotalCloud is attractive and competitive in the market. Given the features, especially the dashboard, I have no concerns regarding pricing."
"Qualys TotalCloud offers good pricing that is affordable and competitive with the market. Our partnership also provides us with additional benefits."
"Qualys TotalCloud offers competitive pricing given its comprehensive suite of features, including integration, assessment, remediation, and detection capabilities, all within a single platform."
"It isn't cheap, but it's reasonable. It helps us to manage things with very few resources."
"The cost is high, but it meets our organizational needs."
"Qualys TotalCloud is cost-efficient and was selected for its value compared to other products."
"The price is outrageous. If you have money to throw at the product, then do it."
"The pricing is a bit higher than we anticipated."
"The price is based on how many computers you're going to install it on."
"It is not cheap and pricing may limit scalability."
"Pricing depends on the scope of the application and the features. Larger installations save more."
"The cost for the hardware is around 300k."
"Regarding price, Cisco Secure Workload can be expensive if you don't have a budget. If you're not doing micro-segmentation, every extra security measure or enforcement you're putting on top of your existing environment will be an extra cost. It's not a cheap solution at all. But from my point of view, if you need to do micro-segmentation, this is one of the best tools I've seen for it. I can't compare that to Microsoft's solution because I haven't looked into it. I've looked into VMware and Cisco. Those are the only two that I know of. I didn't know that Microsoft could do micro-segmentation at all. Maybe they can, but I haven't heard anything about it."
"It is an annual subscription basis per device. For the devices that we have in scope right now, it is about $25,000 a year."
"It does not have multi-tenants. If South Africa wants to show only the machines that they have, they need their own cloud incidence. It is not possible to have that in a single cloud incidence with multiple tenants in it, instead you need to have multiple cloud incidences. Then, if you have that, it will be more expensive. However, they are going to change that, which is good."
"It is priced correctly for what it does. They end up doing a good deal of discounting, but I think it is priced appropriately."
"Our licensing is tied into our contract. Because we have a long-term contract, our pricing is a little bit lower. It is per year, so we don't get charged per endpoint, but we do have a cap. Our cap is 80 endpoints. If we were to go over 80, when we renewed our contract, which is not until three years are over. Then, they would reevaluate, and say, "Well, you have more than 80 devices active right now. This is going to be the price change." They know that we are installing and replacing computers, so the numbers will be all over the place depending on whether you archive or don't archive, which is the reason why we just have to keep up on that stuff."
"The pricing is definitely fair for what it does."
"We are still using a separate tool. I know for our 600 or I think we're actually licensed for up to 700 users, it runs me 23 or $24,000 a year. When you're talking to that many users plus servers being protected, that's well worth the investment for that dollar amount."
"Price-wise, it's on the higher side. A traditional antivirus solution is cheaper, but in terms of security and manageability, its ROI is better than a traditional antivirus. I would recommend it to anybody evaluating or considering an antivirus solution. If your system gets compromised, the cost of ransom would be a lot more. This way, it saves a lot of cost."
"Morphisec is reasonably priced because our parent company's other subsidiaries use different products like CrowdStrike. CrowdStrike is four or five times more expensive than Morphisec. The competitive pricing saves us money in our overall security stack."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Comms Service Provider
16%
Outsourcing Company
12%
Manufacturing Company
11%
Financial Services Firm
10%
Manufacturing Company
13%
Financial Services Firm
9%
Government
8%
Outsourcing Company
8%
Outsourcing Company
15%
Manufacturing Company
13%
Construction Company
12%
Comms Service Provider
9%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business14
Midsize Enterprise5
Large Enterprise34
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business5
Midsize Enterprise3
Large Enterprise8
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business5
Midsize Enterprise8
Large Enterprise8
 

Questions from the Community

What needs improvement with Qualys TotalCloud?
In terms of improvement, remediation still belongs to the cloud team, which is one of the issues we faced with Qualys...
What is your primary use case for Qualys TotalCloud?
My main use case for Qualys TotalCloud is regarding the cloud visibility that we were not having previously. Previous...
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Cisco Secure Workload?
CloudStrike offers antivirus capabilities and firewall features for servers and VDI but lacks automatic policy discov...
What needs improvement with Cisco Secure Workload?
We actively seek improvements in integrating the Infoblox DDI platform with Cisco Secure Workload. This integration a...
What is your primary use case for Cisco Secure Workload?
When we onboarded Cisco Secure Workload, the usual use case was to discover internal application dependencies and cre...
Ask a question
Earn 20 points
 

Also Known As

Qualys TotalCloud with FlexScan
Cisco Tetration
Morphisec, Morphisec Moving Target Defense
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Information Not Available
ADP, University of North Carolina Charlotte (UNCC)
Lenovo/Motorola, TruGreen, Covenant Health, Citizens Medical Center
Find out what your peers are saying about Cisco Secure Workload vs. Morphisec and other solutions. Updated: September 2026.
913,806 professionals have used our research since 2012.