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Impulse Point SafeConnect vs Portnox comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Mar 29, 2026

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

Impulse Point SafeConnect
Ranking in Network Access Control (NAC)
16th
Average Rating
8.0
Number of Reviews
1
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
Portnox
Ranking in Network Access Control (NAC)
5th
Average Rating
8.0
Reviews Sentiment
7.0
Number of Reviews
30
Ranking in other categories
ZTNA (7th), Passwordless Authentication (1st)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of May 2026, in the Network Access Control (NAC) category, the mindshare of Impulse Point SafeConnect is 1.6%, up from 0.2% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Portnox is 6.4%, up from 3.6% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Network Access Control (NAC) Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
Portnox6.4%
Impulse Point SafeConnect1.6%
Other92.0%
Network Access Control (NAC)
 

Featured Reviews

CD
Director of Computer Information Services at a university with 5,001-10,000 employees
Easy to scale, enforces policies well, and has responsive technical support
A lot of campuses use SafeConnect. It gives us good visibility and enforces policies. It helps enforce network security by scanning devices, making sure they have current and valid antivirus solutions with up-to-date antivirus definitions, and steers our end users by enforcing policy groups and steering them to the right access. Technical support is responsive. The stability is pretty good. It is very easy to scale the product.
Maurice Mwaura - PeerSpot reviewer
Product Manager at Applied Principles Limited
Unified access control has improved compliance visibility and simplified passwordless access
There is work to be done when it comes to making the solution more seamless. For example, when a user is denied access, they would need a way to maybe self-resolve themselves, perhaps a way to generate a ticket on their own, something around resolutions. When it comes to users using the product, that is where good products are differentiated from products that are a bit of a challenge. Portnox has much to do in terms of their reporting. The generated reports need improvement. Things that other tools would say are normal are usually not present. For example, there is a page called NAS devices or NAS network that is able to show the switches that have been managed. Currently, there is no way of generating an easy report or an easy way of just generating something to tell the customer what they have been able to achieve so far. This is not done yet and is still very manual. I think there is work to be done there. More integrations around the various products being used would be beneficial. So far I have not encountered any major challenge. Where there was a challenge, I think support came in and helped us resolve. In fact, most of the challenges are not with the product; they are with the customer environment. I think that is just to update their documentation where they have come across a new vendor for easier integrations in the future.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"It gives us good visibility and enforces policies, helps enforce network security by scanning devices, making sure they have current and valid antivirus solutions with up-to-date antivirus definitions, and steers our end users by enforcing policy groups and steering them to the right access."
"It is very easy to scale the product."
"It's a stable product."
"One of the features I enjoyed the most about Portnox was the ability to dive in with proper details on an endpoint."
"For a network access control solution, Portnox is a very good solution."
"The most important of all is that we are aware of situations the minute anyone on the network has issues, with a very good graphical interface that shows us exactly where the issue is and what ports it is occurring at, making it a lot easier for us to troubleshoot network issues and helping with uptime and productivity."
"Previous to the deployment we didn't have complete visibility of all the endpoints, all the devices that are connected to the network. But with the deployment of portnox, we could see all the devices and where they're connecting. We can equally segregate and apply different rules, policies to each location that we didn't monitor specifically."
"Portnox ensures system compliance through policy enforcement, including antivirus updates, Windows operating system updates, and system patches, helping network administrators maintain system health and security across the network."
"The cloud-based feature is very nice."
"It's agentless, and it's scalable."
 

Cons

"The solution would be much better if it offered self-service onboarding."
"The solution would be much better if it offered self-service onboarding."
"Portnox can occasionally knock out a switch port, causing network downtime and requiring manual reset."
"Allowing for a search of MAC addresses in the interface, whether they are authenticated on the network or not, would be beneficial. Currently, it only finds authenticated MAC addresses, which complicates troubleshooting when the same MAC address is used for different requests."
"One of the things for the on-premise is that sometimes you click on it and it takes a while for it to respond."
"One of the things for the on-premise is that sometimes you click on it and it takes a while for it to respond."
"Their filtering system tends to lag quite a bit, so when I'm doing filtering at times, it doesn't filter the items properly."
"The solution did have some stability issues, however, all I had to do was restart it."
"Now, the way security is viewed, maybe including something like AI, to automate some of the things that are required to be done would be great."
"The integration between Portnox CORE and Portnox CLEAR can be better. These are two different systems, and there is no unique console for both devices. Portnox CORE is agentless, whereas Portnox CLEAR is not agentless."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"For our tier group, for one year, the cost is probably around $10,000 for the license. If you do multi-year, you could get two years, and you could get it for about $8,000 per year. If you do three years, you get it around $7,000 a year."
"Portnox CORE's pricing is adequate and cheaper compared to other complex solutions. Its licensing costs are yearly and include support. Cost is calculated per device."
"The solution is very expensive and I would rate it 10 out of 10."
"The users are not very happy with the new licensing option where there is only a subscription license. There is no perpetual license."
"The tool is more expensive than Fortinet."
"The licensing module should be reviewed to count the number of devices instead of port numbers of total switches. There is a case for this where not all ports for a switch are used by devices. Unused ports are calculated in the license, then the customer pays for license for those unused ports."
"It's not cheap. It's not expensive. It's in the middle."
"Pricing is quite reasonable."
"The cost of Portnox Clear is reasonable."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
No data available
Manufacturing Company
15%
Financial Services Firm
14%
Healthcare Company
8%
Comms Service Provider
5%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
No data available
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business17
Midsize Enterprise5
Large Enterprise10
 

Questions from the Community

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What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Portnox Clear?
My thoughts on the pricing are that they are usually very flexible. They work with the customer's budget. In terms of being cheap or expensive, that usually just depends on the customer. If a custo...
What needs improvement with Portnox Clear?
The area that has room for improvement that I had is actually the one that they fixed about two or three days ago regarding the session recording. As of now, I am yet to review and see any areas of...
What is your primary use case for Portnox Clear?
Some of the best features that I have experienced with Portnox is the integration with identity providers and the fact that they introduced ZTNA. Recently, they introduced session recording, which ...
 

Also Known As

SafeConnect
Access Layers Portnox, Portnox CLEAR
 

Interactive Demo

Demo not available
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Aerohive Solution
Data Realty, Royal London, Wales Millennium Centre, McLaren Construction Group, EL AL Israeli Airlines, 
Find out what your peers are saying about Hewlett Packard Enterprise, Cisco, Fortinet and others in Network Access Control (NAC). Updated: May 2026.
896,298 professionals have used our research since 2012.