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NordLayer vs Portnox comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Dec 28, 2025

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

NordLayer
Ranking in Network Access Control (NAC)
20th
Ranking in ZTNA
20th
Average Rating
8.0
Reviews Sentiment
6.2
Number of Reviews
1
Ranking in other categories
Secure Web Gateways (SWG) (38th), Internet Security (16th), Enterprise Infrastructure VPN (28th), ZTNA as a Service (25th), Customer Identity and Access Management (CIAM) (34th), Secure Access Service Edge (SASE) (25th)
Portnox
Ranking in Network Access Control (NAC)
6th
Ranking in ZTNA
8th
Average Rating
8.0
Reviews Sentiment
7.0
Number of Reviews
29
Ranking in other categories
Passwordless Authentication (1st)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of March 2026, in the Network Access Control (NAC) category, the mindshare of NordLayer is 0.5%, up from 0.2% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Portnox is 5.4%, up from 3.1% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Network Access Control (NAC) Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
Portnox5.4%
NordLayer0.5%
Other94.1%
Network Access Control (NAC)
 

Featured Reviews

Christophe Derdeyn - PeerSpot reviewer
Partner delaware Singapore at delaware Singapore
A convenient and easy tool with an incredibly high number of dialing points
The solution is convenient and easy. It has an incredibly high number of dialing points for pretty much every single country in the world. It has a few additional security features. It has a function that prevents unsecured access if my connection were to drop for any reason. It’s something I like. It has threat protection features. It can protect my web connection and files against malicious downloads and trackers.
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

"The solution is convenient and easy."
"The product's initial setup phase was straightforward."
"The cloud-based feature of Portnox is excellent."
"One of the features I enjoyed the most about Portnox was the ability to dive in with proper details on an endpoint."
"The cloud-based feature is very nice. We use Meraki for our switching, and it is simple to point all of our networks and offices to Portnox. It is pretty seamless."
"Technical support was very helpful when we needed them."
"With Portnox, you have a large-scale view of the systems on your estate, and you can use the ID of that user to search and get substantial information about a user."
"The technical support is top-notch."
"I like the fact that you can take your device anywhere and still have that visibility from anywhere because it's agent-based."
 

Cons

"The tool is not perfectly stable."
"It could be a little cheaper."
"Portnox can occasionally knock out a switch port, causing network downtime and requiring manual reset."
"In terms of operational efficiency, things are more complicated now. It takes more time to get devices on the network, but we increased security quite a bit."
"I believe there are some difficulties with the removal of devices that could be improved."
"Portnox has some difficulties with stability; sometimes there are glitches, and settings are not clear."
"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."
"Their filtering system tends to lag quite a bit, so when I'm doing filtering at times, it doesn't filter the items properly."
"It might be beneficial to improve the ease of integrating the product with firewalls."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

Information not available
"The vendor price is fair."
"It is not bad. It is a bit on the high side, but considering the cloud features and how much it costs to run the instance in the cloud, it is not unreasonable. We do have RADIUS servers for the US, Asia, and Europe."
"The pricing is a bit high, possibly due to the cloud features and running instances across regions like the US, Asia, and Europe."
"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."
"We pay for port licensing and support on a yearly basis, and it's not cheap."
"Pricing is quite reasonable."
"The tool is more expensive than Fortinet."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Computer Software Company
13%
Comms Service Provider
12%
Healthcare Company
8%
Energy/Utilities Company
8%
Manufacturing Company
16%
Financial Services Firm
13%
Healthcare Company
9%
Computer Software Company
6%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
No data available
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business15
Midsize Enterprise5
Large Enterprise9
 

Questions from the Community

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What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Portnox Clear?
Portnox's pricing is very conservative and offers great value for money. If I compare it with any other solution, pricing is definitely at the top of the list because it is very affordable. Pricing...
What needs improvement with Portnox Clear?
In Portnox, the area that has room for improvement is that older data is not fetching correctly. For an older switch, for example, a six-month-old switch that we just added, it does not happen to e...
What is your primary use case for Portnox Clear?
My use case for Portnox is for whitelisting ports and adding policies. We are using two modes: enforce mode and monitoring mode. For monitoring, we are using some smaller switches, just some busine...
 

Also Known As

No data available
Access Layers Portnox, Portnox CLEAR
 

Interactive Demo

Demo not available
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Hostinger, Shutterstock, USMobile, Soundcloud, Calendly, whatagraph.
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: February 2026.
884,873 professionals have used our research since 2012.