Aruba ClearPass Reviews

I use this solution for securing company-wide logs.

I'm using the latest version. It's deployed on the public cloud. Microsoft Azure is the cloud provider.

Everyone in our organization uses this solution. It's about 300 people. There are four people who specifically operate the solution, do daily checks, check for errors, and help users who are having trouble with their login sessions.

I like that it's usable in both an on-premise and hybrid and cloud native environment. I like the integration options with a multitude of other vendors and Aruba applications.

The user interface could be more polished and modern. It would be useful to have more options for automation.

I would like to have more collaboration between different security platforms. For instance, the Fortinet portfolio, which we also use extensively.

I have used this solution for about one year.

It's very stable. We did have some issues with under provisioning the underlying resources, so that needs to be taken into account. If you do, then it is very stable.

The scalability is very high. You just need to add extra nodes. I would rate the scalability as eight out of ten.

Technical support is only approached by our third party network service provider.

Deployment took one day.

Implementation was done through a third party. We outsourced the deployment to our network vendor.

Maintenance is also outsourced. For the application itself, maintenance takes about four hours a month. For the actual usage of the applications on a day-to-day basis, we do that ourselves.

Compared to the functionality, the pricing is very favorable. It's affordable and provides good value for the money.

I would rate the pricing as three out of ten.

We evaluated other on-premises solutions, but they aren't very comparable to Aruba.

I would rate this solution as nine out of ten.

I would recommend Aruba ClearPass to others.

We're using Aruba ClearPass for policy management, security health check, and authorization, as well as assistive network by Active Directory or Google mail.

What I like most about Aruba ClearPass is that it has the best enforcement feature for the network. I also like its Guest Captive Portal and virtual security enforcement features, but the virtual security enforcement feature is still under testing by my company.

Aruba ClearPass also has a wonderful UI which I find valuable.

An issue with Aruba ClearPass is the lack of information and poor community support. You can't find the material easily on the internet for any issues. For example, if you're looking for any configuration or exploring any issue, it's not easy to find information, and this is the problem with Aruba ClearPass. Access to helpful information and poor community support could be improved.

Another area for improvement in Aruba ClearPass is that some of its advanced features aren't easy to find. For example, my team needed to apply Google single sign-on, but it wasn't easy to find. Aruba ClearPass is a big solution with a lot of capabilities, and it's a very advanced solution, so you need to either have some experience with it or undergo some training. Aruba ClearPass is a very good solution from the network perspective, but the issue is the poor support you get from the community. When you try using the solution, some areas aren't easy. When you search on YouTube, you'll find very few materials about Aruba ClearPass. It isn't like Cisco where you can find information from hundreds of websites, on YouTube, etc. This is bad for Aruba, so this area should be improved.

Aruba has a training center, but the usual training offered is only for Aruba Wireless and Aruba Switches. If you have another solution, it's not easy to integrate it with Aruba ClearPass, so this is an area for improvement. You need to do some research to successfully integrate your solution with Aruba ClearPass. We integrated Aruba ClearPass with Ubiquiti WiFi, and it's working fine with no issues. My next project is to start integrating Aruba ClearPass with Cisco Switches.

The solution is good, but on the website, there's no book and no video, and you can't find the material on Aruba ClearPass easily. This is one of the issues with Aruba.

I have around one to two months of experience with Aruba ClearPass.

Aruba ClearPass is a very stable solution. My team didn't experience any hangs or any abnormal behavior from it. If you apply the required configuration, Aruba ClearPass works well. Stability is a good point in the solution.

Aruba ClearPass scales well. It's a scalable solution.

The technical support for Aruba ClearPass is good and responds very fast.

The initial setup for Aruba ClearPass isn't complex, but you need the training to set it up.

The deployment for the solution is very easy, and you can install it within half an hour, but this is a NAC solution. In terms of configuration, it's not a switch configuration or an IT configuration. Aruba ClearPass has one thousand scenarios in our network, and the problem is that you need a lot of information, so its configuration isn't as straightforward.

The deployment for Aruba ClearPass was done in-house. I took training classes from the Aruba training center. It was on-demand training.

The licensing cost for Aruba ClearPass is a bit expensive. Its pricing could be better. The license costs around $125,000 for the perpetual license and support for one year. Aruba can give you a license with five thousand endpoint access and one thousand five hundred onboard licenses on one hundred endpoints and two controllers.

My company is evaluating Aruba ClearPass right now. It isn't live, but it's under evaluation or testing currently.

I'm using version 6.10 of Aruba ClearPass.

My rating for Aruba ClearPass is nine out of ten.

Between ten to twenty people use Aruba ClearPass within the company. There's only a small amount of users of Aruba ClearPass currently because the solution is still under evaluation. Once Aruba ClearPass is live, my impression is that there would be no issues with it in terms of connectivity.

My advice to others looking into using Aruba ClearPass is to get good training from the Aruba virtual training center. The training costs extra. The on-demand training costs around $500. I also recommend doing the structured training, but that would cost around $3,000.

My company is a customer of Aruba.

Our primary use case is for security.

The aspect of Aruba ClearPass that I like most is that it has a lot of options, it is very versatile.

One thing that could be improved in Aruba ClearPass is that we would like to have an option to recognize all the assets on the customer's site in one click. That is an easy way of recognizing all the assets on a customer site. We would like an easier way of recognizing the assets of the network so we could know in which VLAN we want to configure the port or the suite and which policies apply to that port. We'd like ClearPass do that automatically.

We first installed ClearPass about two years ago.

In terms of stability, it is quite stable.

One a scale of one to five, I would give the scalability a three. It is not scalable enough.

The technical support is good.

The initial setup was quite complex, it is not that easy.

It took maybe two weeks. It takes a long time because it depends on the customer's industry or location or on the user's computers. It's not that fast normally.

Aruba ClearPass is expensive.

On a scale of one to ten I would give Aruba ClearPass an eight.

It is a good solution for applying security to the network. I would recommend it.

We mainly use it for 802.1X authentication.

Our customers like its ability to authenticate using not just certificates but also MAC addresses is very helpful in mitigating unauthenticated access on networks and switches.

There is room for improvement in terms of scalability. 

I have experience with Aruba ClearPass for five to six years.

I would rate the stability a nine out of ten.

I would rate the scalability an eight out of ten. Our customers are mostly medium-sized businesses.

I have some years of experience with FortiGate, Fortinet Firewalls, and Fortinet switches. Mostly with FortiSwitch models 6450, 548, and 124F.

I didn't set it up myself. I'm involved in operating the system.

Overall, I would rate the solution an eight out of ten.

If for example, a user in my office received a particular VLAN for the USA and relocated to the UK, they will not get the same access. This is the challenge that we are trying to achieve through the CPPM. 

Document authentications allows us to decide which users can connect to an office VLAN and this has been the most valuable feature. It is dependent upon the policies that we have created on CPPM. If a domain laptop needs a Windows update, the device is updated. 

This solution could be improved by making it possible to use it across different territories. Currently, if a user moves from the US to the UK, their usage and access will be restricted. 

I have been using this solution for one year. 

This is a stable solution.

This is a scalable solution. 

The initial setup is straightforward. 

The suitability of this solution is dependent upon the requirements of the business. You need to consider if you want authentications for every network devices like switch, routers, firewalls and wireless. This can depend on the type of projects you are running. 

We needed the enterprise authentication because we needed the wifi dot certification. Using this, we can access network devices and policies. 

I would rate this solution a seven out of ten because the Aruba dashboard is quite simple compared to other solutions.

Aruba ClearPass is used for enforcing certain security policies all around the organization, it covers certain security policies, which is in turn, is deducted from the business requirements. You start with a security policy, then you need technology to enforce it, this is where Aruba ClearPass is used.

A lot of the issues in Forescout are mitigated in Aruba ClearPass, it supports all the expected protocols.

Aruba ClearPass has fewer deployment scenarios and flexibility than Forescout.

I have been using Aruba ClearPass for five years.

Aruba ClearPass is reliable.

I have found Aruba ClearPass to be scalable.

I have approximately two clients with 400 users each, giving a total of 800 users using the solution.

Aruba ClearPass has a very good technical support team. Whenever we need the vendor to be involved, we find a good deal of technical support.

I have used Forescout and I would rate Aruba ClearPass second best.

The initial installation is simple. The deployment could be better since it has fewer capabilities than other solutions, it could be more flexible.

We have a dedicated engineer for Aruba ClearPass when it comes to deploying and support of the solution. One engineer is enough for my client's environment.

The licensing model is very straightforward. There are two types of licensing for Aruba ClearPass, a perpetual license, and a subscription. Both of them are straightforward. We don't need to read an ordering guide, it's very clear.

I would recommend this solution to others if they have a certain use case. If there is a lot of Cisco environments that need to be implied under the security policy, then ClearPass is the right solution for them. It supports a wide range of Cisco technologies and Cisco protocols.

I rate Aruba ClearPass an eight out of ten.

Before ClearPass we were using the native captive-portal on our Wi-Fi controllers (Aruba) to authenticate users but this was causing httpd daemons to overload the CPU on the controllers. This situation created a denial of service condition on the Wi-Fi which was a major call driver for us.

Before ClearPass we were using the native captive-portal on our Wi-Fi controllers (Aruba) to authenticate users but this was causing httpd daemons to overload the CPU on the controllers. This situation created a denial of service condition on the Wi-Fi which was a major call driver for us.

Ability to drill down on items like “System CPU Utilization” or “Device Family” stats from the dashboard. As of right now you need to pick up to 5 items listed on the Dashboard but they seem to be static.

The interface is a little confusing as is setting up some of the options but this is partially due to the flexibility of the product. There are wizards available to create policy which is helpful. We’re primarily using it for RADIUS based AAA for 802.1x Wireless.

One and a half years primarily using the Policy Manager module, and one year using the Guest module. No Onboarding use as of yet.

MS AD integration was a bit of a problem at the beginning until our SE realized that the ClearPass servers need to be joined to the domain before AD lookups can be done.

I haven't experienced any issues.

I haven't experienced any issues.

Mixed – our current SE does not seem to have much knowledge about configuration of ClearPass and I have been referred to their “ClearPass Expert” on a couple of occasions but I have yet to speak to him/her. Aruba TAC has been able to help the few times I’ve called.

Our existing wireless infrastructure is Aruba so it made sense to use their solution for AAA. We did a trial with Win Server 2012 RADIUS and that worked as well, however it does not offer as many options as ClearPass does.

Initial setup was fairly straightforward following the “Start Here” wizard. Our only real “snag” was the Active Directory integration, but that was remedied by our SE.

The licensing model wasn’t explained terribly well to us so we vastly under-purchased. This has unfortunately caused us a bit of trouble over the last year. The licensing numbers are based on unique connected authenticating endpoints per day, averaged over 7 days. When we purchased the product we were under the impression that the licensed nodes were concurrent devices, of which we typically see 8000+ in the middle of the day. Our licensing ended up being 19000+ unique devices and we’ve had to put together a cluster of 4 Clearpass nodes to accommodate this.

The licensing model wasn't explained terribly well to us so we vastly under-purchased. This has unfortunately caused us a bit of trouble over the last year. The licensing numbers are based on unique connected authenticating endpoints per day, averaged over 7 days. When we purchased the product we were under the impression that the licensed nodes were concurrent devices, of which we typically see 8000+ in the middle of the day. Our licensing ended up being 19000+ unique devices and we’ve had to put together a cluster of 4 ClearPass nodes to accommodate this.

Tread carefully when estimating the number of unique device nodes for licensing. If using Active Directory for MSCHAPv2 authentication make sure that you add Clearpass to the Windows Domain.

My company uses Aruba ClearPass mainly for the initial goal we set during the initial setup of the solution, which includes Network Access Server (NAS) and backup. We use the application in our company with almost all the features it provides.

I have found all of the features of the solution to be valuable. One of the most important features of the solution is that you can have downloadable user roles for authentication in the solution, which I think is pretty good.

The initial setup phase of the solution was really very difficult, owing to which the setup phase can be considered as an area that can be improved.

I have been using Aruba ClearPass for three years. I am a customer of the solution.

It is a very stable solution. Stability-wise, I rate the solution a ten out of ten.

My organization has about 3,000 users of the solution.

I contacted the solution's technical support team since I had some questions related to the product and not due to any particular issues related to the solution.

My company has a huge infrastructure, because of which we have to deal with a multi-vendor environment that includes Arista, Cisco, Juniper, and Fortinet.

The initial setup of Aruba ClearPass was really very difficult.

The solution is deployed on-premises.

Aruba ClearPass' deployment process that involves the configuration from scratch can take up to a couple of weeks, especially if you are not familiar with the product.

Though I don't remember the pricing model of the solution, I can say that the package or licensing model offered for the solution is a permanent one.

I recommend those planning to use the solution to use it, but they need to consider that it comes across as a really complex solution. It is important to have some past experience with the solution.

I rate the overall product a ten out of ten.