Try our new research platform with insights from 80,000+ expert users

Akamai Guardicore Segmentation vs Cisco ACI comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Jan 12, 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

Akamai Guardicore Segmentation
Ranking in Cloud and Data Center Security
1st
Average Rating
8.2
Reviews Sentiment
6.8
Number of Reviews
18
Ranking in other categories
Cloud Workload Protection Platforms (CWPP) (9th), Breach and Attack Simulation (BAS) (4th), Microsegmentation Software (2nd)
Cisco ACI
Ranking in Cloud and Data Center Security
4th
Average Rating
8.0
Reviews Sentiment
6.5
Number of Reviews
101
Ranking in other categories
Network Virtualization (1st), Software Defined Networking (SDN) (2nd)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of April 2025, in the Cloud and Data Center Security category, the mindshare of Akamai Guardicore Segmentation is 25.2%, up from 20.5% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Cisco ACI is 5.7%, down from 7.2% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Cloud and Data Center Security
 

Featured Reviews

KlavsThaarup - PeerSpot reviewer
Offers micro segmentation capabilities and easy to setup
It's micro-segmentation The label-based segmentation is the most valuable feature. There are always areas for improvement. It doesn't support a PAAC solution (Platforma as a service) in the cloud. So that could be improved. In future releases, I would like to see more integration with other…
Raj Metkar - PeerSpot reviewer
Provides scalability, ease of migration for future DC moves, multi-tenancy and programmability
Cisco's MSO (Multi-Site Orchestrator) or NDO has room for improvement. Cisco monitors ACI through a product called NDI. I find it very frustrating that Cisco has multiple monitoring platforms. It has DNAC for monitoring Cisco NX-OS, campus switches, and any other routers and switches you would have in the environment. That same thing does not work for Cisco ACI monitoring. MEraki cloudbasd platform for Meraki which will get extended to Campus monitoring, to be honest Cisco never got Monitoring 100% right from days of CiscoWorks to Prime to current platforms. To monitor and manage Cisco ACI, you need to have another platform called NDI and Cisco Dashboard Insights. What frustrates me about Cisco is that it never has a central, single pane of glass platform for all its solutions. It has one thing for Cisco ACI and another thing for campus switches. I would really appreciate it if Cisco came up with something centralized to monitor everything. I haven't thought about anything since the Cisco NDO is quite advanced, and you can deploy your cloud networking through it. I don't know how many people use it. I might explore it as my cloud orchestration tool in the future. We do a lot of cloud automation using our scripts like TerraForm, but I would like to see people using NDO more. We could have more case studies on how many people use NDO for their cloud orchestration. That might be a much easier journey for people when they move from an on-premises data center into a cloud and move from one cloud to another cloud. That is where I personally see an orchestrator being effectively used for multiple deployments.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"That is primarily because I've seen increased rules. It's kind of caught us a little off guard. With GuardiCore, I have had to deal with their technical support and engineering team in Israel. They are amazing. They are very quick to adapt."
"The most valuable features of the solution are the maps and ring fencing that help monitor events."
"The real bonus is the fact that we can secure applications, all the way down to the individual services, on each host. It's actually more granular security than we can get out of a traditional firewall."
"We like the centralized management of the firewalls. Until we installed Guardicore Centra, we managed all our firewalls individually, so making changes was complicated, difficult, and time-consuming."
"Guardicore Centra offers the best coverage specifically in backward compatibility with legacy operating systems."
"From day one, you get threat intelligence. It will immediately block active threats, which has been useful."
"Application Ring-Fencing and Deception Server, which is basically like a honeypot, are pretty useful features."
"The label-based segmentation is the most valuable feature."
"This solution is easy to configure, and it is done in an object-oriented manner."
"We can support policy based on our intent, then that gets rendered into the policy that we will be using for Fabric."
"With its programmability, you can do stuff to policies to make them more flexible, allowing you to connect devices in new ways."
"I have found the SDN features to be the most valuable."
"All the features provided by Cisco ACI including orchestration to layer seven, service training, load enhancements and firewalls."
"The features we find most valuable is the integration with the virtual switches of our UCS platform."
"The basic functionality that is the most useful is creating a virtual network on a physical device."
"The most valuable feature of the solution is the Call Manager."
 

Cons

"Sometimes, the speed needs improvement, especially when it comes to the generation of maps, where it can be a bit slow."
"Incident tagging could be improved. Other vendors offer semi-automatic tagging, which Guardicore doesn't yet have."
"Needs more customization of honeypots and a vaster catalog of systems able to be mimicked."
"Guardicore Centra should incorporate automation so that we don't require to write custom scripts and APIs. The tool also has limitations on rules where it allows only sixty thousand rules. Our clients have also commented that there are too many manual clicks and effort to do changes. I think that the incorporation of automation can help our clients make changes with confidence and without the possibility of human error."
"Kubernetes is not installed in the way we need it."
"Clients would like to see that the security policies of GuardiCore can continue to be comparable to all the major firewall players out there."
"The long-term management of the security policies could be improved with some kind of automation platform, something like Chef or Puppet or Ansible, to help you manage the policies after day-one... to then manage the policies and changes to those policies, going forward, through some type of automation process is not turning out to be really easy."
"It doesn't support a PAAC solution (Platforma as a service) in the cloud."
"It needs to be able to function on the cloud."
"Training for this product is available from institutions but it is not available online where you can get users trained easily."
"Quality Assurance could be better, and there are a lot of bugs in each release. We discover these bugs when we upgrade the ACI environment, sometimes resulting in downtime. In the next release, I would like to be able to manage hybrid cloud networking. So currently, if you have an ACI environment running on-premise or Epic in the cloud, we can handle it with the NexSys dashboard. But if Cisco can integrate SD WAN-related features, through which we can do multi-cloud networking, that will be an awesome feature. It should be more flexible."
"It is challenging for people who don't understand the programming language, making it difficult to migrate. With technology, there are two verticals. One is hardware driven and the other is software driven. Most people in our domain understand networking, but they don't understand programming. When we migrate, some programming is required."
"The error messages should be improved. Sometimes we want to remove an error message so we acknowledge an error and we would then like to remove it but there's no real way of doing that. If we need to do it, we need to open a tech case. That could use improvement."
"Customer support for ACI needs improvement. Many customers prefer HPE because their internal support is different and easier to integrate with existing networks. This lack of awareness of ACI's capabilities makes customers stick to traditional networking."
"Since it is a new technology, Cisco moved all the menus. This made it tricky to use."
"The initial setup was fairly complex and it looks terrifying when you first log in. That's one thing about ACI. It takes a bit to wrap your mind around how it works. It's not overly complicated once you understand the concepts, but someone who has never worked with anything like ACI, will initially find it difficult to grasp the complexity of it."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"GuardiCore has made some new changes to the license now. We've seen monthly and annual licenses based on a subscription. We have a few clients that pay anywhere from $25,000 a year."
"The customer would complain about the cost."
"Guardicore Centra provides better value for money than NSX, was the other solution that we looked at, which was too expensive for what it does."
"The solution is reasonably priced and I would rate it a six out of ten. The tool's licensing costs are yearly."
"The price is the same as other products in the market. There's no price argument to choose one or the other product, it will cost the customer approximately the same."
"Compared to the pricing we were seeing from both Illumio and Edgewise, Guardicore was very competitive."
"The pricing is too high."
"This is not a cheap solution but you have to consider the bigger picture, which is what it is giving you."
"We bought a package for hardware, software, and support. At that time, Cisco was simply selling that package to distributors, then we opted for it directly."
"It saves time and resources."
"I don't believe there is any licensing required."
"Once you sign for the start kit implementation, you have to go all the way through to the implementation, even if you are experiences issues."
"Cisco's pricing is very expensive."
"On a scale from one to ten, where one is cheap and ten is expensive, I rate the solution's pricing an eight out of ten."
"Cisco ACI costs depend on how many sites you have. One simple site with a simple installation, including two leaves, two spines, and some fibers, would cost $200,000 to $300,000 for the licenses. The solution is a bit expensive, but it's a good investment if you want your data centers to work without interruption."
"Price is always an issue."
report
Use our free recommendation engine to learn which Cloud and Data Center Security solutions are best for your needs.
844,944 professionals have used our research since 2012.
 

Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
17%
Computer Software Company
16%
Manufacturing Company
7%
Insurance Company
6%
Computer Software Company
23%
Financial Services Firm
13%
Manufacturing Company
8%
Government
7%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
 

Questions from the Community

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Guardicore Centra?
I would rate the pricing a six out of ten, where one is cheap and ten is expensive. I know other micro-segmentation tools like Cisco or Illumio, and so I think they are in the middle.
What do you like most about Guardicore Infection Monkey?
Initially, I liked the telemetry part. But later, we used the microsegmentation features that we were able to deploy and found that they really stood out from other vendors. It allows us to see mi...
What needs improvement with Guardicore Infection Monkey?
When we have more than one interface, we can only have one policy for both interfaces. Normally, you have assets with a production interface and a server interface that are only for management. But...
What are the biggest differences between Cisco ACI and VMware NSX?
There are some very major differences between both the Products and to name a few. -Cisco ACI have physical network gear (9K Switches) where the Code runs in ACI Policy Mode & the UCS server wh...
What are the biggest differences between Cisco ACI and VMware NSX?
Once you know your way around the Cisco ecosystem, using Cisco ACI is not so difficult. It is a global product, so when you change one interface, changes are automatically reflected on every switch...
What do you like most about Cisco ACI?
The flexibility of adding new components with minimal impact on existing services running in the data center is a key benefit of this ACI-based solution.
 

Also Known As

Guardicore Centra, GuardiCore
No data available
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Santander, Frontier Airlines, OpenLink, Intermountain Healthcare, Cellcom, BancoBASE
Bowling Green State University, du, Qatar University
Find out what your peers are saying about Akamai Guardicore Segmentation vs. Cisco ACI and other solutions. Updated: March 2025.
844,944 professionals have used our research since 2012.