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Cisco Identity Services Engine (ISE) vs Omada Identity comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive Summary
 

Categories and Ranking

Cisco Identity Services Eng...
Average Rating
8.2
Number of Reviews
139
Ranking in other categories
Network Access Control (NAC) (1st), Cisco Security Portfolio (1st)
Omada Identity
Average Rating
8.2
Reviews Sentiment
7.0
Number of Reviews
48
Ranking in other categories
User Provisioning Software (3rd), Identity Management (IM) (4th), Customer Identity and Access Management (CIAM) (3rd)
 

Mindshare comparison

Cisco Identity Services Engine (ISE) and Omada Identity aren’t in the same category and serve different purposes. Cisco Identity Services Engine (ISE) is designed for Network Access Control (NAC) and holds a mindshare of 29.2%, down 31.6% compared to last year.
Omada Identity, on the other hand, focuses on Identity Management (IM), holds 4.1% mindshare, up 4.0% since last year.
Network Access Control (NAC)
Identity Management (IM)
 

Featured Reviews

Rohit-Joshi - PeerSpot reviewer
Aug 3, 2023
Enables us to ensure that any machine that comes into the network is patched and secure
Posturing is the most valuable feature. There are other tools available that can do some of their other features, like network authentication. The posturing was something because of the nature of the industry that we are in. There are people who go outside for work. Their machines are at times not in the network, and not patched properly. We don't know when they're going to come back, whether it is in a good state, whether it has antivirus, whether it's installed on those machines. Posturing is something that we have made our baseline policy that whenever a machine comes back to our network, it should have a certain level of the operating system and a level of security and antivirus installed. We couldn't have done this posturing without Cisco ISE. This is its greatest feature. It does help me to detect and remediate my network. It enables me to detect any external threat that comes to my network and remediate. If a machine comes into my network that does not qualify per my baseline policy, I have a policy that the machine gets redirected to where it can be patched and remediated. I can ensure that it is fully patched and secure. The entire idea of having ISE is to enhance cybersecurity resilience. The zero trust architecture was coined by the cybersecurity team itself. It was a task given to us in the infrastructure space to see how we can bring resilience into the cybersecurity network and ISE was the solution.
Espen Bago - PeerSpot reviewer
Sep 12, 2023
Has the ability to give people access, but it should include more analytics capabilities
Omada Identity is quite good at providing a clear roadmap for getting additional features deployed. We've always been able to have good discussions with Omada's product managers about the features we would like to have. It's a good environment for discussion, and I've heard from others that Omada is good at listening to customers and getting features into production within a year or so. Omada partially helped us to deploy IGA. However, the company I was working for needed to take more charge and do things a bit differently. It was not possible for Omada to do that for us. Omada did help, and it was not Omada's fault that it took longer. It's too early to say if the solution's identity analytics has affected the manual overhead involved with our identity management. It should have had a positive effect because it should be easier to request more things automatically. Since that's not in production yet, we couldn't measure the effect, but it looked promising. Our Omada solution is set up to remove an employee's access as soon as that employee leaves our organization. This setup has positively affected our organization's security because we have less overall access. Omada Identity was deployed as a SaaS solution in our organization. I think Omada Identity is flexible enough to be used by both smaller and bigger companies. Based on what I've seen, Omada's out-of-the-box connectors are more than sufficient. I advise users to assess their data quality and make a clear cleanup plan before using the solution because Omada is not well-suited as a cleanup tool. Overall, I rate Omada Identity a seven out of ten.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"[One of the most valuable features] is just the ease of use. It's pretty simple to set up certs that we can add to our clients to make sure that they connect properly, [as is] whitelisting Mac addresses."
"It has all of the features available, in fact, more than what you need."
"A lot of customers use a third party to manage their guest Wi-Fi. Cisco ISE presents the ability to bring that in-house so that customers can have full control over it, change the branding, and get extra telemetry from it and the user data. It works really well for our customers."
"We have seen ROI. It has done its job. It has protected us when we needed it to."
"I've had no issues with scalability. I started using it on two campuses, and now I'm using it across the country and scaling it across subsidiaries in other countries."
"The endpoint profiling feature is among the most valuable because it keeps me from having to manually maintain a MAC address bypass list to track endpoints. I can have ISE profile them for me and then put them in the right bucket."
"Having access and being able to add people or change authentication yourself is nice. In the past, we've used other group authentication services, and we always had to go to them and get permissions. Having that control is key."
"I like the guest access feature, which has been important for us."
"The most valuable feature in Omada is the governance. We work with other products and other product vendors, but the sweet spot in the market for Omada is where things are heavy on governance."
"It has a lot of out-of-the-box features. It is flexible, and there are a lot of possibilities to configure and extend it. It is user-friendly. It has an interface that is end-user or business-user friendly."
"The most valuable feature is the automatic provisioning and reconciliation of things like the Active Directory groups and memberships."
"It scales in terms of numbers and types of identities. It can govern the on-premise applications as well as the cloud applications. So, it can manage hybrid environments with all types of identities and various load amounts."
"You can make resources. You can import them from Azure or Active Directory and put them in an application. For example, if there is an application that uses a lot of Active Directory groups, you can make the groups available for people. If they need to access that application, you can tell them the resource groups you have for that application. People can do everything by themselves. They do not need anybody else. They can just go to the Omada portal, and they can do it all by themselves. That is terrific."
"Two valuable features of Omada Identity are the ability to discover accounts and link them to identities, and the automatic disabling of inactive accounts or identities."
"Its best feature is definitely the process design. It is quite easy and straightforward to design a process."
"Technically, the product does everything one would expect from an identity and access management platform. The product offers robust handling of Active Directory resources."
 

Cons

"The web interface needs improvement. The new web interface that they have is not as easy to manage and we find it to be very slow."
"The upgrades could be better. Every time we try to do an upgrade, we have problems. It's a pain."
"This product doesn't work in isolation."
"In an upcoming release, the solution needs to be more agentless and more independent. Additionally, there could be improved integration with other next-generation solutions, such as Palo Alto, Fortinet, or Check Point."
"The pricing and licensing structure are not ideal for customers."
"Documentation is probably the worst part of the software."
"The customer server was great but it would have been better for me if they had support in other languages such as Spanish."
"It could be less monolithic. It's one huge application, and it does everything under the sun, so it's hard to deal with and upgrade and manage."
"Omada could communicate better with us about the product roadmap. We haven't gotten any updates about it. The user interface is often a bit difficult to understand. It isn't optimized for small screens, so it doesn't display all of the information clearly, so users need to scroll a lot."
"Its flexibility is both a good thing and a bad thing. Because it is very flexible, it also becomes too complex. This is common for most of the products we evaluated. Its scalability should be better. It had a few scalability issues."
"When the re-certification process is launched that makes Omada very slow. There are performance issues in the current version."
"Omada's performance could be better because we had some latency issues. Still, it's difficult to say how much of that is due to Omada versus the resources used by our other vendors in our on-prem environment. Considering the resources we have invested into making it run well, it's slightly slower than we would expect."
"There is room for improvement in Omada's integration capabilities, particularly in streamlining complex integrations and enhancing programming logic for better rule management."
"The reporting and importing have room for improvement."
"They need to improve the cost for small companies."
"We are trying to use Omada's standards and to adapt our processes. But we have had some trouble with the bad documentation. This is something that they could improve on. It has not been possible for us to analyze some of the problems so far, based on the documentation. We always need consultants. The documentation should include some implementation hints and some guidelines for implementing the processes."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The licensing is subscription-based and based on the user account."
"Standard licensing gives backup access and very few features, and then there's VM licensing - each VM we use needs to be licensed."
"I think the price is okay."
"The price is okay."
"The price of Cisco ISE (Identity Services Engine) is expensive and we are thinking about changing to FortiGate."
"Licensing has got much simpler since Cisco moved to the DNA model because we just have the three tiers, but it could always stand to be improved upon."
"It is difficult to measure security breaches, but since we have not been attacked so far, it has paid for itself over the years."
"The licensing can be confusing, but it is still pretty good."
"It is licensed per managed user per year."
"Omada continues to be very competitive on pricing, especially on the Omada cloud product."
"Omada is expensive."
"My client deals directly with the Omada Identity team in terms of licensing. I never look at pricing, so I'm not aware of how much the solution costs, but it's worth the money. Often, when you begin to use Omada Identity and it takes a while to set up, it'll be irreversible, and you'd depend on and focus more on the functionality of the solution, rather than its price tag."
"It's a fair price for the on-premises system. Compared with what we had before, it's much cheaper and we get all the modules in one. We tried to go with the cloud, but it was far too expensive."
"Omada Identity is very reasonably and competitively priced."
"It is not cheap. None of these solutions are cheap, but we have good pricing at least for now from a licensing perspective."
"From an on-prem point of view, the cost is quite transparent and reasonable. The direct cost is primarily for licenses and maintenance on licenses."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Educational Organization
26%
Computer Software Company
15%
Financial Services Firm
8%
Government
7%
Financial Services Firm
17%
Computer Software Company
13%
Manufacturing Company
8%
Government
7%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
 

Questions from the Community

Which is better - Aruba Clearpass or Cisco ISE?
Aruba ClearPass is a Network Access Control tool that gives secure network access to multiple device types. You can adapt the policies to VPN access, wired, or wireless access. You can securely ...
What are the main differences between Cisco ISE and Forescout Platform?
OK, so Cisco ISE uses 802.1X to secure switchports against unauthorized access. The drawback of this is that ISE cannot secure the port if a device does not support 802.1x. Cameras, badge readers, ...
How does Cisco ISE compare with Fortinet FortiNAC?
Cisco ISE uses AI endpoint analytics to identify new devices based on their behavior. It will also notify you if someone plugs in with a device that is not allowed and will block it. The user exper...
What do you like most about Omada Identity?
We don't have to go in and do a lot of the work that we did before. It may have saved us somewhere in the range of 10 to 30 percent of the time we spent on provisioning access.
What needs improvement with Omada Identity?
There are some technical bits and pieces that we have looked at that could be better. For instance, when you do a recalculation of an identity, it's hard to understand what was incorrect before you...
What is your primary use case for Omada Identity?
We wanted a solution that could help us make HR the master of identities. We wanted a solution that could take that data and direct it into all our other directories and Active Directory.
 

Also Known As

Cisco ISE
Omada Identity Suite, Omada Identity Cloud
 

Learn More

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Overview

 

Sample Customers

Aegean Motorway, BC Hydro, Beachbody, Bucks County Intermediate Unit , Cisco IT, Derby City Council, Global Banking Customer, Gobierno de Castilla-La Mancha, Houston Methodist, Linz AG, London Hydro, Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Molina Healthcare, MST Systems, New South Wales Rural Fire Service, Reykjavik University, Wildau University
Bayer, ECCO Shoes, Vattenfall, NuStar Energy, Unicredit, Schiphol Group, BMW Group, Deutsche Leasing
Find out what your peers are saying about Cisco, HPE Aruba Networking, Fortinet and others in Network Access Control (NAC). Updated: October 2024.
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