Cisco Identity Services Engine (ISE) Reviews & Product Details

With 3 years of experience administering Cisco ISE, I find its biggest strengths are centralized access control, strong security enforcement, and clear visibility into network activity. It simplifies managing user, device, and guest access while integrating well with other security tools to strengthen overall network defense. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

he VPN gateway must be properly configured to prompt for and process password changes, since Cisco ISE only validates credentials against the identity source. If this setting is not enabled on the VPN device (such as ASA/FTD with AnyConnect), users won’t see a prompt to update expired passwords, even if Active Directory allows the change. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Dynamic and context-aware access policies based on user, device type, time, and location.

Profiling and posture assessment for both managed and unmanaged devices.

Centralized policy management that scales across large distributed networks. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Complexity in Configuration and Policy Design:

ISE has a steep learning curve. Setting up policies—especially for large environments with multiple identity sources and posture checks—can become complex and time-consuming. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

All-in-One Solution

Central Control

Compatibility and scalability

Support (Either by Cisco TAC, Community, Wep,...) Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

High Cost.

Complexity for beginners.

Changing the Schema especially for the Licensing. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

I like Cisco ISE for it's network access control capabilities, centralized policy management, and integration with multivendor support. It helps enhance network security .It can be worked as a Radius server. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

1st I would say it's a complex set up. It is very costly. And it is not user-friendly. A new user need to take time to understand the set-up.In some cases, Cisco ISE may require significant hardware resources to run efficiently, Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Cisco ISE is Orchestrator of our network, concentrate all users and mitigate attacks & have multiples features. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Maybe many releases and change of license Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Cisco ISE is an excellent product in terms of security and service. It has a dot1x feature, which makes it zero trust at an extreme level. Cisco ISE is very useful for network administrators and security engineers to protect their environment. the part I like.

1. dot1x pre-authentication in both wire and wireless.

2. granular policies to control endpoint.

3. complete visibility of endpoint discovery. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Cisco ISE is a good product, but their are some flaw which just need to address,

1. Licensing is very costly

2. you need to upgrade all of your infra.

3. Require dedicated resource for ISE

4. Automation and integration with some more product. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Cisco ISE is very useful for our firm as it provides a very good and dynamic (automatic) segregation of endpoints connections to their right vlan connection and also the right access to be provided for an endpoint device. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

At the moment the process of IOS upgrade as it is not as straightforward as the other IOS devices that we are using in the firm such as Switches and Routers. If Cisco can improve this to be more simple then that will make our life easier. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Cisco ISE enables authentication and authorization of users, devices, and applications across the network.

Real-time security: It provides real-time protection against network security threats and attacks.

And finally is ease to use: Cisco ISE offers an intuitive and easy-to-use user interface, allowing administrators to efficiently deploy and manage the solution. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

It depends on the type of organization that wants to implement it, but I consider the following points as disadvantages:

Cost: It can be expensive compared to other similar solutions.

Complexity: The solution can be complex to implement and configure, especially for companies with larger or more complex networks.

Hardware requirements: Cisco ISE requires specific hardware to operate and can be costly to purchase and maintain. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Network visibility and control, profiling the devices whether it's done automatically or manually using granular policies, and the variations of the conditions to match and apply control policies are amazing Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

The software upgrade is not an easy step and it's risky, sometimes it's canceled or stopped on any node in the setup due to some issues or bugs, also in the posture assessment part can be enhanced by adding real remediation actions like forcing the windows & AV update, having more conditions like checking the open ports, the configured default accounts can be added to the posture check as well Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

The security provided by CISCO ISE in our network accessing applications. It is also very flexible in integrations in different securities. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

A bit complicated in terms of implementation, however, support is always active to help in any issue at any time. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.