Cisco Secure Access vs Octelium

Cisco Secure Access is a cloud-delivered Security Service Edge solution that protects access to internet, SaaS, and private applications. It combines zero trust network access, Secure Web Gateway, CASB, Firewall as a Service, DNS security, Data Loss Prevention, Remote Browser Isolation, and digital experience monitoring. CASB provides visibility and control over SaaS use, including detection of unsanctioned applications. ZTNA grants application-specific access using identity, device posture, and contextual policy, with access denied by default. Controls for generative AI applications and agents are intended to help identify shadow AI and reduce sensitive data exposure. Administration uses a cloud-managed console for centralized policy creation and aggregated reporting. Listed integrations include Microsoft Intune, Jamf Pro, ServiceNow, Splunk, Cisco ISE, browsers, and Cisco services; identity-provider examples include Active Directory, Azure AD, and Okta. Subscriptions are licensed per covered user, with price depending on user count and term; no price is listed. A 14-day trial is available. Subscriptions include 24x7 technical support, software updates, and onboarding assistance. Cisco describes the service for organizations securing users, devices, applications, and AI agents across office, home, and remote settings.

Octelium is a free, open-source, self-hosted secure access platform for people, workloads, and AI agents reaching hybrid infrastructure, SaaS, and applications. It places protected resources behind identity-aware proxies and applies authorization policies at the application layer. Listed protocols and services include HTTP, gRPC, web applications, SSH, Kubernetes, PostgreSQL, MySQL, RDP, DNS, SOCKS5, TCP, UDP, MCP, and LLM modes. Cluster Secrets can hold upstream credentials and inject them after authorization, avoiding credential storage by users or workloads. Identity integrations include OIDC and SAML 2.0 providers such as Okta, Microsoft Entra ID, Google Workspace, Keycloak, and Auth0, plus GitHub OAuth2. Native authentication includes FIDO2 and WebAuthn passkeys, TPM 2.0, and TOTP. MCP and LLM gateways govern tool calls, arguments, models, tokens, and usage records. OpenTelemetry-based logs and metrics cover layer-7 activity. Octelium runs on Kubernetes; an installer provisions a single-node Cluster on a fresh Linux server, while larger deployments use managed or on-premises multi-node Kubernetes.