Cisco ISE vs Snort: What are the differences?

Developers describe Cisco ISE as "A network administration product that enables the creation and enforcement of security and access policies". A critical component of any zero-trust strategy is securing the environment that everyone and everything is connecting to: the workplace. It enables a dynamic and automated approach to policy enforcement that empowers software-defined access and automated network segmentation within IT and OT environments. On the other hand, Snort is detailed as "An open-source security software product that looks at network traffic in real time and logs packets to perform detailed analysis". It is an open-source, free and lightweight network intrusion detection system (NIDS) software for Linux and Windows to detect emerging threats.

Cisco ISE and Snort can be primarily classified as "Network Monitoring" tools.

Some of the features offered by Cisco ISE are:

• Gain visibility with context and control
• Extend zero trust to contain threats
• Accelerate value of existing solutions

On the other hand, Snort provides the following key features:

• Intrusion Agent
• IPSx
• IPS

Snort is an open source tool with 829 GitHub stars and 257 GitHub forks. Here's a link to Snort's open source repository on GitHub.