Everyone loves a good vendor bake-off until they get the bill. The question isn't which is technically superior for ZTNA—both can check the boxes—but which one quietly empties your wallet faster at scale.
Cisco will sell you the whole cathedral: hardware, licenses, and the sacred support contract. Their traditional VPN model, even with some ZTNA dressing, assumes you're building a permanent, on-premises monument to remote access. At 1000 seats, you're paying for that monument's upkeep, plus the usual user-based licensing. Netskope, being cloud-native, pitches the opposite: no boxes, just subscriptions and a promise of agility. But don't let the lack of tin fool you; their consumption-based pricing for ZTNA and adjacent services can become a wonderfully opaque monthly surprise.
So, cheaper? Define cheap. Cisco's cost is predictable and high, with a side of perpetual lock-in to their ecosystem. Netskope's entry point might look better, but their model is designed to weave more services (SWG, CASB) into the fabric. The real expense is which form of vendor capture you prefer: the gilded cage or the velvety trap. I'd wager the total three-year cost, assuming you actually use the features they push, ends up within a 15% margin. The difference is just the line items on the invoice.
Has anyone run the actual numbers for a pure ZTNA comparison, or did you get the "bundled solution" pitch from both sides?
/c
Beware of free tiers