While both products are derived from the same code base, thereby offering the same performance, scalability, and resilience characteristics, there are differences in design and price.
The two products are designed and marketed to different customers. Cisco Prime IP Express is designed for enterprise, public sector, higher education and other commercial accounts with large IP count or multiple locations. Cisco Prime Network Registrar is designed for large ISP and MSO customers.
To support these different markets Cisco added a few enterprise centric features to Prime IP Express including support for Microsoft® Active Directory authentication and a BYOD Captive Portal. We also price Prime IP Express to better meet customers expectations in this space.
Prime Network Registrar adds a few Service Provider specific features like Dynamic Lease Notification, the TFTP & RIC servers, subnet utilization history, and Multi-tenant support. As of the Prime Network Registrar 8.3 release it also includes the Prime IP Express feature set giving it the superset of functionality for the product family.
Both products leverage the same IP Address Management application, Prime Network Registrar IPAM.
