Home › Study Guides › Security+ vs. Network+: Which Should You Take First?
Five situations, five different answers. A decision framework based on your actual role, not a generic ranking.
Every IT career forum, help desk chat group and CompTIA study group eventually hits the same question: Security+ or Network+ first? The honest answer is that it depends on what you are already doing and where you are trying to go. Anyone who gives you a flat always-do-this-one-first answer is guessing at your situation instead of asking about it.
Start with what each certification actually covers. Network+ is about how networks function: IP addressing, routing and switching concepts, network troubleshooting, cabling standards and network hardware. It is foundational IT knowledge that applies whether you end up in networking, security, systems administration or cloud roles. Security+ is about protecting systems and data: threat identification, risk management, security architecture, incident response and governance. It assumes you already have some general IT literacy and builds security-specific knowledge on top of it. CompTIA designed them to be complementary rather than competing, so Network+ gives you the layer covering how systems talk to each other, and Security+ gives you the layer covering how to keep that communication and those systems safe.
The decision then comes down to your situation, and there are five common ones. If you are a help desk technician who wants to move into security within a year, take Network+ first. You are resetting passwords and troubleshooting printer connectivity today, and you do not yet have hands-on exposure to VLANs, routing or firewall rules beyond what you have read about. Without Network+, a big chunk of your Security+ study time will go toward backfilling networking fundamentals the exam assumes you already have, and you will retain less of the actual security content because you are learning two layers of new material at once.
If you are a network administrator being asked to take on more security responsibilities, go straight to Security+. You already configure switches, manage VLANs and troubleshoot connectivity as part of your normal job, which is Network+ material you have absorbed through experience rather than a textbook. Security+ is the certification that will actually reflect the direction your role is moving, and studying material you already know on the job is a poor use of limited study time.
If a specific job posting names one of them, match the posting. Say you are applying to a security operations centre analyst opening that lists Security+ as required and does not mention Network+ at all. Get Security+. This sounds obvious, but people sometimes default to the logic that the harder one is more impressive and skip past what the job actually requires. Employers screening resumes for a named certification are not going to credit you extra for having earned a different one first.
If you are targeting a defence or government role under the DoD 8140 framework, Security+ is the one that matters at the baseline level. Network+ is not part of that framework in the same way, so if a government or defence contractor role is your target, prioritise Security+.
And if you are career-changing from a completely non-technical background, the answer is neither, yet. If you are coming from retail management or a non-technical office role with no help desk or networking experience, both exams assume a baseline IT comfort that background does not provide. Consider CompTIA's IT Fundamentals or A+ first, because jumping straight to Security+ from zero technical background usually means a much longer, more frustrating study process that is mostly relearning fundamentals mid-course.
A related question is whether you can take Security+ without Network+ at all. You can; there is no hard prerequisite enforced by CompTIA. Its own recommendation is Network+ plus roughly two years of experience with a security focus, but that is guidance rather than a gate. Plenty of people go straight into Security+, particularly those with equivalent knowledge from a degree programme, self-study or job experience even without holding the Network+ credential itself. There is also no bundled discount or combined exam for taking both: each certification has its own exam, its own voucher and its own study timeline, so prerequisite here means suggested preparation, not a technical gate that blocks registration. What changes is how much of the exam content feels new as against review, not whether you are allowed to sit for it.
It helps to know where the two actually overlap. The overlap sits mostly in networking fundamentals, meaning IP addressing, common ports and protocols, and basic firewall placement, which show up in both exams from different angles. Network+ tests them directly. Security+ assumes you can read them and then asks what to do when they are attacked or misconfigured, which is most of the Security Architecture domain. Taking Network+ first does not just save time, it changes what you are doing in your Security+ study sessions, from learning a concept to applying one you already have. What is genuinely unique to each is also worth knowing: Security+ owns risk management frameworks, incident response procedures, and governance and compliance content that Network+ never touches, while Network+ owns cabling standards, wireless standards and the structured troubleshooting methodology that Security+ simply assumes you have. Someone who takes Security+ with no networking background usually feels it hardest in Security Architecture and in the network-based attack scenarios under Threats, Vulnerabilities and Mitigations, where the questions assume you can picture the topology being described. Everything else in Security+ is learnable cold; those two areas punish unfamiliarity with the underlying network picture specifically.
If you want both eventually, you are in the majority. Most people who go deep into IT or security careers end up with both over time, plus additional certifications layered on top on the security track. The question is not really which one forever, it is which one moves you forward right now, so sequence them based on your current gaps rather than a general ranking you saw online. And if you are not sure yet which deserves your study hours first, you do not have to commit blind: CoStudy's Security+ and Network+ decks both give you the first ten questions free with no signup, so you can sit with the actual terminology from each exam and get a feel for which one matches where you already are before you buy a voucher for either.
A few questions come up repeatedly. Most candidates report Security+ as somewhat more conceptually demanding, partly because of the performance-based questions and the breadth of threat and attack terminology, though Network+ has its own dense areas, particularly subnetting and troubleshooting scenarios, so harder depends on your existing strengths. Having Network+ generally does help you pass Security+ faster, especially for the Security Architecture domain, since it reduces the amount of unfamiliar material you are learning at once. Security+ tends to appear more frequently in job postings today, largely because cybersecurity hiring has outpaced general networking hiring in recent years and because of its DoD 8140 recognition, though Network+ still shows up regularly for network administrator and network operations centre roles. Studying for both simultaneously is possible but not usually recommended, because treating them as one combined study block tends to blur retention rather than reinforce it, and finishing one before starting the other is more effective for most people. And employers do not care about the order you earned them in; they care whether you hold the relevant certification for the role you are applying to.
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