We performed a comparison between Cisco ACI and Meraki SD-WAN based on real PeerSpot user reviews.
Find out in this report how the two Software Defined Networking (SDN) solutions compare in terms of features, pricing, service and support, easy of deployment, and ROI."It improves security and automation."
"Cisco's technical support team is very good."
"The most valuable feature is the unified fabric."
"The most valuable features are the ease of setup for redundancy, as well as centralized control."
"In legacy networks, managing changes requires individual tickets for each device. ACI's single pane of glass management through APIC is a big advantage. So, single-tenant management is a plus."
"ACI's most valuable feature is sizing - you can easily find the sizing of the data, which means the data speed, CPU, and virtualization can be determined."
"ACI's most valuable feature is its SDN capabilities. Everything is on your software design controller. Everything is blocked by default until you allow it."
"It is easy to use because you have all the information coming from the same technology."
"It is easy to monitor and manage."
"SD-WAN is a complete enterprise solution for securing traffic."
"Meraki SD-WAN is stable and the performance is good."
"I appreciate the cloud-based management feature the most. It's a crucial aspect for me because it allows me to manage the configuration remotely without having to visit the on-premise location. The ability to do this from my home is a major benefit. Additionally, security is good."
"We have found the scalability to be good."
"The solution has many features available."
"The most valuable features of this solution are load balancing and the security possibilities you have."
"In my experience, Meraki is very easy, simple, and clear to set up and use."
"Before version 5, you could manage your firewall or load balancer from the AP. It was very basic and now they removed the whole features in the new version, so you cannot manage your load balance or firewall from your AP on L2, L4, and L7 services."
"I would like to see a lot more integrations with the rest of the Cisco portfolio."
"The first setup was difficult because it is a very different discipline than other traditional network deployments. The terminology is very different, so the first time can be difficult."
"Cisco ACI is a highly complex solution. The initial deployment is just a few clicks, but understanding how an ACI works and interacts with routing, switching, and virtualization takes a lot of knowledge. The interface isn't necessarily hard to use, but the technology is complicated. If you want to understand how it works and how to configure it, you should study hard."
"The interface is sometimes slow. I receive a lot of weird errors when I try to install apps, such as contract apps, which should give me a nice visualization of all the contracts. However, it just doesn't load, etc."
"It needs more features for integrating with third-party vendors."
"They should make it easier for the network people to do automated solutions."
"The product needs to be more visible on the Internet and have the ability to be integrated into more software developments."
"Meraki offers the client basic security, it is not the same as what FortiGate is offering."
"There could be more options for integration between other devices — sort of being able to more easily make everything integrated in one solution."
"Meraki could make better use of virtual connect."
"I'm not too familiar with the Meraki environment, but I suppose more automation is always a good thing."
"Meraki is lagging behind in using a single pipe from service providers. That is, it would be good if they could use both the internet leased line and broadband connectivity."
"There is a point in a very large organization where you hit the VPN limit, or tunnel limit."
"The port density should be improved because this solution is limited to two."
"An area for improvement would be to add 4G bonding and allow Meraki devices to support dual 4G SIM cards."
Cisco ACI is ranked 2nd in Software Defined Networking (SDN) with 97 reviews while Meraki SD-WAN is ranked 1st in Software Defined Networking (SDN) with 61 reviews. Cisco ACI is rated 8.0, while Meraki SD-WAN is rated 8.2. The top reviewer of Cisco ACI writes "Stable, easy to extend, scalable, and has a host-based routing feature". On the other hand, the top reviewer of Meraki SD-WAN writes "Very stable security, great service, and the best for VPN management". Cisco ACI is most compared with VMware NSX, Cisco Secure Workload, Akamai Guardicore Segmentation, Nuage Networks and Cumulus Networks, whereas Meraki SD-WAN is most compared with Cisco SD-WAN, VMware SD-WAN, Omada Cloud SDN, Cradlepoint NetCloud and Citrix SD-WAN. See our Cisco ACI vs. Meraki SD-WAN report.
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