We performed a comparison between Aruba Switches and NETGEAR Switches based on real PeerSpot user reviews.
Find out in this report how the two Ethernet Switches solutions compare in terms of features, pricing, service and support, easy of deployment, and ROI."I find the most valuable feature is it is part of the Aruba family."
"Aruba Central is very valuable to us."
"The most valuable aspect for our organization is the CX. It's wonderful."
"We like that it is very easy to manage the product through the cloud."
"The solution is scalable."
"With Aruba, I like its stability and lifetime warranty."
"The solution is very stable."
"When it comes to basic L2 switching, we've found that Aruba switches are very user-friendly in terms of configuration and management. I haven't had the opportunity to utilize Aruba Central for managing the switches yet, so I can't speak to that aspect. However, overall, we've found the deployment process for Aruba switches to be very straightforward."
"Remote management is the most important thing for us. And monitoring, of course, allows us to see when something is wrong with a client. We get notified that an access point is down, for instance, or that there are too many clients on one access point, so that we can log into the portal and manage the solution with the client instantly, from either a laptop or a cell phone, with the Insight app."
"The most valuable feature to me is the modular side of things, being able to replace a module and a transceiver at our beck and call. If something goes down, or a piece of equipment is broken, I don't have to replace the whole switch. I can just replace the part that's broken or the part that is no longer working. I can get them back up and working within a matter of minutes, versus having to replace everything and reprogram everything. It's a huge time-saver."
"The ease of use of these switches is very good because of the Cisco CLI. If you are familiar with CLI, then you can configure the switch that way. It also has a relatively straightforward web interface. Using the web interface is good for beginners or people who aren't familiar with Cisco CLI. However, having a common command line interface method is great for some of our more advanced guys who are familiar with it."
"The most important feature is the failover, the LACP links. That's the dual set it allows. We have redundant core switches and, if one fails or one network adapter fails, the other one can take over without problems."
"Since it has a web interface, it is easy to set up. You don't have to take three years of training somewhere for a lot of money."
"It's nice, if there is an issue, to be able to go in through the remote. The fact that the remote doesn't require a static IP... is nice. They initiate the contact to the outside world, without requiring a static to get in."
"Netgear switches are highly reliable. We haven't done anything particularly sophisticated with them."
"The most valuable feature is definitely the fully functional IGMP snooping and querier, out-of-the-box, that the switch provides. With most if not all switches that we've worked with previously, at a minimum you have to enable a couple of different options... It's really a good feature to have that stuff enabled and fully functional out-of-the-box so that [AV techs] don't have to worry about configuring any of that stuff."
"It would be better and easier for us to buy if the price were reduced."
"In my opinion, Aruba's new features, like the new firmware, need to be improved."
"The main issue we had with the Aruba Switches was that they would heat up easily when placed outside. We have two locations with no cover in the corridor and it's a historical building. We experienced outages on the first batch of Aruba Switches we received, which we never had with the Dell Switches, for example, even though Dell Switches are not as well-known. However, the Dell Switches had been outside for a few years and we never had any issues with them. In contrast, we encountered an issue with the Aruba Switch after only one week of being outside when it shut down in security mode."
"My experience with Aruba's account manager hasn't been the greatest."
"This solution could be improved if it offered long term support on a specific model or product."
"There is room for improvement in the customer service and support team."
"The written documentation, all the available documentation, is often a little bit hard to find. The solution lacks documentation, especially on recent features. We have access directly to Aruba, Germany, so they are always helpful, but if you start, for instance, with something a little bit more complex like zero-touch provisioning, that would require a more comprehensive written piece."
"It's an expensive product."
"My one issue with it is that not all the features of the switch can currently be managed via the portal. For some of the more advanced features, you still have to configure the switch."
"The M4250 switches needs more SFP models."
"There is a lack of documentation, and the documentation I have is unclear, so I have to rely on Google for information."
"The ‘how-to’ guides could do with some improvements. We got in trouble following the stacking and Dante set-up guides. If these would have been accurate, we would not have lost three days."
"I'd like to see a little bit of slowdown on the firmware updates. They've been doing a lot of them. I don't know if that's just because it's such a new product line, but the firmware updates have been a little annoying because they've been coming once a week. For a switch, that's a little extreme."
"The product could be more robust."
"Their old firmware was a problem for us and we're still working on it. It didn't apply correctly so it took about half of our switches offline, which meant we couldn't use some of the functionality like the firmware updates. Unfortunately with that firmware, which they've sorted out, if you don't go through all the firmware and make sure it's past that point and back online, that's an issue with them. It's something to cautious about"
"Centralized monitoring is there, but competitors like Cisco Prime are at a higher level of centralized monitoring."
Aruba Switches is ranked 2nd in Ethernet Switches with 70 reviews while NETGEAR Switches is ranked 4th in Ethernet Switches with 50 reviews. Aruba Switches is rated 8.4, while NETGEAR Switches is rated 8.2. The top reviewer of Aruba Switches writes "As a managed service provider, it's important to have a solution that can manage everything from one console". On the other hand, the top reviewer of NETGEAR Switches writes "You can stack different models of switches which makes the scalability great". Aruba Switches is most compared with Cisco Ethernet Switches, Fortinet FortiSwitch - Secure Access, Meraki MS Switches, Ubiquiti UniFi Switches and D-Link Ethernet Switches, whereas NETGEAR Switches is most compared with D-Link Ethernet Switches, Cisco Linksys Ethernet Switches, Ubiquiti UniFi Switches, Cisco Ethernet Switches and Cisco Catalyst Switches. See our Aruba Switches vs. NETGEAR Switches report.
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