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."The operation and maintenance costs have been reduced. It is also simple to deploy any deployment. Any configuration can be easily done."
"I like features like policy control and micro-segmentation."
"It improves security and automation."
"We are doing automation from ACI and we have integration with Azure. With the Azure stack integration we can have total automation. We can configure the EPGs from there, and we can configure load balancing functionalities from there as well. The most useful feature is that you don't need to configure anything on ACI itself. You can configure on Azure and it will provision your application."
"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."
"We will improve our organization using the automation."
"It is easy to use because you have all the information coming from the same technology."
"The best part of Cisco ACI is the server deployment and integration."
"The most interesting feature is the amount of information you can get from overseeing the system from a centralized place."
"The most valuable feature is application performance monitoring and being able to browse packets dynamically based on priorities."
"This product has a simple configuration that can be accessed through a web interface or the API."
"The most valuable feature is application awareness."
"It is easy to monitor and manage."
"Meraki SD-WAN is scalable."
"Using Meraki just solves a lot of problems."
"They're known for their ease of use and ubiquitous management platform that covers everything. Meraki really excels in plug-and-play solutions. You just plug it up, and everything works. All of the components—the firewall/router, the switches, the access points, the cameras—work very nicely together, and they all can be managed from one platform. That is probably their biggest selling point. Everything comes in one ubiquitous package, and you don't have to manage different components from different platforms. You can see everything from one platform."
"We had issues in the first deployment when we tried to finish the migration from traditional networking to Cisco ACI."
"Cisco ACI would benefit by providing the option to integrate easily with DNAC in their next release."
"The error messages should be improved. Sometimes we want to remove an error message so we acknowledge an error and we would then like to remove it but there's no real way of doing that. If we need to do it, we need to open a tech case. That could use improvement."
"I think that technical support tickets should be escalated sooner."
"If I lose the connection from one side to the core, I can't use the other side to go to the core. I hope in the future, this will be fixed."
"More how-to videos and instructional information is required."
"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 product needs to be more visible on the Internet and have the ability to be integrated into more software developments."
"With Meraki, it's more of a basic connectivity. It doesn't have all the feature sets that a Cisco SD-WAN solution has. It's limited."
"They stopped doing WAN optimization as a feature set, which is lacking. They need to relook at that and consider WAN optimization as an option."
"From the vice perspective, they just are not as robust as some of the other vendors. They have limitations in throughput and the number of circuits that they can support on a wide area network. Their higher-end security is all cloud-based. They have some capability with the premise-based solutions, but the higher ends are all cloud-based, and that's via Cisco Umbrella."
"There is still some work to do when it comes to AI."
"I would like to see more functions added to the next release of Meraki SD-WAN."
"We have a lot of problems with distribution. The late deliveries likely have to do with the time it takes for the fabrication of components. It is a principal problem at this moment."
"Warm spare is a good failover solution but Meraki could do something more to handle failovers better."
"There could be more options for integration between other devices — sort of being able to more easily make everything integrated in one solution."
Cisco ACI is ranked 2nd in Software Defined Networking (SDN) with 96 reviews while Meraki SD-WAN is ranked 1st in Software Defined Networking (SDN) with 60 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, Nuage Networks, Akamai Guardicore Segmentation and Cumulus Networks, whereas Meraki SD-WAN is most compared with Cisco SD-WAN, VMware SD-WAN, Omada Cloud SDN, Cradlepoint NetCloud and Megaport. See our Cisco ACI vs. Meraki SD-WAN report.
See our list of best Software Defined Networking (SDN) vendors.
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