We compared Cato Networks and Cisco SD-WAN across several parameters based on our users' reviews. After reading the collected data, you can find our conclusion below:
Features: Cato Networks provides useful features like continuous VPN, web filtering, and antivirus capabilities. Users appreciate its simplicity and efficiency. Cisco SD-WAN is praised for its service quality, real-time traffic visibility, and automation capabilities.
Room for Improvement: Cato Networks could enhance its security measures by incorporating a web application firewall feature and improving intrusion detection. Cisco SD-WAN should enhance its connectivity to prominent cloud providers and incorporate additional security features.
Ease of Deployment: Users have found the initial setup process for Cato Networks to be straightforward, and it takes only a short time. Cisco SD-WAN can be more complicated and may require expert help. While some users found it to be easy, others encountered difficulties and uncertainty during the setup.
Service and Support: Cato Networks' customer service is commended for its prompt and involved assistance during implementation. Some reported occasional issues with support consistency and internal communication. While some Cisco SD customers found the support to be outstanding, others encounter delays and challenges in connecting with the appropriate personnel.
Pricing: Cato Networks offers flexible pricing based on bandwidth and socket type, while Cisco SD-WAN has received mixed feedback regarding its cost. Cato Networks is regarded as competitively priced and affordable, whereas Cisco SD-WAN is perceived as pricier compared to its rivals.
ROI: Cato Networks provides noticeable cost savings and efficiency improvements within a year, resulting in a positive return on investment. Cisco SD-WAN offers flexibility and scalability, leading to long-term benefits and cost reduction.
Comparison Results: Cato Networks offers valuable features like always-on VPN and web filtering. However, it lacks advanced networking capabilities and a web application firewall. The pricing is reasonable but slightly higher compared to some competitors. Cisco SD-WAN is a highly scalable solution with a comprehensive feature set and scalability, but it requires improvements in stability and native connectivity to cloud providers.
"The visibility control and security aspects are amazing."
"Cato offers all the functionality found in other solution. The life cycle management is always very stable."
"What I found most helpful in Cato Networks is that it works out of the box. One of its main advantages is that it's a simple product to deploy. You subscribe, and you're ready to run."
"The most valuable feature is that it also works as a next-gen firewall because it has security features."
"The feature that I find to be the most valuable is the bandwidth aggregation."
"It's a cloud-based solution that integrates well with everything."
"The solution is stable."
"The scalability is quite good."
"The solution can scale. We haven't had any issues doing so."
"It's a complete solution with many security features."
"The most useful feature for our organization is the combination of on-prem and cloud-based deployments. We connect securely to our hybrid cloud using transit VPCs and cloud on-ramp for fast deployments."
"Encryption, which is native to the solution, is a valuable feature. Also, central management, onboarding of devices, QS, and routing applications are all okay."
"Cisco is an industry leader, so customers have a high level of trust with the brand more-so than with some newcomers that might have some more revolutionary solutions, but no name recognition."
"Cisco SD-WAN has separate OMP routing."
"You get security, all of the service you need, and it's easy to deploy."
"You can easily scale the product."
"We would like the product to continue to improve its security."
"A little tweaking or improvement of the UI in terms of logging when troubleshooting would be an improvement because it's very detailed."
"Its functionality is a bit limited in some areas as compared to a Cisco solution. It is not as granular. It doesn't have the manageability, feature set, and capabilities of a larger or an enterprise-level solution. It just needs a more robust feature set and granularity."
"Modifying or incorporating Cato Network to work with a third-party platform, such as Microsoft, or other Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) offerings would be beneficial. Having more integration partners would help the users implement the solution."
"They can't do one-to-one NAT (Network Address Translation) in AP (their access point), and that is something that Palo Alto can do."
"Cato Networks security could be better."
"The different languages in the user interface should be enhanced."
"Web application firewalling (WAF) is a feature we would like to have in this solution and does not exist yet."
"The security features could be improved."
"The whole solution needs to be re-imagined. It's quite complex right now and really needs to be simplified to make it easier for those of us using it. It should offer more simplified management as well."
"The process of onboarding the vSmart, vBond, and vManage should be improved to make it easier to manage in general."
"This solution should include a fully functional firewall at no extra charge."
"It is the best solution that I ever had, but there might be something better than this in the future."
"It would be better if it provided more visibility. At present, we can't troubleshoot in real time."
"One of the major areas that Cisco can improve on with their SD-WAN offering is their security features. When compared with Fortinet, who have what they call their 'security pillars' (e.g. firewall and security features built-in to their SD-WAN solutions), Cisco generally comes up short. With Cisco, if you need a security component, you have to pay more to get it done. So if they could add more security features that come part and parcel with their existing solutions, then I think Cisco could be very aggressive in the market."
"The initial setup is complex and can be improved."
Cato SASE Cloud Platform is ranked 5th in Software Defined WAN (SD-WAN) Solutions with 21 reviews while Cisco SD-WAN is ranked 1st in Software Defined WAN (SD-WAN) Solutions with 86 reviews. Cato SASE Cloud Platform is rated 8.8, while Cisco SD-WAN is rated 8.0. The top reviewer of Cato SASE Cloud Platform writes "Useful remote worker VPN, centralized management, and simple on-boarding process". On the other hand, the top reviewer of Cisco SD-WAN writes "A solution for integrating services to enhance up-time, performance and lower costs". Cato SASE Cloud Platform is most compared with Zscaler Zero Trust Exchange, Prisma Access by Palo Alto Networks, Fortinet FortiGate, VMware SD-WAN and Cisco Umbrella, whereas Cisco SD-WAN is most compared with Fortinet FortiGate, Meraki SD-WAN, VMware SD-WAN, Juniper Session Smart Router and Aruba EdgeConnect SD-WAN Platform. See our Cato SASE Cloud Platform vs. Cisco SD-WAN report.
See our list of best Software Defined WAN (SD-WAN) Solutions vendors and best WAN Edge vendors.
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