We performed a comparison between Cisco Meraki Wireless LAN and Cisco Wireless based on our users’ reviews in five categories. After reading all of the collected data, you can find our conclusion below.
Comparison Results: While Cisco users across the board feel that both products are very expensive and provide very good customer service and support, users reported a better ROI from Cisco Meraki Wireless LAN.
"You can easily monitor, manage, and cover all your IT equipment."
"In terms of reporting, in terms of all the user reports, it's very rich."
"The AI capabilities of Mist Wireless are superior to other OEMs."
"The solution is very secure."
"It provides private network access, helping us protect our company’s devices."
"The most valuable feature of the solution is Marvis, the AI-driven network management system."
"The simplicity is great."
"Juniper Mist offers valuable features like comprehensive network insight, granular policy control, fast device setup, strong security, and efficient SSL traffic management."
"The initial setup of Cisco Meraki Wireless LAN was very easy."
"The functionalities are quite professional and complete. It offers good integration with other Meraki products, like switches and the firewall. You can get an overview of all networks and the host. It's really great; nobody else can do that."
"You can scale the solution easily."
"It is cloud-based. You can manage it remotely from anywhere in the world, and you don't have to be on-site, which is a very big advantage."
"It's a stable product."
"We can deploy it and check in on our customers without having an on-site connection or an on-site infrastructure for elderly customers."
"Cisco Meraki is HIPAA compliant."
"Integrating with the router, firewall, and Wireless Controller is advantageous."
"This product has a long life and you don't have any issues with it."
"Its stability is most valuable."
"The initial setup is easy. It's fairly quick to deploy."
"Cisco's technical support is very good, I've never had an issue with their technical support."
"This product has a Clean Air Solution, which means it can detect non-WiFi signals. It not only signals but it can also detect that what type of device it is coming from. And if it needs to change the channel in order to avoid that unwanted signal, it can do so and that way the client machine will have better performance."
"The speed and security are most valuable."
"I'm very satisfied with Cisco's technical support."
"Wireless connectivity is the main feature. It is also securely integrated with ISE, which is valuable because, in the banking industry, we also cover the security aspect. This Wi-Fi controller integrates with the ISE system that we have. Every user that comes on the wireless needs to log in with the domain. If they don't, it will not allow the user to join the network. This is the key feature of this solution."
"The solution is expensive."
"The product should include adaptive Wi-Fi to show a more accurate location."
"Juniper Wireless Access Points (AP Series) could improve if the MIST platform had a built-in master key. This would be an advantage."
"Enrolling into the tool is a tedious process."
"The price could be better."
"It would be helpful to have even stronger security features to help protect against interference from other nearby access points that aren't part of our network."
"I need a bit more time with it before criticizing the features."
"The pricing is very high in the Indian market."
"If there are advanced features that you can have enabled, they should allow users access to that in an easier manner."
"The integration options with third-party applications need enhancement."
"It lags a bit in providing reports for Wi-Fi performance."
"There could be more functionality."
"The technical support from Cisco is good, but they can improve themselves in some areas. Sometimes it takes a while to provide a solution or an answer to our problem."
"I would like to see Cisco Meraki improve the accessibility by region level here in Latin America."
"We would like the solution to work on the pricing of the solution. It would be ideal if it could bring the overall costs down."
"The user interface needs to be improved."
"Its licensing model and cost should be improved."
"There are performance issues, particularly with video calls where throughput is not great."
"I wouldn't mind if Cisco allowed their premiere devices to be able to have that cloud-based support as well, or cloud-based management."
"No product can be a ten out of ten and there are some security issues."
"They are a pretty expensive option."
"The pricing of Brazil is very expensive. When you look at other options, they are much cheaper."
"Before deploying a wireless solution, you have to read and plan every role, every windows system, put in your access point, and then make the audit. This solution is not the best one to do this. We use another solution that is called Eko. In the future, if this solution could have better auditing capabilities it would be better."
"The price of Cisco Wireless could be lower."
More Juniper Mist Wireless Access Points Pricing and Cost Advice →
Cisco Meraki Wireless LAN is ranked 4th in Wireless LAN with 115 reviews while Cisco Wireless is ranked 2nd in Wireless LAN with 147 reviews. Cisco Meraki Wireless LAN is rated 8.2, while Cisco Wireless is rated 8.2. The top reviewer of Cisco Meraki Wireless LAN writes "Offers good mobility, stability and scalability ". On the other hand, the top reviewer of Cisco Wireless writes "Allows us to deploy a wide range of wireless products with stable WiFi". Cisco Meraki Wireless LAN is most compared with Aruba Wireless, Ruckus Wireless, Ubiquiti Wireless, Mist AI and Cloud and Huawei Wireless, whereas Cisco Wireless is most compared with Aruba Wireless, Ruckus Wireless, Ubiquiti WLAN, Mist AI and Cloud and Omada Access Points. See our Cisco Meraki Wireless LAN vs. Cisco Wireless report.
See our list of best Wireless LAN vendors.
We monitor all Wireless LAN reviews to prevent fraudulent reviews and keep review quality high. We do not post reviews by company employees or direct competitors. We validate each review for authenticity via cross-reference with LinkedIn, and personal follow-up with the reviewer when necessary.
Cisco Wireless is very robust, very rugged, and can handle indoor and outdoor coverage extremely well. We found it to be very reliable and to consistently run very efficiently. Cisco Wireless helped us get more network access to more people wirelessly across some very large spaces.
It is expensive, though. The Cisco Wireless portal, like many Cisco products, can be very complex. The flexibility of the controllers needs fixing and Cisco Wireless requires a bit of tweaking to get the stability right. We would also like to see the reporting improved - this would help make troubleshooting easier.
Cisco Meraki Wireless LAN is very user-friendly. You don’t have to be a wireless engineer to set it up. Cisco Meraki Wireless LAN is cloud-based, which is very convenient as you don’t have to have a physical controller, saving valuable space, power, and redundancy. This solution offers advanced configurations that are a great fit for small to medium-sized businesses that can’t employ an advanced tech team. Cisco Meraki Wireless LAN is high-performance, stable, scalable, and very easy to deploy, and offers a dashboard that makes managing the solution very easy.
Some of the built-in capabilities and filtering with Cisco Meraki Wireless LAN needs to be made easier to use. Cisco Meraki Wireless LAN needs to better identify devices, and the TAC reading and interpretation capabilities are not always accurate. There are also some processing limitations when you have multiple SSIDs.
Conclusion
As these are both Cisco products, they offer brand recognition you can trust, great quality, and good durability.
We found that Cisco Wireless offered slightly better access points and improved coverage, allowing the creation of better networks. Cisco Wireless takes a one-time payment for the hardware, and then annual payments. If you employ Cisco’s knowledgeable team members, this will be a good fit for you.
The huge selling point for Cisco Meraki Wireless LAN is its ease of use. You don’t need to have a lot of knowledge to deploy or manage processes, which makes this a great product for smaller businesses with a less tech-savvy team.
The standard answer to such a question is: it depends.
The pricing for both solutions is very similar: per-AP, Meraki is more expensive than Cisco Wireless. Cisco APs are cheaper, but the controller raises the solution price to be almost equal to Meraki.
Meraki is subscription-based and requires constant internet access to manage the system. If the annual license expires, the APs will work, but you can't manage them or read reports of the Meraki portal.
Cisco Wireless is a one-time payment for the hardware with annual support payments. if you have a small office with only a few APs needed, you can use the Cisco Mobility Express Controller (which uses one of the APs or a Catalyst Switch as the controller) but that has a limit of 100 APs.