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.
"Overall, we've been very pleased with the performance."
"It provides private network access, helping us protect our company’s devices."
"The simplicity is great."
"The solution is stable."
"The solution is pretty generic and easy to use."
"The artificial intelligence feature is very good."
"The most valuable feature of the solution is Marvis, the AI-driven network management system."
"The most useful feature of Juniper Wireless AP is the reporting Marvis."
"The solution provides good coverage and identity management. Additionally, the user interface is straightforward."
"The ability to manage it remotely is the most valuable. If it has an internet connection, you can get to it. It is a great product for remote clinics. We kind of thought about doing this kind of standalone technology. Meraki is easy to manage. From a management perspective, it is the easiest to use, especially in the cloud. I like Meraki. I even have it in my home."
"The flexibility, since it's a cloud service, is the most valuable feature of this solution."
"The solution is very stable. It is a very manageable and secure system."
"It is more robust for me to deploy networks. And because of the field we are in where offices open up and others close, it helps my turnaround time to deploy these networks for the customers."
"Multiple access ID capabilities, meshing, and the quality of the product itself are all valuable features."
"Its ability to be cloud-managed is the most valuable feature so if there's a reconfiguration or an issue, we have excellent visibility into the network and we can usually resolve the problem online without having to go onsite."
"The primary value lies in the ease of configuration; these products seamlessly integrate, and work well together."
"The most valuable features of this solution are the Cisco CleanAir and Cisco RRM."
"Good connectivity and easy to configure."
"The integration is great."
"Cisco Wireless is one of the more stable products so their products are scalable."
"The product’s stability is great."
"The tool is mainly improving our productivity."
"The most valuable features of Cisco Wireless are the level of control and management. I am happy with it."
"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."
"Improvement is needed in the user-friendliness of Juniper Mist, particularly in enhancing the interaction with AI features."
"The pricing is very high in the Indian market."
"There is room for improvement in terms of support and installation."
"If you want to do more specific stuff, it's a bit limited."
"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."
"The product should include adaptive Wi-Fi to show a more accurate location."
"The price could be better."
"The pricing should be made cheaper."
"Initially, I liked some of the filtering features, but that's one of the components that we ran into problems with."
"An area for improvement would be that Meraki doesn't work well in a warehouse environment. The device is too sensitive to other wireless devices, which provokes noise and can require a reboot to erase this."
"I would like to see Cisco Meraki improve the accessibility by region level here in Latin America."
"There is a processing limitation when you have multiple SSIDs, above three or four."
"The solution could be cheaper."
"It could be slightly cheaper but it's fine."
"It would be useful to have a service management platform integrated within this solution where we can measure the customer experience."
"The cost of the devices and the solution itself could be more competitive."
"Cisco won't work with any other vendors. That is a significant problem with Cisco."
"It should be fully compatible with other devices."
"Their software's really clunky."
"The media stream and Mojo settings are not sufficiently supported."
"The GUI could be made more user-friendly. There should also be a dashboard where it can showcase how many end-users are connected to a particular access point."
"If they could offer better coverage, we'd be much happier."
"There is no technology without room for improvement. The main setback with Cisco solutions, not only with Cisco Wireless, is having to update the OS manually. We are now migrating to Miraki, so we've been able to work that out."
"It requires a few tweaks in order to stabilize it. Its portal is complex. Cisco solutions are complex in general."
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 146 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.