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 most valuable features are the automation with the different systems for the software development and the ability to provision switches in hours rather than days."
"We can implement customer requirements more quickly."
"We use Cisco ACI for perimeter security and threat detection."
"It's improved the static configuration of our data center switching environment. But it's added some challenges to our ability to operationalize it and make it easier for people to manage."
"The most important aspect of Cisco ACI in my opinion is the ease of management. Other solutions, like traditional solutions and pricier solutions—or even fabric and PAT—you have to do many configurations on a box-to-box basis, With Cisco ACI, you go on the AP and do some "next, next finish" installer."
"It improves security and automation."
"One significant attraction for clients in Iran is the robustness of multicast solutions, which has been a major driver for them to migrate to Cisco ACI."
"It provides flexibility, so you can install it everywhere."
"We have found the scalability to be good."
"In my experience, Meraki is very easy, simple, and clear to set up and use."
"Meraki SD-WAN is a very stable and scalable solution with good technical support."
"The solution is very stable."
"Meraki SD-WAN is user friendly."
"The Meraki SD-WAN solution is simple to deploy."
"The best feature we're using is the packet shaping."
"The solution is easy to use."
"The firewall has room for improvement because there is no central inspection yet on Cisco ACI."
"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."
"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."
"We had issues in the first deployment when we tried to finish the migration from traditional networking to Cisco ACI."
"It would be good if Cisco ACI had some cross-domain orchestrator that could rule all the pillars in the customer network or interconnect more easily with the compass environment."
"Before version 5, you could manage your firewall or load balancer from the AP. It was very basic and now they removed the whole features in the new version, so you cannot manage your load balance or firewall from your AP on L2, L4, and L7 services."
"It would be better to introduce some wizards to guide you through the whole configuration process instead of clicking through a bunch of menus with no concrete path. It is too easy to forget one or another if you configure it this way."
"Better troubleshooting features would be helpful. In ACI, it can be a big mess, a real headache to troubleshoot a single issue... The troubleshooting part, and the information that ACI gives you, sometimes don't give you a proper, inside picture of what's going on within the fabric."
"The blocklist on the Cisco Meraki side isn't complete or very large. We'd like to see them update and expand this."
"The integration with other tools must be improved."
"When there is an issue, I find it difficult to figure out what is going wrong because the logs do not provide as much information as solutions from HP."
"A run optimization feature is needed to reduce the bandwidth for any uploaded content."
"There is still some work to do when it comes to AI."
"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."
"Meraki is lagging behind in using a single pipe from service providers. That is, it would be good if they could use both the internet leased line and broadband connectivity."
"We'd like features that provide more transparency when there are issues. Right now, it's hard to get clarity on problems. We need more visibility."
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.
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