We performed a comparison between Cisco Catalyst Switches and Juniper QFabric based on real PeerSpot user reviews.
Find out in this report how the two LAN Switching solutions compare in terms of features, pricing, service and support, easy of deployment, and ROI."Scalable product."
"All features are very strong. It is very easy to manage. It is also certified and popular. Cisco has come up with a new management console to manage the switches. I still haven't tried it, but in my opinion, this is the best way forward. You can use software to manage the switches instead of the common line configuration. You can manage it through software, which is very easy."
"These switches are flexible and user-friendly."
"There is a lot of improvement in the network segment after replacing the older switches. I have not seen any kind of issue with these switches since deployment. They are pretty much stable."
"They don't ever fail and they have a long service life."
"I never had downtime with Cisco Catalyst Switches in the last eight years, and I'm pretty impressed with its reliability."
"The scalability is excellent."
"I have found that the protocols that Cisco Catalyst Switches support are beneficial for my customers."
"QFabric supports redundancy and includes all of the enterprise and service provider features that customers would want in data center or service provider network."
"The solution is easy to use and has good performance."
"The 40 gig backbone InterConneX was valuable for our use case. It is even faster now. QFabric has spine-leaf technology or topology, which basically makes every single hop only one hop away in terms of connecting from one device to another. It is a pretty good and robust solution. It works pretty well in terms of scalability, and their technical support is amazing."
"Juniper QFabric has various advantages including scalability, simplicity, performance, and flexibility."
"The vendor maintains the product well."
"It is known for being agile, flexible, and cost-effective when working with various vendors."
"It's user-friendly."
"The solution is stable."
"They should also have a graphic interface for the switches too without the command line."
"An area for improvement would be the documentation and training on configuring this product."
"Cisco needs to improve compatibility with other solutions and other vendors like SolarWinds. We've had problems using Catalyst with SolarWinds. Some devices can't be put on SolarWinds due to some ID Values and so on."
"The solution is expensive."
"Any improvements that they make should be in the wireless area of the product."
"If we have a major problem, fixing it takes two or three days and six to eight engineers from Cisco. When they escalate a ticket, it goes through too many levels. Every time the issue is passed along to a new person at Cisco support, they ask the same questions repeatedly."
"Its initial setup can be simpler, and it would be great if we can work with a reference architecture. Cisco has the capability to provide a very integrated solution. They have DNA Center, Cisco ISE, Cisco Prime, FMC, and AMP. We are looking at all the products, but it is rather complex to pick out the right licenses that you need. The license structure is a bit complex. Sometimes, there is an overlap in products, which does not really make sense. For example, you have DNA Center and Cisco Prime, and it is not really clear what you would use for what exactly. There is a lot of information on the Cisco website, but it takes a while to go through all this and look at the presentations that are available from Cisco Live. These presentations are appreciated, but sometimes, they are a bit too much like bullet points. You don't exactly know what's behind it, so you have to do a second guess. Overall, there is a lot of information but not always to the point."
"It is kind of expensive."
"The pricing structure could be more budget-friendly."
"The disruptive upgrade was an issue for us."
"They are working on the virtualization of the actual fabric layer. They are moving away from the original spine-leaf design to a different infrastructure. Instead of having three tiers, which was the director of the interconnected nodes, they cut them back, and they still have that kind of structure."
"It works too much on rebooting and there is some memory leakage."
"Having support for all OpenFlow versions would be beneficial."
"The stability needs to be improved."
"I do not use GUI's very much for switch stacks. I am always in the CLI. However, I do know that Juniper in the past has lacked on their GUI's, but they have been working on it."
"It would be nice if Juniper provided the system integrator with training, similar to that of Cisco."
Cisco Catalyst Switches is ranked 1st in LAN Switching with 166 reviews while Juniper QFabric is ranked 10th in LAN Switching with 9 reviews. Cisco Catalyst Switches is rated 8.6, while Juniper QFabric is rated 8.8. The top reviewer of Cisco Catalyst Switches writes "Reliable and stable catalyst switch; can be easily installed". On the other hand, the top reviewer of Juniper QFabric writes "Performs well, is easy to set up, and the vendor maintains the product well". Cisco Catalyst Switches is most compared with Arista Networks Platform, Dell PowerConnect Switches, HPE ProCurve, Cisco Nexus and ExtremeSwitching, whereas Juniper QFabric is most compared with Cisco Nexus and Cisco FabricPath. See our Cisco Catalyst Switches vs. Juniper QFabric report.
See our list of best LAN Switching vendors.
We monitor all LAN Switching 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.