We performed a comparison between Cisco Catalyst Switches and NETGEAR Switches 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."Catalyst switches are highly stable and easy to use. It's a technology well known by most engineers."
"One of the most valuable features is the MatchBox Switch."
"It uses many protocols to ease operations, such as CDP and the interoperability of other Cisco products."
"One main feature with Cisco is you know you are going to get a very good switching infrastructure that is secure."
"In terms of technology, Cisco is the leader in everything. I'd rather buy a second-hand Cisco switch than a brand new switch from a competitor. They're that reliable and resilient."
"One good feature is UPOE. Another is having a built-in controller, the customer doesn't have to ask for another controller. For example, you get a built-in controller with the C650. And two-port is one of the premium factors from Cisco."
"They don't ever fail and they have a long service life."
"The platform significantly improved our organization by addressing latency issues in our network."
"The most valuable feature is the fact that Insight is cloud-managed. The whole reason behind it is that there is one central place to manage it. You can pre-configure everything and you can get access to it without having to get onto the client's network. That makes it easy to use and deploy."
"The ease of use of these switches is very good because of the Cisco CLI. If you are familiar with CLI, then you can configure the switch that way. It also has a relatively straightforward web interface. Using the web interface is good for beginners or people who aren't familiar with Cisco CLI. However, having a common command line interface method is great for some of our more advanced guys who are familiar with it."
"The most valuable feature to me is the modular side of things, being able to replace a module and a transceiver at our beck and call. If something goes down, or a piece of equipment is broken, I don't have to replace the whole switch. I can just replace the part that's broken or the part that is no longer working. I can get them back up and working within a matter of minutes, versus having to replace everything and reprogram everything. It's a huge time-saver."
"The solution is simple to use. I am also impressed with the tool's GUI and CLI."
"This is a cost-effective solution."
"Comes preconfigured and designed specifically for AV."
"The solution is reliable and it is easy to setup."
"Netgear switches are highly reliable. We haven't done anything particularly sophisticated with them."
"Cisco Catalyst Switches' pricing can be cheaper."
"It is not easy for everyone to configure the product's initial setup part, making it an area where improvements are required."
"The GUI should be addressed."
"Cisco has to lower the price of its products to make them more cost-effective."
"It can have more security features to secure the access layer."
"I would like to see a graphical user interface for the configuration."
"The licensing process could be a bit less complex."
"The licensing process should be back to how it was before. Now, you have to register online, and it makes staging a bit trickier."
"The management of them, itself, is not so good. You have to go between many different browsers, even some super-old browsers, to be able to do it. That is a super pain."
"The M4250 switches needs more SFP models."
"The ‘how-to’ guides could do with some improvements. We got in trouble following the stacking and Dante set-up guides. If these would have been accurate, we would not have lost three days."
"Centralized monitoring is there, but competitors like Cisco Prime are at a higher level of centralized monitoring."
"The product could be more robust."
"One thing I would like to see improved is the response time for technical support."
"The tool needs to improve its network management. The tool can be also more simplified."
"I'd like to see a little bit of slowdown on the firmware updates. They've been doing a lot of them. I don't know if that's just because it's such a new product line, but the firmware updates have been a little annoying because they've been coming once a week. For a switch, that's a little extreme."
Cisco Catalyst Switches is ranked 1st in LAN Switching with 170 reviews while NETGEAR Switches is ranked 5th in LAN Switching with 50 reviews. Cisco Catalyst Switches is rated 8.6, while NETGEAR Switches is rated 8.2. 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 NETGEAR Switches writes "You can stack different models of switches which makes the scalability great". Cisco Catalyst Switches is most compared with Arista Networks Platform, Dell PowerConnect Switches, Cisco Nexus, HPE ProCurve and Alcatel-Lucent OmniSwitch LAN Switches, whereas NETGEAR Switches is most compared with D-Link Ethernet Switches, Cisco Linksys Ethernet Switches, Cisco Ethernet Switches, Ubiquiti UniFi Switches and Meraki MS Switches. See our Cisco Catalyst Switches vs. NETGEAR Switches report.
See our list of best LAN Switching vendors and best AV Over IP Switching vendors.
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