Meraki Dashboard vs SolarWinds NPM comparison

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Comparison Buyer's Guide
Executive Summary
Updated on Jul 29, 2023

We compared Meraki Dashboard and SolarWinds NPM across several parameters based on our users' reviews. After reading the collected data, you can find our conclusion below:

  • Features: Meraki Dashboard users like its centralized console, cable testing, firmware updates, and group policy features. The solution is also praised as user-friendly, stable, and scalable. SolarWinds NPM is commended for its adaptability and extensive network surveillance functionalities.

  • Room for Improvement: Users say Meraki Dashboard could improve its client VPN, hardware discovery, and integration with external solutions, Some users mentioned a need for more comprehensive documentation and granular control. SolarWinds NPM needs improvement in edge computing capabilities and data reporting. Users also said the performance could be better and that they would like to see expanded IPAM functionality.

  • Service and Support: Meraki Dashboard's customer service receives mixed feedback. Some users spoke fondly of the technical support they received, while others expressed frustration over long wait times and had a hard time finding the right person to help them. While some customers described SolarWinds support as helpful and responsive, others reported delayed responses.

  • Ease of Deployment: Users said Meraki Dashboard was effortless and intuitive to set up, noting that features like templates and configuration cloning saved time during deployment. Some users said SolarWinds NPM was straightforward to set up, while others perceived it as complex.

  • Pricing: Opinions on Meraki Dashboard's pricing varied, with some users finding it pricey and others deeming it fair. The cost of SolarWinds NPM varies depending on the customer’s size and requirements. Some users find it costly.

  • ROI: Meraki Dashboard simplifies IT operations, and some users expect returns within a few years. Some users reported immediate benefits from using SolarWinds NPM in terms of security and business outcomes, while others have not.

Comparison Results: Meraki Dashboard is a scalable, user-friendly solution with a smooth, painless setup made easy by built-in templates and features like configuration cloning. However, some users complained that the solution is too expensive and needs better integration with non-Cisco platforms. SolarWinds NPM is a customizable solution that’s easy to deploy and features comprehensive network monitoring capabilities. However, some users consider it costly and voiced concerns about technical support and user experience.

To learn more, read our detailed Meraki Dashboard vs. SolarWinds NPM Report (Updated: March 2024).
765,234 professionals have used our research since 2012.
Featured Review
Quotes From Members
We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use.
Here are some excerpts of what they said:
Pros
"We can manage the entire system across the network and troubleshoot the pain points."

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"The ability to view the entire project stack, including the camera, features, and routers, which I believe are the most important or relevant components.""There are some whitelist blacklist capabilities in the MX dashboard, which is very helpful.""Meraki Dashboard centralizes control of all our equipment into one cloud-based console, so we can manage it from anywhere. We can resolve problems remotely outside of business hours because it is on the cloud. You can use the dashboard to change security settings or configure routers and switches.""We've been spending a lot less time on tickets and deployments, so we have more time to do other things.""It is a reliable product. It provides a lot of information that is easy to read.""An excellent dashboard that is currently unique in covering both SD-WAN and SD-LAN with built-in security.""Scalability is one of Meraki Dashboard's strongest features. We have thousands of users if we're counting the end-users on our clients' network, but we have hundreds of clients.""The most valuable feature is their support, they get better every day."

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"All the features are very good. The monitoring of the equipment, the configuration manager, and the IP address monitoring are great.""The product is scalable.""SolarWinds NPM provides an overview of network monitoring, extending its capabilities to cover other aspects, such as virtual machines and servers. The platform has features like NetPath, which is particularly beneficial for end-users, offering insights into issues like latency, packet loss, and connectivity problems with routers, switches, or servers.""It is very extensible with 'SWQL' and APIs to where we are beginning to integrate it with network automation.""We can proactively fix historical issues, so we won't face those problems in future.""It is considerably cheaper compared to other tools.""It's a very good tool and a very stable tool.""I found a lot of valuable features in SolarWinds NPM, such as the customized application monitoring that allows you to customize any monitoring and script customization, and you also have the option to deploy and upgrade SolarWinds NPM online, which is very useful for my organization."

More SolarWinds NPM Pros →

Cons
"The Wi-Fi side needs improvement."

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"You can't really clone or replicate a device, that sort of feature would be useful. You can clone the site but you cannot clone the device.""What we would like from the IT perspective is a lot more granular control, more visibility into the packets, into the routing, and things of that nature.""What needs improvement in Meraki Dashboard is its configuration. It'll also be better if the tool has more functionality, and that is what I'd like to see in its next release.""There is a bit of a problem when you try to log in and you don't have a fixed IP address. If you're granting access, you need to log in by using the IP address. If your administrator's IP address is not a fixed IP address and it has changed, you might need to update the changed IP address in the interface. For this, you need to log in to the interface to update the IP address. This issue might not have so much to do with Meraki interface.""For my purposes, I don't need to see any other features added to the Meraki Dashboard. I have no criticisms and I do like the tool. If I had a criticism for it, it would be about the pricing because it could be a little less, but again, for the service that you get, I won't complain about that too much.""Meraki Dashboard's pricing could be improved.""They can improve the landing page in Meraki Dashboard. When I go into an organization, they can include a lot more infographics. They can also simplify it a bit and consolidate it. For example, if I've got five branches and I go into customer A's profile or organization, I'd like to see an infographic on the landing page providing a snippet of the entire network layout, that is, all branches in one snapshot. From there, I would like to go into the network that I want to work on or view.""The wait time to speak with a Meraki support engineer is always long, but they get the job done."

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"The console could be more user-friendly. It would be better if SolarWinds updated the user interface.""Application Performance Monitoring should be included in this solution.""The price of the solution can be improved.""It would be nice to have a test to check if you can access a particular device via API without installing it and waiting for a poll cycle. You should have the capacity to initiate a test to see if it was reachable and get the results almost immediately.""An area for improvement in SolarWinds NPM is the short retention period. Currently, it's just for seven days of data, which is very low, making it hard for my organization to keep that data. SolarWinds recommended a seven-day retention period, but my organization needs a fourteen-day data retention period. Hence, I'd like an increase in the retention period or the database limit in SolarWinds NPM because you can't go back to the data for any investigation if seven days have passed. Another area for improvement in SolarWinds NPM is the database, which needs to be a bit more mature. I want a modified database in the next release of SolarWinds NPM. I'd also like more options added to groups because, currently, it's very limited.""The solution's network discovery and node addition processes need more work.""They need to work on their automation and automatically discover devices. They are not very good at automatically discovering devices.""A feature I would ask for is for them to have this solution available for Linux systems instead of Windows."

More SolarWinds NPM Cons →

Pricing and Cost Advice
Information Not Available
  • "Licensing is around under 1000 pounds. The licensing is either one year, three years, five years or ten years and during the licensing, we can choose to renew it per year or per every three years. We've got a license for three years. It's about 160 or about 200 pounds each."
  • "From a pricing perspective, they are still expensive."
  • "The licensing fees are $180 USD, per AP, for three years."
  • "It is said to be expensive."
  • "The pricing for a small setup is only a few hundred dollars a year. The fee is subscription-based."
  • "Typically, the license model is for one, three, and five years. They can just be a bit more flexible around it and look into providing an option for 24 months."
  • "My view is that it's expensive, but it's the best."
  • "The price of Meraki Dashboard is not expensive because knowing that it is a cloud-based solution has its benefits."
  • More Meraki Dashboard Pricing and Cost Advice →

  • "I’d suggest that people be aware that licensing has tiers."
  • "Excluding the costs of running VMs and physical blade servers, our licensing costs run around US$200,000/year for over 60 polling engines."
  • "I think that the cost has risen, but the functionality and versatility is way above other products."
  • "The licensing model is such that you can purchase only what you need; and then grow into the next level by paying only the difference in price and the associated maintenance costs."
  • "The price points are more than competitive when compared to other vendors."
  • "I believe the original setup cost was around $3500 with an annual cost of around $1200-$1500 to renew the support license. This would bring the average day-to-day cost of around $5-$6 over three years."
  • "You have to license it per year, for the support. You don't really need to have support once you've already set it up. Once you install SolarWinds, you can skip on the licensing. It will still work."
  • "The pricing needs to be improved. It is too high. One full engine costs around $10 000, which is why we don't have high availability right now."
  • More SolarWinds NPM Pricing and Cost Advice →

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    Comparison Review
    Anonymous User
    I have researched a quite a few network monitoring tools which can be used for various monitoring purposes of not only the servers, but the intermediate routers as well. There are majorly three types of these softwares. Ones which are completely open-source, you can do almost anything you want using these, but they require quite some expertise before you can use them. Then there are the ones that are not open source, the enterprise softwares and cost you some money, but on the other hand, they are extremely easy to set-up and learn. You can have them up and running in a matter of minutes. And then there are those which are completely cloud based. They can be free of cost or charge some money depending on the software. The good thing about these is that you don’t have to install any extra software, and it can be managed completely online but then again these have limited features and you cannot exploit them to the full extent as you can do with the open-source and to some extent the enterprise software, so I won’t suggest you to use these, because these are generally not the complete solutions and require other support software to achieve the same. Below I have listed the outstanding pros and cons of the various Network analyzers that you can look into Nagios Pros: Nagios offers an extensive set of collector plug-ins that allows users to gather performance and availability data from a broad range of operating systems, including  Windows and Netware Nagios… Read more →
    Questions from the Community
    Top Answer:We can manage the entire system across the network and troubleshoot the pain points.
    Top Answer:The product is not expensive. I rate the product’s pricing a seven out of ten, where one is cheap and ten is expensive.
    Top Answer:The Wi-Fi side needs improvement. In most warehouse environments, there are shortfalls in such conditions. We often face… more »
    Top Answer:It is a reliable product. It provides a lot of information that is easy to read.
    Top Answer:The product’s pricing is neither high nor low. I rate the product’s pricing a five out of ten, where one is cheap, and… more »
    Top Answer:There could be an on-premise server for the dashboard. Meraki can download the full server from the cloud to on-prem for… more »
    Top Answer:It actually depends on the exact purpose or kind of devices (network devices, servers, something else). Some tools are… more »
    Top Answer:From my point of view, SolarWind is the best tool.
    Top Answer:We are partners with SolarWinds and we sell a lot of Network management to large enterprises also because of… more »
    Comparisons
    Also Known As
    Solarwinds Network Performance Monitor, SolarWinds Network Bandwidth Analyzer
    Learn More
    Overview

    Juniper Mist Premium Analytics is a comprehensive network analytics solution that provides organizations with valuable insights into their network performance and user experience. The primary use case of this product is to enable IT teams to proactively monitor, troubleshoot, and optimize their network infrastructure.

    The most valuable functionality of Juniper Mist Premium Analytics is its AI-driven insights and recommendations. Leveraging machine learning algorithms, it analyzes vast amounts of network data to identify anomalies, predict potential issues, and suggest remediation actions. This proactive approach helps organizations minimize network downtime, improve user experience, and optimize network performance.

    By providing real-time visibility into network performance, Juniper Mist Premium Analytics helps organizations quickly identify and resolve network issues. It offers detailed analytics on network traffic, application performance, and user behavior, allowing IT teams to pinpoint the root cause of problems and take immediate action. This not only reduces troubleshooting time but also enhances overall network reliability.

    Furthermore, Juniper Mist Premium Analytics enables organizations to optimize their network infrastructure. It provides insights into network capacity utilization, application usage patterns, and user behavior, allowing IT teams to make informed decisions about network design, resource allocation, and capacity planning. This helps organizations to ensure that their network is efficiently utilized and can support the growing demands of their users.

    Meraki Dashboard is a comprehensive cloud-based platform that offers centralized management and control for all Meraki networking and security products. It provides a user-friendly interface, allowing administrators to easily monitor and configure their network infrastructure from anywhere. With real-time visibility, troubleshooting becomes effortless, ensuring optimal performance and minimizing downtime. 

    The intuitive dashboard offers a holistic view of the network, enabling quick identification of potential issues and proactive measures. It simplifies network deployment and scaling, with zero-touch provisioning and automatic firmware updates. The robust security features include advanced threat protection, content filtering, and VPN connectivity. 

    Meraki Dashboard also offers powerful analytics and reporting capabilities, providing valuable insights into network usage, application performance, and user behavior. With its seamless integration and scalability, 

    Meraki Dashboard is the ideal solution for organizations of all sizes, ensuring efficient network management and enhanced productivity.

    SolarWinds NPM is a network monitoring solution that enables you to detect, diagnose, and resolve network performance issues and outages quickly and efficiently. The solution is a powerful tool that can help you increase service levels, reduce downtime with multi vendor network monitoring, simplify the management of complex network devices, improve operational efficiency, and much more.

    SolarWinds NPM Features

    SolarWinds NPM has many valuable key features. Some of the most useful ones include:

    • Increased scalability
    • Fault, performance, and availability monitoring
    • Dynamic network discovery and mapping
    • Cross-stack network data correlation
    • Customizable topology
    • Dependency-aware intelligent alerts
    • Intelligent maps
    • Automated capacity forecasting, alerting, and reporting
    • Logical and physical network monitoring
    • Monitor Azure vNet gateway visibility

    SolarWinds NPM Benefits

    There are several benefits to implementing SolarWinds NPM. Some of the biggest advantages the solution offers include:

    • Comprehensive monitoring for advanced network devices: With SolarWinds NPM, you can gain insight into the health and performance of your load balancers, Cisco ASA and Palo Alto Networks, firewalls, and Cisco Nexus switches.
    • Hardware health monitoring: SolarWinds NPM makes it easy for you to monitor, alert, and report on key device metrics, including power supply, fan speed, and temperature.
    • Customizable performance and availability reports: With this feature, you can choose from more than 100 templates to schedule and also generate custom network performance reports.

    Reviews from Real Users

    Below are some reviews and helpful feedback written by PeerSpot users currently using the SolarWinds NPM solution.

    PeerSpot user Andrew N., Senior Network Engineer at Element Critical, says, “The "Performance Analyzer" feature is the solution's most valuable aspect. It's able to do the bounded graphs of all the interface stats, from errors to broadcasts and to current traffic. With a click of a button you're able to, in one interface, look at historical data for those items.” He also adds, “From the troubleshooting point of view, just having that peace of mind is great. And, The solution is extremely stable. We haven't had any issues in that regard. We haven't had issues with bugs, glitches, or crashes."

    Daniel S., Systems and Data Warehouse Supervisor at MMSD, mentions, “The alerting and usage tracking is a valuable feature because it alerts us when we're getting near capacity on disk space, network utilization or processor utilization. It helps us manage our capacity and enables us to be proactive.”

    A Senior Vice President and CIO at a financial services firm explains, “As we look to add more servers to our virtual environment and to understand the impact, the solution allows us to dig into the historical charts related to capacity planning. It also gives us visibility of spikes and allows us to track down the reasons for their occurrences. So too, it makes room for potential processes that have gotten hung or runaway and to know when it's time to reboot a server or service.”

    Dinesh N., Digital Innovation at Bobcat Company, states, “The best part of the solution is the sharing display. It gives a general public ID wherein everyone can link to a public display. That's a good feature.”


    Fazal A., Implementation & Support Specialist at 360Factors, comments, “We have configured multiple alerts for our network devices, including routers and switches, so that we are notified if any interface goes down. In the event an interface goes down, we have multiple reports that include availability monitoring, network uptime monitoring, and network downtime monitoring. These reports are on multiple schedules such as the end of the day, end of the last business day of the week, monthly, and quarterly. This gives us the ability to provide reports to our management and let them know the performance of our network.”

    Sample Customers
    Information Not Available
    Coop eG, Peet's Coffee & Tea, Priefert Manufacturing, Century Care Management, Clifton College, Zürs Ski Resort, Capital FM Arena, MAXI Autohöfe
    Microsoft, Federal Express, Hewlett-Packard, and MasterCard
    Top Industries
    VISITORS READING REVIEWS
    Computer Software Company18%
    Financial Services Firm12%
    Manufacturing Company9%
    Government8%
    REVIEWERS
    Retailer13%
    Comms Service Provider10%
    Financial Services Firm10%
    Computer Software Company7%
    VISITORS READING REVIEWS
    Computer Software Company24%
    Financial Services Firm7%
    Manufacturing Company7%
    Construction Company5%
    REVIEWERS
    Computer Software Company12%
    Comms Service Provider12%
    Financial Services Firm11%
    Healthcare Company9%
    VISITORS READING REVIEWS
    Educational Organization50%
    Computer Software Company7%
    Government5%
    Manufacturing Company5%
    Company Size
    VISITORS READING REVIEWS
    Small Business22%
    Midsize Enterprise15%
    Large Enterprise63%
    REVIEWERS
    Small Business38%
    Midsize Enterprise23%
    Large Enterprise38%
    VISITORS READING REVIEWS
    Small Business26%
    Midsize Enterprise17%
    Large Enterprise58%
    REVIEWERS
    Small Business33%
    Midsize Enterprise18%
    Large Enterprise50%
    VISITORS READING REVIEWS
    Small Business12%
    Midsize Enterprise55%
    Large Enterprise33%
    Buyer's Guide
    Meraki Dashboard vs. SolarWinds NPM
    March 2024
    Find out what your peers are saying about Meraki Dashboard vs. SolarWinds NPM and other solutions. Updated: March 2024.
    765,234 professionals have used our research since 2012.

    Meraki Dashboard is ranked 9th in Network Monitoring Software with 51 reviews while SolarWinds NPM is ranked 4th in Network Monitoring Software with 146 reviews. Meraki Dashboard is rated 8.6, while SolarWinds NPM is rated 8.2. The top reviewer of Meraki Dashboard writes "Incredibly easy to use, great troubleshooting and prevention of malicious events". On the other hand, the top reviewer of SolarWinds NPM writes "High-level, comprehensive, and proactive monitoring in a user-friendly interface". Meraki Dashboard is most compared with ThousandEyes, Mist AI and Cloud, Cisco DNA Center, Zabbix and Auvik Network Management (ANM), whereas SolarWinds NPM is most compared with Zabbix, PRTG Network Monitor, ManageEngine OpManager, ThousandEyes and ScienceLogic. See our Meraki Dashboard vs. SolarWinds NPM report.

    See our list of best Network Monitoring Software vendors.

    We monitor all Network Monitoring Software 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.