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Cisco Meraki MX pros and cons

Vendor: Cisco

4.1 out of 5

66 reviews
93% willing to recommend

Pros & Cons summary

Cisco Meraki MX offers intrusion detection, advanced firewall capabilities, and centralized web-based management, allowing easy device control without physical interaction. While its cloud management and scalability suit businesses with multiple locations, high licensing costs and integration challenges impact affordability and usability. Features like Auto VPN simplify setup, but limited VPN configurations and automatic updates may frustrate advanced users. It lacks comprehensive UTM protection and encounters issues with API integrations and Active Directory connectivity.

Buyer's Guide

Get pricing advice, tips, use cases and valuable features from real users of this product.

Prominent pros & cons

PROS

Meraki MX provides centralized management over the web, allowing seamless control of all Meraki devices within a single account.

Offering easy site-to-site VPN setup, Meraki MX enables simplified VPN connections across multiple locations without requiring extensive VPN expertise.

Meraki MX ensures enhanced security with intrusion detection and prevention capabilities, automatically blocking threats and sending detailed reports.

The device supports dual WAN connections, facilitating effective traffic shaping and balancing of internet data usage.

Meraki MX is praised for its reliable scalability, robust security features, and ease of configuration and management.

CONS

Cisco Meraki MX has limited VPN configuration details and weak client-side VPN functionality.

The licensing is expensive; the firewall stops working if not renewed on time.

Active Directory integration has bugs and lacks functionality, making it ineffective.

Cisco Meraki MX does not offer comprehensive reporting and logging features without third-party software.

Scalability is limited, making it challenging for enterprise-sized implementations.

Cisco Meraki MX Pros review quotes

CB

Central Services Engineer at Liberty Technology

Feb 10, 2021

Meraki makes it easy to be secure and know where the holes are to fix them. We have been fixing anything that we have ever found for 20 years. We keep up-to-date with firmware upgrades. We just try to stay on top of everything for security, like maintaining updates and getting rid of old systems. I feel like we're on top of it.

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EC

Director at a computer software company with 11-50 employees

Aug 3, 2021

Its ease of configuration and management is very useful for us and for other companies that don't have an onsite IT person. It is easy to configure and easy to manage. It is easy to configure the VPN with the Auto VPN feature.

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Supervisor of IT Infrastructure & Cybersecurity at a comms service provider with 51-200 employees

Oct 24, 2023

Point-to-point VPNs can dynamically follow IP changes with no need for static IPs.

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AH

Senior Network Specialist at Al Ghurair Investments

Aug 23, 2020

It has the most advanced security features, for example, layer 3 and layer 7 firewall capabilities and the end team and IPS protection. It also has IPS, and it has very good functioning of cloning services. You don't actually have to touch the device. If you have multiple companies in different countries, you don't really require this device to be touched. You can get it delivered directly to any office of a country, and then you can simply put your configuration over the cloud. It's very simplified and easy to manage. It gives a very good granular visibility about your network. Earlier, a lot of things were lacking in the network. We were unable to identify where the problem was, but after implementing Meraki MX, we are able to dig down and identify where is the problem. We can easily and quickly identify the sources and the root causes of the issues.

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LM

Network Security Engineer at TECHBASE

Jun 27, 2019

A strong, reliable solution for small companies with little or no dedicated IT department.

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Senior Enterprise Account Manager at Ninth Dimension IT Solutions (P) Ltd

Aug 17, 2023

Since it has an integrated dashboard for all the products, customers can get complete network analytics regarding what the user is doing, monitoring, and observing.

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MURALI NIDAMANURI

Managing Director at a manufacturing company with 10,001+ employees

May 20, 2025

By increasing these user experiences, productivity has been enhanced across companies and client employees.

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CEO at ITSG SA

Jun 30, 2019

We work also with domain control (DC) from Microsoft or Amazon. We use a whole virtual appliance with Meraki.

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SG

Technical Presales at Vcom Teachnologies

Sep 4, 2025

Setting up Cisco Meraki MX requires only internet access, and the rest is very simple.

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Frankline Wanangwe

System Engineer at DOWN TO EARTH TECHNOLOGIES LTD

Sep 9, 2024

The solution's most valuable feature is the ease of management of the dashboard.

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Cisco Meraki MX Cons review quotes

CB

Central Services Engineer at Liberty Technology

Feb 10, 2021

When we do API integrations with Meraki, they have always been hard as well as tedious to build. The data that we want out of the API integrations has been only recently available. Six months ago, it was hard to get someone to build something correctly or useful with Meraki APIs. Recently, they have made more data available on the API, but it is just a start. They need to do more.

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EC

Director at a computer software company with 11-50 employees

Aug 3, 2021

We have been having a problem with the VPN. When the energy goes down and is back again, the VPN link doesn't get established. We have to manually turn off the modems and other pieces of equipment and manually establish the VPN. It has been around one month since we have been having this problem, and we don't have enough support from Meraki to solve the problem.

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Supervisor of IT Infrastructure & Cybersecurity at a comms service provider with 51-200 employees

Oct 24, 2023

Meraki tech support staff have a lot more visibility into your network than you do, which is frustrating at times. I understand the approach is to keep the dashboard easier to understand. This will frustrate more advanced users at times.

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Cisco Meraki MX

Free Report: Cisco Meraki MX Reviews and More

Learn what your peers think about Cisco Meraki MX. Get advice and tips from experienced pros sharing their opinions. Updated: October 2025.

868,787 professionals have used our research since 2012.

AH

Senior Network Specialist at Al Ghurair Investments

Aug 23, 2020

From the improvement perspective, we need more monitoring capabilities. We want to have full-based access visibility, such as, what is happening when something is trying to reach and it is denying. We cannot see some parts of it. The integration of active directory with this product is not very fruitful. It has some bugs or lacks in the functionality of active directory integration. We are unable to identify where exactly and whether it has really applied our policy.

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LM

Network Security Engineer at TECHBASE

Jun 27, 2019

The client-side VPN is weak. The product could be improved with deployment templates.

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Senior Enterprise Account Manager at Ninth Dimension IT Solutions (P) Ltd

Aug 17, 2023

The current lead time is longer for Meraki MX, and it needs to be improved.

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MURALI NIDAMANURI

Managing Director at a manufacturing company with 10,001+ employees

May 20, 2025

Scalability is an obvious concern with Meraki MX. You can't scale beyond some value. They are not highly enterprise grade, when you have hundreds of thousands of people it is very difficult to scale in Meraki.

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CEO at ITSG SA

Jun 30, 2019

The problem is that the two licenses do not currently integrate. We have to create separate companies and do an interconnection.

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SG

Technical Presales at Vcom Teachnologies

Sep 4, 2025

The price could be reduced by around 30% to make it more comfortable.

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Frankline Wanangwe

System Engineer at DOWN TO EARTH TECHNOLOGIES LTD

Sep 9, 2024

Improvements are required more on the side of troubleshooting.

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Show 10 more reviews (out of 57)

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Unified Threat Management (UTM)

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Unified Threat Management (UTM)

Popular Comparisons

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Fortinet FortiGate vs Cisco Meraki MX

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