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Cisco Catalyst SD-WAN vs DX Spectrum comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Jan 2, 2025

Review summaries and opinions

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:
 

ROI

Sentiment score
7.3
Cisco Catalyst SD-WAN reduces WAN costs significantly, offering savings up to 80% with enhanced reliability and operational efficiencies.
Sentiment score
7.1
Organizations experienced significant ROI with DX Spectrum, noting enhanced automation, cost savings, efficiency, and effective integration despite high costs.
 

Customer Service

Sentiment score
7.5
Cisco Catalyst SD-WAN support is generally rated highly, though some users note delays and varying expertise levels.
Sentiment score
7.1
Customer service excels with high ratings, but technical support varies; Broadcom acquisition raised concerns over response times.
The principal third-level support is very good.
Cisco's ongoing reorganizations have affected the quality of technical support, which varies depending on the engineer handling cases.
The technical team is very competent.
Broadcom technical support is very good.
 

Scalability Issues

Sentiment score
7.6
Cisco Catalyst SD-WAN is praised for its scalability, supporting enterprises across various sectors with seamless growth and integration.
Sentiment score
8.1
DX Spectrum is highly adaptable and scalable, effectively supporting growth in diverse environments from small businesses to large corporations.
Cisco SD-WAN is highly scalable and can be expanded to more than 10,000 sites.
The ease of configuration and features like zero-touch provisioning enhance the scalability of Cisco SD-WAN, especially in disaster recovery situations.
 

Stability Issues

Sentiment score
7.6
Cisco Catalyst SD-WAN is reliable with few bugs, but complex setups and early releases may introduce issues.
Sentiment score
7.3
DX Spectrum is praised for its stability and reliability, with minor issues usually due to incorrect configurations or updates.
While some software-related issues and bugs were encountered, they did not cause the whole environment to crash.
 

Room For Improvement

Cisco Catalyst SD-WAN struggles with high costs, complexity, and lacks unified interface and advanced security features, needing enhancements.
DX Spectrum users seek a modern interface, enhanced integration, simplified processes, better analytics, and improved support for device certification.
Now, they change frequently, making it difficult to obtain long-term support.
Including more features like integrating with Splunk for monitoring vulnerabilities would help eliminate the need for other SOC solutions.
Currently, they appear as pop-up messages, but I would prefer having alarm messages shown as a scrolling bar at the taskbar for easier visibility.
The event management should have more deduplication and alert correlation and check the bidirectional communication with ServiceNow.
 

Setup Cost

Cisco Catalyst SD-WAN is costly due to complex licensing but offers value in robust performance, with adaptable cost management.
DX Spectrum's pricing favors large enterprises, offering flexible but complex licensing, with high costs impacting smaller businesses.
The pricing of Cisco Catalyst SD-WAN is rated between eight and nine out of ten, where ten is the most expensive.
It is also relatively cost-effective for smaller businesses when using the Meraki version.
Its pricing is justifiable due to the comprehensive solution it offers.
The price of DX Spectrum is not competitive when compared to other solutions, such as SolarWinds.
 

Valuable Features

Cisco Catalyst SD-WAN offers centralized management, automation, security, cloud integration, and flexibility, enhancing network efficiency and scalability.
DX Spectrum offers comprehensive network monitoring, fault management, scalability, and seamless integration, ideal for managing extensive IT infrastructures.
It also provides robust security features, including port security, analysis, mirroring, and multiple other security solutions.
With Cisco Catalyst SD-WAN, I can automate processes, ensure network assurance, and configure network settings.
Security is standard compliant, eliminating config drift that was prevalent before manual configurations.
The interface has the needed configuration for visualization, and it's effective in providing a complete diagram of network links and connections across various stations globally.
DX Spectrum uses an SNMP Trap to accept all the details, especially for device monitoring of faulty devices, allowing me to use Spectrum effectively.
 

Categories and Ranking

Cisco Catalyst SD-WAN
Ranking in Network Management Applications
6th
Average Rating
8.0
Reviews Sentiment
7.0
Number of Reviews
94
Ranking in other categories
Software Defined WAN (SD-WAN) Solutions (2nd), WAN Edge (2nd)
DX Spectrum
Ranking in Network Management Applications
7th
Average Rating
8.4
Reviews Sentiment
6.7
Number of Reviews
117
Ranking in other categories
Network Monitoring Software (21st), IT Infrastructure Monitoring (20th), Network Troubleshooting (6th), DX NetOps (1st)
 

Featured Reviews

Igor Van Den Ouden - PeerSpot reviewer
Enables secure and flexible branch connectivity with application-aware routing
The valuable features of Cisco SD-WAN include its security policies and zone-based firewall that are applied to every site, as well as application-aware routing. Security is standard compliant, eliminating config drift that was prevalent before manual configurations. Application-aware routing offers flexibility in using different lines for traffic, depending on the policy implemented.
Umair (Abu Mohaymin) Akhlaque - PeerSpot reviewer
Good for monitoring, covers networks well
If you are looking for the right monitoring tool, Spectrum is one of the best solutions. It covers networks very well. It has all the capabilities that you're looking for when it comes to monitoring. Spectrum is great for root cause analysis. It has excellent correlation event management. Spectrum's stability and scalability are also amazing. If you have a CA Service Desk, then it can be integrated so that if you have open tickets they can be closed automatically. The configuration manager is great as well.
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Educational Organization
43%
Computer Software Company
12%
Financial Services Firm
7%
Manufacturing Company
4%
Financial Services Firm
20%
Computer Software Company
13%
Manufacturing Company
9%
Government
7%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
 

Questions from the Community

What do you like most about Cisco SD-WAN?
When considering the most valuable features of Cisco SD-WAN, the decoupling of self-monitoring stands out significantly.
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Cisco SD-WAN?
The pricing of Cisco Catalyst SD-WAN is rated between eight and nine out of ten, where ten is the most expensive.
What needs improvement with Cisco SD-WAN?
The durability of the switches could be improved. In the past, Cisco devices had a longer lifespan. Now, they change frequently, making it difficult to obtain long-term support.
What do you like most about DX Spectrum?
The solution's most valuable features are its integration with Broadcom tools and scalability.
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for DX Spectrum?
We are a customer of Broadcom, we use a group license that covers various CA products, including DX Spectrum. The company purchases the licenses they need from this group license, and we do not hav...
What needs improvement with DX Spectrum?
DX Spectrum should have an automatic ticketing mechanism with ServiceNow. I need to use other tools for event management. It has a dashboarding mechanism and monitors devices and network switches t...
 

Also Known As

Cisco SD-WAN
CA Spectrum
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Doyle Research, Ashton Metzler & Associates
National Informatics Centre India, Banese, Olympus, AlphaServe Technologies, Sicredi
Find out what your peers are saying about Cisco Catalyst SD-WAN vs. DX Spectrum and other solutions. Updated: April 2025.
850,028 professionals have used our research since 2012.