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Cisco Crosswork Network Automation vs NetBrain comparison

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Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive Summary

Review summaries and opinions

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

Categories and Ranking

Cisco Crosswork Network Aut...
Ranking in Network Automation
8th
Average Rating
7.6
Reviews Sentiment
5.0
Number of Reviews
3
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
NetBrain
Ranking in Network Automation
6th
Average Rating
7.2
Reviews Sentiment
6.9
Number of Reviews
6
Ranking in other categories
Network Troubleshooting (18th)
 

Featured Reviews

Thu Al-Faqar Salah - PeerSpot reviewer
Network Engineer at V2X
Automation has simplified multi-vendor VPN provisioning and protects changes with safe rollback
I have performed automation for Layer 2 and Layer 3 VPN services provisioning during routing changes. In the data center, I completed provisioning tasks for Cisco switches using scripting in the YANG model and APIs. I deployed configuration remotely for approximately 400 to 500 switches, implementing automation instead of configuring devices individually. I also use Cisco Crosswork Network Automation Health Insights and change for streaming telemetry and KPI monitoring. The features have significantly helped decrease the complexity of using CLI commands. Using the YANG model and other tools for Cisco monitoring has been invaluable. Closed-loop automation and Health Insights have provided tremendous value through multi-vendor abstractions, including network elements and NEDs on YANG and NETCONF models. This has benefited my Layer 3 VPN configuration, and for the underlying commands, whether the target device is running Cisco IOS XR, Junos, or another platform, there are no restrictions between IOS types. Transactional rollback and multi-vendor support with closed-loop telemetry have been critical features. If a mass change fails on one device, the system cleanly reverses everything, ensuring I never end up with a half-configured device. This is an important capability in networking.
Deborah Gamelin - PeerSpot reviewer
Vice President at Asset Track for Cloud, LLC
Good monitoring and troubleshoot capabilities, improves overall network traffic visibility
In my organization, we had 130,000 network devices that needed to be brought into the solution and mapped. NetBrain can handle the scale but the engineers that manage those devices have to go in and update all of them to allow NetBrain permission to poll them. It can get a little stressful for everybody when you're trying to roll out new stuff when you've got other issues that have to be addressed with other devices. In some cases, our devices had no automation at all. One example is the Cisco 3650. Right now, if you went through the inventory list, you see that we have different versions running. Some are on one version, whereas others are on another version. The problem with upgrading them is that they need to be done overnight because we don't want to disrupt any network traffic during business hours. Consequently, it could take us years to upgrade the versions before we can even get them onto these new tools. This may be an internal issue but it's a big one when you have a lot of devices. Even if you had 10,000 devices, it's still an issue. You have to consider the compatibility of the device against the tool, and being able to use certain commands to upgrade it.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"Cisco Crosswork Network Automation has structurally lowered my organization's OPEX by basically eliminating manual traffic re-routing tasks, and has reduced maintenance windows roughly by half."
"Scalability is an exceptional strength of Cisco Crosswork Network Automation, as it is built for service provider scale, easily handles tens of thousands of devices, and uses a layered services architecture with microservices clusters and distributed data gateways to push thousands of concurrent changes without bottlenecks, which is incredibly impressive."
"Cisco Crosswork Network Automation positively impacts my organization by simplifying deployment complexity, providing stable scalability, and managing thousands of network devices without performance bottlenecks."
"This tool is exactly what we wanted and needed."
"Once it's up and running and you don't have the strange requirements I had, and you just want some basic maps, it'll work."
"A reliable, time-saving tool for providing accurate layer 2 and layer 3 network mappings."
"Enables maps to be drawn out."
"NetBrain is a very simple tool."
"NetBrain is very good when it comes to network mapping, as it looks for different assets within the network available, so router, firewall, applications, et cetera, and it gives you the full mapping, asset mapping along with the full range including the firmware software update and all those things."
"The most valuable feature of the solution is that you can click once and have a link test, see your network, and get an overall view of your network and its state."
"NetBrain is faster, better and level sets the engineering technical sets."
 

Cons

"However, there are some areas that could benefit from improvement."
"Cisco Crosswork Network Automation needs improved API documentation, an expense integration guide, and code samples to simplify custom script development for DevOps and NetOps teams."
"I think the biggest improvement needed for Cisco Crosswork Network Automation is its multi-vendor support, which needs to be more robust."
"The pricing needs to be improved."
"The IP interface brief isn't consistent."
"It's okay on the value, a bit expensive for just maps, but makes it a lot easier to see things visually and take it from there."
"Netbrain must get AWS functionality done."
"The solution could integrate more automation."
"Support needs to improve for the installed product and some of the reporting could be more flexible to provide more complete cataloging."
"Each device needs to be configured to allow NetBrain to poll for the information it needs, which can be very time-consuming for a large network."
"It would be nice if the setup was a little simpler. Also, if the solution could provide more training materials for new people coming into our company so they can quickly learn how to use the functionalities."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

Information not available
"Licensing is based on a per-device basis, which means that it can get very expensive if you have a large number of devices."
"The product is expensive, but less expensive than some of the competition and worth the price."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
No data available
Manufacturing Company
12%
Financial Services Firm
9%
Government
8%
Comms Service Provider
6%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
No data available
No data available
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Information Not Available
CompuCon, TD Ameritrade, Move Inc.
Find out what your peers are saying about Red Hat, Cisco, Broadcom and others in Network Automation. Updated: September 2026.
915,341 professionals have used our research since 2012.