"The most valuable feature of this solution is the application visibility, which is one of the main features."
"The network security the solution provides is its most valuable aspect."
"The most valuable thing to me is the stability of the product."
"Allows for cloud-based management of your Wi-Fi network."
"The user interface is very simple and easy to use — our customers are very satisfied."
"It is cloud-based. It has a GUI rather than a command line, and it just works."
"The most valuable feature is the technology of the security that is offered."
"I like the status page Cisco added that shows you the health of the wireless connection."
"I like many of the features that Cisco Wireless has to offer."
"For me, the most valuable thing about Cisco Wireless is its ease of use and stability."
"We are using Cisco access point 2802, and they are very reliable."
"I'm very satisfied with Cisco's technical support."
"The most valuable features are mobility and security."
"The mobility that it provides is really helpful."
"The technical support is excellent."
"The most valuable features of Cisco Wireless are security and the ability to manage everything easily. Other solutions, such as Aruba are not as simple."
"If you lose connectivity with the controller, your Wi-Fi network is immediately impacted."
"We have used technical support for some issues but not many times."
"Integration with the corporate LAN where Catalyst products are installed is a major challenge."
"In the next release, I would like to see the central control plane have the flexibility to control and distribute policies to all LAN networks, balance the traffic, and the performance based on application monitoring."
"The licensing could be a bit better."
"We haven't had any issues with the solution. We like the way it works. There isn't anything I can think of that makes me worry that it might be lacking in a certain area."
"They're great. If there's anything that they need to change, it is just simplifying the site to which you go to make changes on the admin side."
"Cisco offers pretty expensive devices."
"The licensing models need to be reviewed in some instances. Obviously Cisco's licensing models are quite challenging, and it can be costly."
"Installation is complex."
"The new licensing model isn't as good as what they had before."
"It would be better if some utility lets us know the best place to install the system. Every time we install it, we have to change it, and we have to add more access points. This is a problem we have all the time. It would be better if it integrated seamlessly with products from other vendors. It'll also help if they included a device diagnostics feature in the next release."
"The price could be better."
"Controllers could be improved."
"The integration with our CM and other technologies could improve this solution."
"The pricing could be reduced."
Cisco Meraki Wireless LAN is ranked 4th in Wireless LAN with 55 reviews while Cisco Wireless is ranked 2nd in Wireless LAN with 68 reviews. Cisco Meraki Wireless LAN is rated 8.2, while Cisco Wireless is rated 8.2. The top reviewer of Cisco Meraki Wireless LAN writes "Knowledgeable and helpful support, and it scales and load-balances to fit our needs". On the other hand, the top reviewer of Cisco Wireless writes "Robust with a good level of performance and very helpful technical support". Cisco Meraki Wireless LAN is most compared with Aruba Wireless, Ubiquiti Wireless, Ruckus Wireless, Mist Access Points and Aruba Instant, whereas Cisco Wireless is most compared with Aruba Wireless, Ruckus Wireless, Ubiquiti WLAN, Fortinet FortiWLM and Mist Access Points. See our Cisco Meraki Wireless LAN vs. Cisco Wireless report.
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Cisco Wireless is very robust, very rugged, and can handle indoor and outdoor coverage extremely well. We found it to be very reliable and to consistently run very efficiently. Cisco Wireless helped us get more network access to more people wirelessly across some very large spaces.
It is expensive, though. The Cisco Wireless portal, like many Cisco products, can be very complex. The flexibility of the controllers needs fixing and Cisco Wireless requires a bit of tweaking to get the stability right. We would also like to see the reporting improved - this would help make troubleshooting easier.
Cisco Meraki Wireless LAN is very user-friendly. You don’t have to be a wireless engineer to set it up. Cisco Meraki Wireless LAN is cloud-based, which is very convenient as you don’t have to have a physical controller, saving valuable space, power, and redundancy. This solution offers advanced configurations that are a great fit for small to medium-sized businesses that can’t employ an advanced tech team. Cisco Meraki Wireless LAN is high-performance, stable, scalable, and very easy to deploy, and offers a dashboard that makes managing the solution very easy.
Some of the built-in capabilities and filtering with Cisco Meraki Wireless LAN needs to be made easier to use. Cisco Meraki Wireless LAN needs to better identify devices, and the TAC reading and interpretation capabilities are not always accurate. There are also some processing limitations when you have multiple SSIDs.
Conclusion
As these are both Cisco products, they offer brand recognition you can trust, great quality, and good durability.
We found that Cisco Wireless offered slightly better access points and improved coverage, allowing the creation of better networks. Cisco Wireless takes a one-time payment for the hardware, and then annual payments. If you employ Cisco’s knowledgeable team members, this will be a good fit for you.
The huge selling point for Cisco Meraki Wireless LAN is its ease of use. You don’t need to have a lot of knowledge to deploy or manage processes, which makes this a great product for smaller businesses with a less tech-savvy team.
The standard answer to such a question is: it depends.
The pricing for both solutions is very similar: per-AP, Meraki is more expensive than Cisco Wireless. Cisco APs are cheaper, but the controller raises the solution price to be almost equal to Meraki.
Meraki is subscription-based and requires constant internet access to manage the system. If the annual license expires, the APs will work, but you can't manage them or read reports of the Meraki portal.
Cisco Wireless is a one-time payment for the hardware with annual support payments. if you have a small office with only a few APs needed, you can use the Cisco Mobility Express Controller (which uses one of the APs or a Catalyst Switch as the controller) but that has a limit of 100 APs.