We performed a comparison between Cisco Meraki Wireless LAN and Cisco Wireless based on our users’ reviews in five categories. After reading all of the collected data, you can find our conclusion below.
Comparison Results: While Cisco users across the board feel that both products are very expensive and provide very good customer service and support, users reported a better ROI from Cisco Meraki Wireless LAN.
"The most useful feature of Juniper Wireless AP is the reporting Marvis."
"The simplicity is great."
"The solution is pretty generic and easy to use."
"The stability of the Cisco Meraki Wireless LAN is very good."
"Meraki is a decent solution for a small company, and we use it in a pretty typical way. We need Teams and Zoom to work, and we need a high level of security because we want our business to remain confidential."
"The ability to manage it remotely is the most valuable. If it has an internet connection, you can get to it. It is a great product for remote clinics. We kind of thought about doing this kind of standalone technology. Meraki is easy to manage. From a management perspective, it is the easiest to use, especially in the cloud. I like Meraki. I even have it in my home."
"The solution is easy to install."
"Its ease of use and flexibility are most valuable. It is cloud-based software."
"It is very handy to have a support number to call."
"The most valuable feature is that the solution is friendly to manage."
"This product offers cloud-based configuration, so you can set it up from anywhere."
"I've found it to be quite secure."
"The initial setup is easy. It's fairly quick to deploy."
"The ability to make different types of networks, such as land networks, is the most valuable part of the solution."
"This solution is highly stable. We have only had one issue in seven years."
"The LAN network conductivity is good."
"Cisco Wireless always has the latest technology that supports WiFi 5 and 6."
"It is a stable solution."
"Cisco's technical support is very good, I've never had an issue with their technical support."
"I need a bit more time with it before criticizing the features."
"If you want to do more specific stuff, it's a bit limited."
"Juniper Wireless AP can improve by continually improving its reporting and integration with other systems."
"This solution could benefit from a heat mapping ability so that you can tell where the hotspots are, and where the good signals are."
"The user interface needs to be improved."
"Recently I have seen that the Meraki access point, maybe due to congestion, just kicks off my customers, mostly when they are in Zoom meetings or Teams meetings and they have to reconnect."
"Its price should be reduced."
"Documentation could be improved, but everything else has been spot-on."
"The technical support from Cisco is good, but they can improve themselves in some areas. Sometimes it takes a while to provide a solution or an answer to our problem."
"They should introduce a grace period of 60 days after license expiry because as it is now, it automatically goes down and there is no grace period."
"The licensing isn't very customer-centric. They may have improved it, but previously, if you forgot to pay on a certain day, your service would be shut off."
"In the next release, I would like to see some AI capability deployed. Other competitors like Mist and Juniper already have it. So, AI features need to be introduced next year."
"For all products on the market, the availability of the products may not be ideal. We're waiting on a lot of products simply due to the fact that there's a material shortage. We've ordered products and have had to wait three or four months for anything to get delivered. This is not just Cisco. It's a problem on the market for all components which include semiconductors."
"There's a delay in equipment that comes to Columbia, to our country, and that lasts almost six months."
"Before deploying a wireless solution, you have to read and plan every role, every windows system, put in your access point, and then make the audit. This solution is not the best one to do this. We use another solution that is called Eko. In the future, if this solution could have better auditing capabilities it would be better."
"There are performance issues, particularly with video calls where throughput is not great."
"In the next release, I would like to have support for Wi-Fi 6."
"The integration with our CM and other technologies could improve this solution."
"They are a pretty expensive option."
More Juniper Wireless Access Points (AP Series) Pricing and Cost Advice →
Cisco Meraki Wireless LAN is ranked 2nd in Wireless LAN with 62 reviews while Cisco Wireless is ranked 3rd in Wireless LAN with 76 reviews. Cisco Meraki Wireless LAN is rated 8.0, while Cisco Wireless is rated 8.2. The top reviewer of Cisco Meraki Wireless LAN writes "Highly reliable, effective site blocking, and beneficial reports". 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 AI and Cloud and Aruba Instant, whereas Cisco Wireless is most compared with Aruba Wireless, Ruckus Wireless, Huawei Wireless, Ubiquiti WLAN and Fortinet FortiWLM. See our Cisco Meraki Wireless LAN vs. Cisco Wireless report.
See our list of best Wireless LAN vendors.
We monitor all Wireless LAN 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.
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.