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Cisco SD-WAN vs Citrix SD-WAN comparison

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Q&A Highlights
Question: What is the biggest difference between Cisco SD-WAN and Citrix SD-WAN?
Answer: Cisco is a traditional networking play and has successfully transformed from pure hardware to now software defined products. Many network engineers already use the product and makes a lot of sense for a company with Cisco history to go towards Cisco just like a company which uses citrix desktops will go for the Citrix ADC. Therefore, configuration of Cisco, while not being difficult, is more "formatted" for Engineers who have used the solution and already have deep understanding of the protocols As a relatively new comer, Citrix seems to have put more effort to make the implementation process easier in terms of GUI Now, citrix has one fourth the market share of cisco and this is crucial in terms of competency - as it is 4 times easier to get Cisco competency However, in terms of costs, I like Citrix Netscaler pooled licensing arrangement, It is a flexible licensing framework whereby there is a common pool of license regardless whether the customer performs the deployment as a physical hardware, virtual device or even a containerized solution already use the product. Therefore, Cisco has higher costs As for used cases, I have seen NetScalers used for Load Balancing, for external users to internal services and resources like XenDesktop and XenApp Finally, both Cisco and Citrix have resilient solutions and provide good support - also some dependency where you are located. As for recommendation, it depends on your specific scenario in light of above points.
Featured Review
Sascha Bülow
Researched Cisco SD-WAN but chose Juniper Session Smart Router: Tunnel-free and secure vector routing technology is its major USP, and as a partner, we get good support from them
Ehsan Emad
Stable and customizable but configuration could be simplified
Some clients resist switching to new technology and they're also afraid of problems with compatibility and the layout of the NOC. The NOC must... Read more →
Anonymous User
Researched Cisco SD-WAN but chose Citrix SD-WAN: Provides a fluid experience, balancing bandwidth to applications or solutions that need prioritizing
Buyer's Guide
Cisco SD-WAN vs. Citrix SD-WAN
July 2022
Free Report: Cisco SD-WAN vs. Citrix SD-WAN
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Quotes From Members
We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use.
Here are some excerpts of what they said:
Pros
"As compared to the other major vendors in the SD-WAN market, such as VeloCloud, Cisco, and others, the tunnel-free and secure vector routing technology is its major USP, which gives plenty of room to discuss with the customer why IPSec from 1998 is a bit outdated."

More Juniper Session Smart Router Pros →

"The integration of Layer 3 and application routing is great.""The scalability is the most valuable feature.""It's a scalable solution.""The most valuable features are manageability, scalability, and simplicity.""One of the most valuable features is that they have multiple SD-WAN options: you have Meraki for simple management solutions, you have Viptela, and you have the option of having any type of WAN interfaces. Presently, you can also have a single combined solution for both WAN as well as for voice, so you can have a voice bundle as well. These are major unique points of this solution.""Cisco SD-WAN's best features are the development of network links, application control, and bandwidth monitoring.""You can easily scale the product.""The most valuable features in Cisco SD-WAN are the QoS, AI, and simple interface for users to access."

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"The best feature is the backup capability, where all of the users' computers are tied into a central data repository.""The stability is the main feature of Citrix SD-WAN. You can also upgrade the data packages or have less transmission.""The most valuable feature is its reliability.""The reliability of connectivity is most valuable.""It allows you to combine two asymmetrical connections."

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Cons
"The UI of the SSR conductor is the main part where improvements can be done. Today, for every configuration step, you have to do a series of clicks. What we are missing there are wizards. For example, I have two applications, and I want one application to be prioritized against the other. In such a case, a wizard for assigning policies to a service without configuring each step by hand would be very helpful. There should be an overhaul of the GUI of the conductor. The functionality they have got in the Mist portal should be baked into the conductor itself. It would be really great, but as we all know, that won't happen."

More Juniper Session Smart Router Cons →

"The bandwidth limitations would be good to remove, but it is a policy and license situation for Cisco because the cost is very high. It would be good to have OTP implemented with VRF. It can have support for EIGRP Over the Top (OTP) VRF. I saw some limitations in regards to the VRF protocol and the advertisement between VRF configuration. EIGRP Over the Top basically was quite limited with the VRF configuration. If you wanted to do rollback in VRF by using the EIGRP OTP protocol, the formation was not populated across. Cisco got back and confirmed that it is a configuration that I need to wait for until the next release, which is going to happen in one year. Cisco documentation is not the way it used to be before. It just gives an easy way to configure, but it doesn't go into the details of the configuration. The information that you need is there, but sometimes you want to go further and get more information, but the information is quite limited. It would be good to cover a few business cases or configuration cases. They used to be there in the past.""The deployment is complex.""The security features could be improved.""We had some issues with Cisco SD-WAN but somehow we troubleshot it and things are going well. The issues have not been a large problem.""The initial setup was not very straightforward, but it gets easier the more deployments you complete.""One of the major areas that Cisco can improve on with their SD-WAN offering is their security features. When compared with Fortinet, who have what they call their 'security pillars' (e.g. firewall and security features built-in to their SD-WAN solutions), Cisco generally comes up short. With Cisco, if you need a security component, you have to pay more to get it done. So if they could add more security features that come part and parcel with their existing solutions, then I think Cisco could be very aggressive in the market.""Cisco could do more to offer bundling of the SD-WAN and other solutions.""We have found that their SD-WAN has a lot of scope for improvement."

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"The price could be improved, it's an expensive solution.""I am happy with this product. If anything, its price can be reduced. It is a bit expensive.""The price is the only thing that could be improved. Citrix is not a cheap solution.""Citrix should continue to offer a perpetual licensing model because it is very important to us.""I would like to see support for additional reporting."

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Pricing and Cost Advice
  • "We are currently renegotiating the offer for the licenses and the license bundle model. The license for an ISP has to be different from the license for an end customer. This is something we are currently renegotiating with Juniper, but, of course, the pricing for the licensing is always an issue when you want to get more customers."

    • More Juniper Session Smart Router Pricing and Cost Advice →

  • "Cisco is more expensive than some competing products."
  • "SD-WAN as a service is probably something in the neighborhood of $100 to $200 a month per location."
  • "The costs are a bit on the high side."
  • "It is much cheaper than other solutions. Most of our clients are the top 500 companies, and they all have a corporate contract."
  • "The license model is too complex with too many flavors and options. You might not be able to see it from an end user's point of view, but from a telco point of view, their license model is too complex. They should have a flexible license model. If you want to have good pricing, you need to buy it for a two-year, four-year, or five-year license immediately. Some other vendors have much more flexible license models."
  • "It is going to be on a yearly basis. There are no additional costs."
  • "It is expensive. The license limitation is there in terms of bandwidth. Basically, Cisco is always good in terms of performance and related things. However, if you want to have a license, for example, for 100 Mbps, they charge you because of their 100 Mbps. If you want to go without the license of 300 Mbps, it is a bandwidth license as well. This is not happening with other vendors. That is the reason why we moved away from Cisco. The bill gets a little bit high. I do remember that one time we were trying to increase the bandwidth for at least five devices, and the license got as high as 20-grand for five devices, only for the license. It was expensive for us at the time. Our company is not a big company, but it is a solid company. The price was very high, and we moved away from Cisco because of the price."
  • "The pricing of this solution is very expensive."

    • More Cisco SD-WAN Pricing and Cost Advice →

  • "The price of the subscription should be cheaper."
  • "It is a bit expensive. A cheaper product would be good, but everybody likes things to be cheaper. We bought the devices up front, and then we pay for the annual support."
  • "The license was a one-time purchase. It's expensive."

    • More Citrix SD-WAN Pricing and Cost Advice →

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    Questions from the Community
    What do you like most about Juniper Session Smart Router?
    Top Answer:As compared to the other major vendors in the SD-WAN market, such as VeloCloud, Cisco, and others, the tunnel-free and… more »
    What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Juniper Session S...
    Top Answer:We are currently renegotiating the offer for the licenses and the license bundle model. The license for an ISP has to be… more »
    What needs improvement with Juniper Session Smart Router?
    Top Answer:The UI of the SSR conductor is the main part where improvements can be done. Today, for every configuration step, you… more »
    What do you like most about Cisco SD-WAN?
    Top Answer:Cisco SD-WAN's best features are the development of network links, application control, and bandwidth monitoring.
    Read all 43 answers   →
    What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Cisco SD-WAN?
    Top Answer:For 600 links, the license for Cisco SD-WAN costs us US$250k a year. In Pakistan, we have the option to get this… more »
    Read all 32 answers   →
    What needs improvement with Cisco SD-WAN?
    Top Answer:Cisco SD-WAN's clustering mechanism needs to be improved. If there are more than five milliseconds of latency time… more »
    Read all 40 answers   →
    What do you like most about Citrix SD-WAN?
    Top Answer:The stability is the main feature of Citrix SD-WAN. You can also upgrade the data packages or have less transmission.
    Read all 10 answers   →
    What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Citrix SD-WAN?
    Top Answer:The license was a one-time purchase. It's expensive.
    Read all 7 answers   →
    What needs improvement with Citrix SD-WAN?
    Top Answer:The price is the only thing that could be improved. Citrix is not a cheap solution.
    Read all 9 answers   →
    Comparisons
    Also Known As
    128T Networking Platform, 128 Technology SD-WAN
    Viptela, Cisco vEdge Cloud Router
    Citrix CloudBridge, WOC, NetScaler SD-WAN
    Learn More
    Juniper
    Cisco
    Citrix
    Overview

    The 128T Networking Platform (128T) natively provides network-based security, control, and insight across data centers, wide-area networks (WAN), and edge locations for enterprises, service providers, and cloud companies alike. 128T is reshaping the way organizations design, deploy, and operate real-world networks by making them dramatically simpler, smarter, and more secure — it’s going to fix the router — and ultimately the network — as we know it.

    Cisco SD-WAN is a software-defined WAN (wide area network) solution that provides for secure stable connections to applications for enterprises and organizations. Cisco SD-WAN works to speed up the seamless movement to the cloud. A very robust and reliable solution, Cisco SD-WAN is cutting-edge in threat security and stability of the complete network and has very low latency. Cisco SD-WAN uses Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS), Software as a Service (SaaS), data centers, and even the internet to smoothly advance the move to a SASE (Service Access Service Edge)-based architecture. The Cisco SD-WAN dashboard gives you a complete visual of your entire infrastructure; you can see everything in real time. You will also have simplified IT operations and gain advanced network capabilities, dependability, and security. One valued feature is the overlay management protocol (OMP), which applies to your entire network to speedily connect all your company data centers. Cisco SD-WAN has a very flexible architecture and can be deployed on premises, in the cloud, hybrid, and even has multi-cloud options. Cisco SD-WAN instantly discovers, authenticates, and provisions all devices, both existing and new.

    Cisco SD-WAN simplifies the management of multiple connections across the WAN, improves the end-user experience, improves overall application functionality and performance, and is a very cost-effective solution. Cisco SD-WAN integrates well with Microsoft 365, Salesforce, and many other cloud-based business solutions. Additionally, Cisco SD-WAN optimizes connectivity and streamlines workflows for Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Azure.

    Benefits of Cisco SD-WAN

    • Increased profitability - Cisco SD-WAN will improve performance and decrease overall connectivity costs.
    • Improved productivity - Cisco SD-WAN requires less staff to manage and secure the WANs so valuable resources can be allocated elsewhere in your organization, increasing total productivity.
    • Flexible scalability- Cisco SD-WAN’s flexible and easily scalable architecture will allow your organization to address significantly greater business opportunities, helping to consistently increase revenue.
    • Enhanced security - Cisco SD-WAN offers real-time policy enforcement, ensuring that downtime and unplanned outages are kept to a minimum.

    What real users have to say:

    Cisco SD-WAN is fast with lower costs: “Using SD-WAN to combine services can result in better up time, higher speeds, and much lower costs.”

    Cisco is a brand you can trust: “Cisco is an industry leader, so customers have a high level of trust with the brand - more so than with some newcomers that might have some more revolutionary solutions, but no name recognition.”

    Cisco SD-WAN offers load-balancing and real-time traffic monitoring: “Load balancing is a feature that allows us to take the best of our links and distribute the load intelligently, always with an eye on the end-customer experience.”

    Citrix SD-WAN is a software-defined wide area network (SD-WAN), WAN optimization, and WAN edge solution. Citrix SD-WAN is recognized for providing a robust, trustworthy user experience so that an organization's distributed workforce can deliver the best possible outcomes at all times. Organizations can easily deploy solid security protocols wherever needed and also have the option to choose from a diverse choice of security options with unified security service and seamless integration with today’s top next-gen firewalls.

    Citrix SD-WAN provides a single cloud-based user dashboard that enables organizations to easily manage their WAN, prioritize and audit applications, and configure security protocols. Citrix SD-WAN enables users to easily manage hybrid multi-cloud processes by improving applications and automating connectivity. Citrix SD-WAN gives organizations tremendous flexibility for deployment from public clouds, data centers, home offices, and branches.

    Citrix SD-WAN is the basis of the Citrix consolidated process to SASE (secure access service edge) combined with cloud-delivered security and zero-trust network access to provide organizations with safe, trustworthy, secure access to each and every application anywhere, using any device.

    The Citrix SD-WAN solution is made up of three basic components:

    • Two software editions.
    • Cloud-hosted (or on-premises) orchestrator for clear visibility and unified protocol management.
    • Appliances: data center, home, branch, physical or virtual.

    Citrix SD-WAN Orchestrator

    The Citrix SD-WAN Orchestrator can be on premises or cloud-hosted and is a multi-tenant management service offered to Citrix partners and do-it-yourself enterprise organizations. The dashboard delivers a comprehensive view of your organization’s SD-WAN network concerning the functionality and usage of every site. The intuitive dashboard delivers a summary of uptime of the overlay and underlay paths, usage trends, and network-wide alerts.

    Available application-centric policies: quality of service (QoS), firewall policies, and application-based traffic steering can all be easily configurable globally or per site.

    Reviews from Real Users

    “With SD-WAN, they have all the features and benefits they need to send live streaming information to the database and to headquarters without requiring a server at each site. Our other clients have various sites with just one type of communication, say a radio or a mobile network. SD-WAN helps them to combine and get a better bandwidth to balance all their applications and services.” - Business Consultant at a tech services company

    “We needed to create some kind of network that was distributed through data and media or big files. It was a retail company, so there were branches, and the branches needed to connect to HQ. We provided HQ and each branch with Citrix SD-WAN. We tried to use it, and it worked well. The transmission was good, and they were losing less data.” - Ruslan M., SMB Sales Director, Regional Business Development Department at Softline

    Offer
    Learn more about Juniper Session Smart Router
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    Learn more about Cisco SD-WAN
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    Learn more about Citrix SD-WAN
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    Sample Customers
    Revation Systems
    Doyle Research, Ashton Metzler & Associates
    AIDS Healthcare Foundation, Cornerstone Home Lending Inc., Dallara, ecVision, Essar, Eurofred, Groupe Promutuel, HMSHost Corporation, Royal Caribbean Cruise Lines Ltd, Royal Caribbean International
    Top Industries
    VISITORS READING REVIEWS
    Comms Service Provider34%
    Computer Software Company15%
    Government5%
    Retailer5%
    REVIEWERS
    Comms Service Provider51%
    Computer Software Company14%
    Financial Services Firm9%
    Transportation Company6%
    VISITORS READING REVIEWS
    Comms Service Provider33%
    Computer Software Company21%
    Manufacturing Company5%
    Government4%
    REVIEWERS
    Computer Software Company30%
    Wholesaler/Distributor30%
    Integrator10%
    Insurance Company10%
    VISITORS READING REVIEWS
    Comms Service Provider30%
    Computer Software Company29%
    Government4%
    Financial Services Firm4%
    Company Size
    VISITORS READING REVIEWS
    Small Business17%
    Midsize Enterprise17%
    Large Enterprise65%
    REVIEWERS
    Small Business46%
    Midsize Enterprise14%
    Large Enterprise40%
    VISITORS READING REVIEWS
    Small Business18%
    Midsize Enterprise15%
    Large Enterprise66%
    REVIEWERS
    Small Business23%
    Midsize Enterprise38%
    Large Enterprise38%
    VISITORS READING REVIEWS
    Small Business20%
    Midsize Enterprise18%
    Large Enterprise61%
    Buyer's Guide
    Cisco SD-WAN vs. Citrix SD-WAN
    July 2022
    Free Report: Cisco SD-WAN vs. Citrix SD-WAN
    Find out what your peers are saying about Cisco SD-WAN vs. Citrix SD-WAN and other solutions. Updated: July 2022.
    DOWNLOAD NOW
    620,987 professionals have used our research since 2012.

    Cisco SD-WAN is ranked 2nd in Software Defined WAN (SD-WAN) Solutions with 46 reviews while Citrix SD-WAN is ranked 6th in Software Defined WAN (SD-WAN) Solutions with 5 reviews. Cisco SD-WAN is rated 8.0, while Citrix SD-WAN is rated 9.4. The top reviewer of Cisco SD-WAN writes "Stable, cutting-edge, and robust". On the other hand, the top reviewer of Citrix SD-WAN writes "Provides a fluid experience, balancing bandwidth to applications or solutions that need prioritizing". Cisco SD-WAN is most compared with Fortinet FortiGate, Versa FlexVNF, VMware SD-WAN, Meraki SD-WAN and Nuage Networks, whereas Citrix SD-WAN is most compared with Fortinet FortiGate, VMware SD-WAN, Meraki SD-WAN, Steelhead and Cato Networks. See our Cisco SD-WAN vs. Citrix SD-WAN report.

    See our list of best Software Defined WAN (SD-WAN) Solutions vendors and best WAN Edge vendors.

    We monitor all Software Defined WAN (SD-WAN) Solutions 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.