Meraki Dashboard Reviews

I would say the ease of use is the most valuable feature. It's very easy to set up and get up and running. 

The downside to the simplicity is that you can't get as granular as you could with the Cisco APs. They don't have a command line interface, or CLI, so you can't just go into the CLI and copy and paste a bunch of commands. You have to do it through the dashboard. That would be the biggest downside.

Their biggest improvement needs to be their documentation. With Cisco, for example, you can just Google whatever image your controller is on. You can say, "I want an 8.5 config guide," and they will give you a PDF that goes from A to Z, with everything you need to know in one place for that software image. You can just open up the guide, do a search for whatever you're looking for, and boom, it'll take you to it. Meraki, on the other hand, does not do that, so if you want to learn anything, you kind of have to know what it is you're looking for to begin with. It's just a webpage database of articles and you've got to basically find what you're looking for. I would love to just have a guide for each software release as opposed to me having to hunt it out.

I've been using this solution for about a year and a half now. 

The stability has been amazing. I don't have to manage it a 10th as much as I have to manage my Cisco stuff.

It's very scalable. We have dozens of employees using the dashboard because each location has its own technician and they have access to their location.

I did 99% of the setup. The only thing I had to get help with was for some of the security guys to do their stuff, but it's really easy to set up. That's the great thing about Meraki et al. It is super easy, almost just straight out of the box. You can watch an eight minute video and have an access point up and running. Getting into the nitty gritty is a little harder. When you want to start doing radio profiles and power control, that gets a little more convoluted. It's easy once you know where to look in the dashboard, though. The hard part is knowing where to find the granular stuff, but the initial setup is super easy.

I would say that once you get it really scaled out, one person can maintain it, but that's not how we do it. The security guy handles the firewall part, the voice guy handles the voice part, and I handle the wireless part.

You don't have to pay for the dashboard. You pay for a license, and an access point comes with it. You use the free dashboard to manage those access points.

My advice to those considering this solution is that if you want a set it and forget it solution, this is great. If you want a solution that you can get into the minutia and adjust at a really super granular level, this is not the solution for you.

I would rate this solution as a nine out of ten. 

The Meraki Dashboard allows me to gain everything, for example, access to the devices for programming, and access to reports on hacking attempts, including threats against any of my devices. The tool also works as a firewall and blocks threats, and I can get reports on that. I can also get reports on how well my access points are working. It's a really good dashboard for those purposes.

With the Meraki Dashboard, I can preconfigure a particular device, and then once it joins the network, it automatically updates, so that's a really good case for the tool. Another way the tool improves my organization is that it gives users the ability to find out who is attempting to gain access to the network. There were attempts at hacking in my organization and through the Meraki Dashboard, my team was able to get to the IP and block it easily.

What I found most valuable in the Meraki Dashboard is straight monitoring of the different devices, as well as the ability to easily set up VPNs, for example, both Meraki client VPNs and non-Meraki VPNs for different organizations that work with my company. I also like that the tool is a really good firewall.

For my purposes, I don't need to see any other features added to the Meraki Dashboard. I have no criticisms and I do like the tool. If I had a criticism for it, it would be about the pricing because it could be a little less, but again, for the service that you get, I won't complain about that too much.

I've been working with Meraki Dashboard for the last ten years.

The Meraki Dashboard is a very stable tool. The only time I haven't been able to gain access to it was when there was an issue with Meraki, in particular, with the cloud, but that lasted only for half an hour to an hour.

The Meraki Dashboard is a very scalable tool. It's easy to bring on new devices and new networks. You can go in and set up a device, and once it comes online, it will automatically update, and then you've got all the information on it, and it takes less than five minutes to set up a new device.

Technical support for Meraki Dashboard has been quite good. There was only one time when I couldn't get the answers that I needed, but the rest of the time, I did finally get the answers I needed, though it took a little while. I had to find an older gentleman that had been with the company for a while to figure something out because the young support people couldn't figure it out. Other than that, the technical support has been really good.

In my previous organization, everything was done on the Cisco command line. In my current organization, Meraki came on and the Meraki Dashboard was offered as part of the licensing for each device, so it was a no-brainer to use it rather than try to find another solution.

The initial setup for the Meraki Dashboard was straightforward. It was done before I got on site for this particular job.

Implementation of the Meraki Dashboard was done by a third party, and then when I took over the job, I just gained access to the dashboard. It was a reseller who implemented the tool and my organization was satisfied with the work the reseller did.

I'm unable to share ROI information, and all I know is that Meraki Dashboard is meant to be a one-stop-shop. I can access my devices from anywhere around the world through it and all I need is a browser interface, so the tool allows one person to do the job of a normal five to six-person IT team.

Licensing for Meraki Dashboard is paid every year, and it's on a per-device model that costs roughly $300 to $400 per device, but that comes with full support and troubleshooting, etc. Compared to similar products, Meraki Dashboard is quite high-end, but the costs you pay are all-in.

The Meraki Dashboard is part of Meraki's commitment to its users. It's on a private cloud with Meraki.

In my organization, it's just me using Meraki Dashboard. I'm an IT Manager and I'm also in charge of the deployment and maintenance of the tool. It's easy and the only thing I have to do is make sure I have a network cable and power source, so I plug the tool in the wall, plug it into a network cable, and that's it.

What's going on in my organization is that it was recently purchased by another company that is coming online, and that company is using Meraki, so I'm going to be offloading all of the day-to-day to that company's IT support team.

My advice to others looking into implementing Meraki Dashboard is that you will find that it is very easy to wrap your head around. It is very full. There are no shortcomings on the tool that I found so far as well as on the devices because Meraki Dashboard is made by Cisco, so it's a very good quality device. It's a very good quality dashboard that provides reporting services. Everything is really good, and it will allow you to do anything you need unless you have to physically go on-site, but you can do everything on the Meraki Dashboard.

I'm rating the Meraki Dashboard ten out of ten.

We use Meraki Dashboard for office network management. The solution is full SaaS services deployed on the Cisco Meraki cloud.

The dashboard is a valuable feature because it is fully SaaS. This means we can access it from anywhere and we don't have to worry about the infrastructure. This is something that is already available in Cisco regularly, in the old version of Cisco, and something that Meraki sold. The hardware of Meraki is very good quality. Cisco is implementing new features into the dashboard from time to time. The best quality of the Meraki Dashboard is its high level of service. 

The cost of the solution is high and can be improved.

I have been using the solution for five years.

I give the stability of the solution a nine out of ten.

The support is quick, responsive, and user-friendly. It's been a pleasure working with Cisco Meraki Support. They always provide a response and answers. Even when we need to replace devices, they do it quickly.

Positive

The initial setup is straightforward for someone with experience.

Depending on the architecture of the network the deployment can take from one hour to one working day.

Meraki Dashboard isn't a cheap product, but the quality is worth the price. I can't say if it's expensive or not, because everyone understands that quality costs.

I give the solution a nine out of ten.

We currently have two people using the solution.

Just as Mercedes is known for its high-quality cars, Cisco is known for its high-quality networking hardware. If we're looking for a reliable network, we can't go wrong with Cisco equipment. Hardware and software come from different sources, but together they create a winning solution. Cisco provides the hardware and Meraki provides the software. I believe that there are cheaper products available, but the quality is not the same. In the five years I have been using Meraki I have not checked the competitors. I am not familiar with the pricing for alternative solutions, so I can't compare where Meraki Dashboard fits in terms of cost.

I recommend the solution to others. Meraki Dashboard is a quality solution, intuitive, easy to implement, and has great support.

We're using Meraki Dashboard for the overall insight and management of the products and services that we have with Meraki, whether switches, SD-WAN, access points, MDM, or the system manager. Meraki Dashboard is our overall portal for service management for all Meraki products.

Meraki Dashboard helped my company because it allows the oversight and management of Meraki products and services from an operational and maintenance perspective, including software updates and overall utility. The solution also allows the segregation of rights so that multiple people can quickly manage different aspects of the services.

What I found most valuable in Meraki Dashboard is that it's well-organized, easy to use, and practical.

An area for improvement in Meraki Dashboard is licensing management because it's a little complex. Product licensing can be made a little bit easier through license concurrency and a more straightforward approach to applying the license to products and services.

I've been using Meraki Dashboard for five or six years now. I'm still using the solution but in a different capacity.

Meraki Dashboard is a stable solution.

Meraki Dashboard is a scalable solution.

I found the technical support for Meraki Dashboard good, so I'm rating it four out of five.

From a dashboard perspective, my company used Fortinet before  Meraki Dashboard to oversee products and services.

Meraki Dashboard was straightforward to set up.

I've seen ROI from Meraki Dashboard.

Meraki Dashboard is a utility and portal that's part of the Meraki solution.

In my company, ten to twelve people use Meraki Dashboard.

As the Meraki Dashboard deployment was very straightforward, only two to three people deployed it. Ten people handled the maintenance of the solution, but it was based on areas in which people had responsibility.

Currently, there's no plan to increase the usage of the Meraki Dashboard.

I would recommend Meraki Dashboard to others who have Meraki products and services, as the solution can provide oversight into what you're doing and what you'll be able to maintain from a Meraki point of view.

My rating for Meraki Dashboard is eight out of ten because it's a strong product for me.

I'm doing everything with this solution. I'm renting some access and using it for my enterprise. I'm doing the insights. I'm doing the API integration with the NordLayer. I can work from home with it as well. 

For the most part, it's perfect. The features are all great.

The initial setup is very good.

It's a scalable solution.

The solution is stable. 

It is a little bit expensive. 

Maybe sometimes they just need to add some more integration to not be a hundred percent Cisco. For example, with Cisco Umbrella, if they could integrate, let's say, Palo Alto or some other third-party devices on the API, not on the VPN channel, that would be great.

Some features could be added. 

I've used the solution for around two years.

The solution is very stable and reliable. There are no bugs. Its performance is good. 

I've found the solution to be scalable. 

The number of users vary. 

For my company, I'm providing consultancy. That's around ten people. However, for other companies where we provide the consultant, there's sometimes 2,000, or 5,000 people. I cannot distinguish between my business as a small enterprise doing that consultancy or in general our clients. It's hard to give exact user numbers.

I didn't face any real problems that would require support. Maybe some other people might if they are doing things on their own side.

Sometimes, with the old way of Meraki VPN connection, it did not work on Windows. However, I asked somebody to follow up with customer support or with technical support and we worked out the issue.

I'm using the Cisco Meraki right now for my own business. In my company, we are using FortiGate. 

The setup is easy. It's not complex. It could be more friendly. When we connect on the API, maybe we can add some more features. Other than that, it was great.

I don't have a huge environment, to be honest. If I have a big environment, I would automate that. I'm doing everything manually in a small environment, and it's straightforward and fast.

The amount of people you need to maintain the solution depends on the third party. Our monitoring or support will be two or three people. However, usually, maintenance is handled by a third party. We don't consider how many people; we do the fees, and they will do their job.

I handle the initial setup in-house. I did not need the assistance of other outside individuals such as consultants or integrators. 

Of course, the last time I deployed around 1200 sites and I used a third party.

While we haven't seen any ROI just yet, we expect to see an ROI in three to four years. 

It is a pretty expensive solution. I'd rate it four out of five in terms of how expensive it is, with five being the most expensive. 

There is just the licensing fee and the integration. If I do it with the Cisco Umbrella, since I'm forced to use the Umbrella to get the full features, I'm limited with the Umbrella. That said, I don't want, as an example, a SaaS solution. If I do it with NordVPN or any other SaaS solution, I have to pay there, and I do a VPN connection which is not the right solution for me in 2022. 

We're a customer and an end-user.

We are using the latest version of the solution. However, I don't know the exact version number. 

I'd advise users that the solution can be expensive, and they need to brace for that.

I'd rate the solution seven out of ten.

We primarily use the solution for WiFi. It’s the only thing we use. We have eight Meraki’s for WiFi and use this as a dashboard. We have the devices in the dashboard when we link up to the WiFi.

Principally it is for delivering the internet and for the sites to be standard in the company. We have a firewall, servers, storage, and backup all in the cloud.

I like the configuration capabilities.

The implementation process is good.

The cloud security is excellent.

It’s very stable and reliable.

The scalability is good.

I can’t recall needing anything specific to be improved. Maybe in six months, we might have a different opinion.

I’d like the product to allow for other solutions to be integrated with the dashboard as well.

I’ve been using the solution since 2015.

The solution has been quite stable. We haven’t had issues with bugs or glitches. It doesn’t crash or freeze. It’s reliable and the performance has been good.

The product can scale if you need it to. It’s not a problem at all.

We have approximately 80 employees using the solution right now.

We have local technical support. We haven’t had an issue with them.

It’s neither easy nor difficult to set up. It’s got a moderate level of difficulty when it comes to implementation.

The pricing is good. It’s reasonable. We don’t have an issue with the costs. I’m not sure of the exact cost, however, it’s my understanding the Meraki WiFi is around $800. That’s for a three-year license. It’s about $150 a year.

We are a Cisco customer and work with local Cisco partners.

I have friends in other companies and I do recommend this solution to them. Cisco Meraki is the best solution. Other partners from banks, for example, also recommend this solution. I am very happy with this product.

I’d rate the solution ten out of ten. It’s the best.

Our primary use case of Meraki Dashboard is to manage networks, whether our own or those of our customers. We also manage the firewalls through the portal as well as switches, wireless access points or whatever devices there are. Meraki controls the devices, configures them and also troubleshoots. I'm a senior solution architect and we're a Cisco partner, specifically for the Meraki brand.

The solution saves us a lot of time. They say work smarter, not harder, and Meraki allows us to do that and not waste time on issues that previously concerned us. Meraki is pretty much the leader in cloud-based technology when it comes to networks and they've saved us and our clients a lot of time. 

It's great that everything is in a single pane and you can look at your network in one centralized place. I also value the ability to troubleshoot network issues through the solution. For example, you can do a cable test off their switch port from the portal even if you're not on-site. If I want to know whether the data cable is good, I can run a test through the portal, then the switch, and it'll come back and tell me whether that cable is good or has been damaged. 

They also have a nice system included for firmware updates and numerous good logging files and many features that help whenever something goes wrong. As a pivot onto the security aspect, if you have their Advanced Security License, then they monitor for you. Cisco has lots of different security teams, and they're able to almost make network security a passive thing. As long as I have the right license and have it configured, it catches malware, and will stop a user from downloading a file that's malicious software. In addition, they have a lot of group policy features. You can assign specific users on the network to group policies that either give them access to or bar them from specific things. 

The positives are all about the ease of being able to see everything, the ability to troubleshoot and for the solution to passively stop malicious events without me having to do a whole lot of work.

The client VPN could use some help, but that's probably partially Microsoft's fault because of the Windows client for VPNs, which keeps changing. Meraki don't have their own software for connecting to the VPN so you have to use the Windows one. It would be great for them to create a client for users to install to connect to the client VPN server. It's one of the biggest complaints about Meraki.

I've been using this solution for about three years. 

The solution is stable, it's only been down once or twice in three years and even then it was for a short amount of time and it wasn't completely down, just aspects of it. It's very stable. If a customer has an issue with their network log, we get an alert and check what's going on.

The product is very scalable and I've never had an issue. They have a ton of networks around the world that are all on the portal. In our own company, we have two users dealing with maintenance and we use the solution every day.  Some of our larger customers have over a hundred employees and it works well. 

Technical support does a great job. They have a support portal when you're logged in, you can either call a number, or open a ticket and they're onto it quickly. They usually resolve or respond with helpful information within an hour.

I've worked with Aruba Cloud, they have a different type of cloud portal. I've also worked with regular Cisco, not the Meraki side and HP which bought Aruba, so some of that is now the same. We've also dealt with UniFi Dashboard from Ubiquiti, which is a cheaper brand that doesn't really compare but is for anyone on a tight budget. 

As long as you understand how it works, the initial setup is very easy and you can configure the network before the devices come in, because they put them in your dashboard and you plug it in when you're ready and it automatically does the work. This is the easiest system I've used and I've worked with most of them. It saves a lot of time because they have lots of templates and abilities to clone configurations from other sites. We're consultants so we did the integration for our company, although Meraki have sometimes helped out on projects. 

The license is not cheap as you have to pay a fee for each device but in return they provide good support. If you're buying a Meraki firewall, then you have to buy a license or it won't work. There are options for an annual, three-year, five-year or 10-year license and they have three different lines; the Enterprise Baseline License, the Advanced Security License, and then they have an SD-WAN Plus License, which is the top line license.

The three-year license is about one-third of the price of the actual hardware so if you have a $1,000-$1,200 piece of equipment, then the base license is about $300 for three years for the firewall. Access points are a separate license. It depends on what you're buying. There are 25 to 30 different products and they have different lines of each product.

It can get complicated. They have a top-of-the-range firewall, the MX250, which runs to $20,000-$30,000, and a license for it can be close to $10,000 for three years. They don't actually charge you a license for the dashboard, you get it when you pay for the license for all the hardware.

It's important to find a good partner to work with and to plan what you actually plan to do, and understand what you're buying. There are so many different options with Meraki and you can end up spending more money than you actually need to. We've been educating our customer base about why they should spend more money on their networks and migrating them to Meraki because it's a very good solution. 

The solution saves me a lot of time and there aren't many negatives so I rate it nine out of 10. 

Cisco has a cloud partnership, which you can use to provide use cases for the customer.

All products can be monitored and managed from the same dashboard.

There could be an on-premise server for the dashboard.
Meraki can download the full server from the cloud to on-prem for the client. It will be beneficial to get new insight and new options. It will be an innovation for Meraki. Other cloud providers provide this feature.

I have been using Meraki Dashboard for over five years in presales and one year in a technical role.

We didn't face any issues with the solution's stability.

I rate the solution's stability a ten out of ten.

The solution is mainly for medium businesses but can work on small and enterprise businesses.

I rate the solution’s scalability a nine out of ten.

Meraki Dashboard has excellent technical support in the UK and a lot of sales support. However, the support for the BOC license was not as good.

We have used Fortinet before. Meraki is a management platform focused only on the dashboard. They give 100% effort to support all things. Fortinet is not as powerful as Meraki.

The product’s pricing is neither high nor low.

I rate the product’s pricing a five out of ten, where one is cheap, and ten is expensive.

Overall, I rate the solution an eight out of ten.