Meraki Dashboard Reviews

The most valuable feature is its simplicity in navigating through the dashboard. It's well set out, and the layout is nice and user friendly.

A lot of clients enjoy seeing layer 7 visibility. They get a good indication and insight into what is happening in their network and what applications are being used the most. They can then customize and give preference to business-critical applications.

They can improve the landing page in Meraki Dashboard. When I go into an organization, they can include a lot more infographics. They can also simplify it a bit and consolidate it. For example, if I've got five branches and I go into customer A's profile or organization, I'd like to see an infographic on the landing page providing a snippet of the entire network layout, that is, all branches in one snapshot. From there, I would like to go into the network that I want to work on or view.

I have been using Meraki Dashboard for two years. 

It is 100% stable. Once we deploy it, we very rarely have any comebacks. 

I'm happy with its scalability. 

I only have experience of dialing into Meraki technical support. They were very good.

I don't typically work with this solution. Just from my previous experience, it is fairly simple to set up. I don't think there are any issues.

Deployment duration depends on the complexity. It can take two to three days for complex deployments. It can take a couple of hours for simple deployments.

Typically, the license model is for one, three, and five years. They can just be a bit more flexible around it and look into providing an option for 24 months.

If you are looking for a secure and simple solution, I would highly recommend it.

I would rate Meraki Dashboard an eight out of ten.

We have implemented Cisco Meraki in thirty-two branch offices and our HQ.

This solution provides great Wi-Fi velocity, great security options, and awesome VPN velocity.

Meraki dashboard deserves an Oscar.

We would like to be able to test the health of WAN connections.

I am the Practice Director for Network Infrastructure and I primarily use this solution for edge security and WAN routing.

This solution has improved our organization by significantly reducing the time to deploy devices, and it also made remote troubleshooting a lot easier.

The features I find most valuable are the visibility and the ease of management. I like the visibility into all the traffic, feature parity with Cisco ASA firewalls and things like that.

Something that needs to be improved, is the fact that you if you don't renew the subscription license, it stops working. I would also like to see SSL BPM support for anything else.

The solution has been very stable. We've run into very few bugs, less than on the ASA platform.

We haven't had any issues with scalability and we have multi-hundred device sites, so I believe the solution is really scalable. 

The technical support has been great. Whenever you call them, they're responsive and we get an answer.

We used Cisco ASA before this and we realized that we needed better security compliance, more scalability, and some extra features. This solution now saves us time, and I like the added features that the Meraki dashboard offers. It is also consistent and very reliable. 

The initial setup was pretty easy. You simply follow the menu, and it prompts you for the inputs, which is pretty straightforward.

We have seen a return on investment. We've been spending a lot less time on tickets and deployments, so we have more time to do other things.

We have a license for 5 years. I've heard that the advanced security license is a bit on the high end because it's competitive with other solutions. I believe it really depends on the bandwidth, so the bigger your platform, the more you will pay.

We looked at Cisco ASA, Cisco FTD, and Meraki Dashboard. 

My rating for this solution is 9 out of 10 because we've had success with it, very few complaints, and it works great. I think a lot of people think Meraki is more geared towards small businesses, but I would say since Cisco's acquired them, they've come a long way. It is definitely a great solution so I would suggest that others try it out.
In the next version, I would love to see remote access VPN and getting the functionality so that the ASA product line can connect. 

Cisco Meraki offers unified management of devices on a network from a centralized dashboard.

The feature that seems most valuable in Meraki is that it covers SD-WAN and also the SD-LAN. In the dashboard, it has an integrated firewall and an integrated wireless LAN controller. Those are the features that are generally most useful for the customer. But, to be honest this is a solution for only small and medium-sized business customers.

I don't think that Cisco needs or wants to improve Meraki. Meraki was acquired by Cisco, and Cisco knows exactly what they wanted from the product. This product is only fitting for small to medium business. In order to work with large corporate enterprises, they have acquired another company that will help them provide an enterprise solution. That's why they are not going to improve Meraki. If they were going to try to scale the application of Meraki to enterprise solutions it would not be a good fit.

Both of the Cisco products don't yet support layer 2 MPLS (Multi-Protocol Label Switching). The only vendor I know of today that is supporting MPLS is Nokia. None of Cisco products supporting that protocol, so I think this is a gap in Cisco products.

As far as scalability, the product is not very scalable. The product will only be fit to cover small to medium businesses and Cisco is not likely to improve on that scalability as they have other products in line for the larger market. If a customer has other hardware that they use which supports a large enterprise, I don't think that Meraki fits as a solution.

To be honest about the technical support, in Kuwait we deal with a Cisco distributor and not Cisco directly. If we have any issues, we contact the Cisco distributor and not Cisco directly. So the technical support is not genuine Cisco support, which has an excellent reputation. 

We made the purchase through a vendor named Nordicom, and they would be the company that provides technical support. At this point, we have not had any problems that required contacting the vendor to get a solution. While I am sure that they will be competent as a Cisco vendor because it requires certification, I do not know for a fact about how good their technical support actually is.

I have worked with other products like Nuage from Nokia and I think the Meraki dashboard has a more beautiful and useful dashboard compared to other vendors. The other dashboards are more difficult than Meraki, which makes them harder to use. The Meraki dashboard is really very good. It has built-in security which is a feature that not all of the other vendors have. Because of this, other vendors have to integrate with other security vendors or products to provide a security option. Because Meraki is part of Cisco, it is integrated with some Cisco security solutions already. I feel Meraki is one of the best at what it does even if it is not fitting to large enterprises.

The setup for the product is not complex. I think it's very good.

I was working for an ISP and the ISP mentality is to manage the dashboard and installations. We don't let the customer manage the dashboard unless they have requested to do that specifically, and we do the installations.

I don't have much experience with the pricing because the financial team is responsible for that. So in terms of comparing the prices between Meraki and other solutions, I do not have direct experience and the information to do that. But I heard that Meraki is not cheap. To be fair this is only what I heard from a good source. It's not the cheapest solution, but it is a good one. I just don't know where it falls exactly in the range of competitors.

Before this, we did not evaluate other solutions because it's a new feature and functionality. Maybe we will test other products now because there are many other players in the market. Each vendor is focused on a specific category of clientele, so not all of the solutions will be appropriate for our needs. We are actually evaluating more than one vendors right now, including Meraki and Datadog.

If a customer who is considering the use of this product is not a very large business and only has few branches, Meraki is a very good solution. For large businesses, it is not a fitting product.

Overall, I rate the product as an eight out of ten. It's a very good solution. The rating is not higher than that because I think eight is the best it can attain at this point. If they make enhancements to make it work more smoothly and add additional useful features, I would rate it higher. I'm leaving the other two points for any future improvements.

The price should be improved — lowered — as well. If it is very expensive compared to other solutions, this will be a challenge for the adoption of the product. Meraki is making a very good solution, but when comparing products, the price will matter to many potential clients. The dashboard is good, but the competing products can improve their own dashboards or make a better, more simple dashboard than the one Meraki has. It's not that big a deal to improve that feature. So if the competition has better prices, a nice dashboard, or better technologies, they will compete and maybe take market share.

As an aside, I had an interesting discussion last week with Cisco while we were evaluating their product. I told them about something that I thought should be improved about the product. They told me: "We are Cisco," meaning that they did not have to worry about improving that aspect of their product because of their popularity and brand name. They have the right to claim they are the best and they have worked to gain that reputation. Most customers know this, and they know Cisco's reputation and their name.

In the end, not all of the customers will go by the name only. Some customers will go with Cisco directly, regardless of how the product develops. But there are other products that compete and customers will discover those when doing comparisons and possibly switch if Cisco does not pay attention to the needs of the clients. For example, Fortinet has its own SD-WAN solution now. Many other players like VMware and Nokia also have their own new or emerging solutions — and they are big, well-known names, like Cisco. If, in the end, they have better solutions, the customer will use their solution instead. It is not enough just to have the name Cisco. 

I am one of the people who is an advocate for Cisco solutions, but the mentality of the company being superior just because they have a name needs to change or the product development will fall behind. Because of this attitude, there is really more reason to consider other products and people will.

We use this solution to provide Wi-Fi access within the organization.

Using this solution reduces the amount of time that I have to spend managing our network.

The most valuable feature of this solution is the single pane of glass. It has nice features like heat mapping and rogue AP detection. It can analyze the traffic that it is picking up from what may be a rogue access point, and it is able to identify those and send relevant notifications.

Another helpful feature is that it can dynamically change the channel that the AP is using. 

It would be helpful to have the ability to create a floor plan based on an existing PDF or JPEG, which is automatically converted into a usable network map.

The stability is very good. So far it has not gone down, and I haven't experienced any issues with it.

This is a very scalable solution. The APs are relatively lightweight, and we have many of them being managed by one controller. 

I haven't yet needed to use technical support.

We were previously using prox and Wi-Fi APs. We were having all kinds of issues; there was poor visibility, and we had to log in to agents individually. Sometimes the WAN interface would just break, so you would have to reboot it then begin troubleshooting once it came back online. There was a need for a centralized solution.

The initial setup of this solution is very straightforward. You have to purchase the license for the Enterprise, and then purchase a license for each AP. Then you create a login with that license and you can build out your networks. It is easy to configure, and this includes defining your access points.

I am the only person who maintains this solution for our organization.

We used CDW to assist with our implementation and deployment, and our experience was very good.

I don't have an accurate measure for ROI, but the time savings suggests that there is something there.

The licensing fees are $180 USD, per AP, for three years. I don't recall the initial startup costs.

I did not shop around very much. I had heard about what this solution could do and choose it based on that.

This product saves me time and I am very happy using it. It is a great product, but nothing is perfect. 

I would rate this solution a nine out of ten.

We use this solution to create VPN tunnels between remote sites and our core.

It has made creating VPN tunnels between remote sites and our core a lot easier. To create a VPN we need to deal with multipoint VLANs that we have between our different sites. Using this solution has meant that we don't have to create a bunch of specific policies, such as firewall exceptions. Instead, we just have the Meraki Cloud profile set up properly.

The most valuable feature is the single pane of glass that gives you multisite visibility.

It has the ability to push a configuration to multiple devices, or you can use the single pane of glass to login to any one of them. It saves a lot of time if you have to make a change on the fly.

The one issue that we have had is that the VPN tunnel would go down unless you worked out with the ISP that you would be using a static IP address on the WAN interface. If you're allowed to just be dynamic then whenever the port and IP changes, it will break the VPN connection and it does not always come back up. Our ISP has the dynamic IP addresses change on a cycle, so this was a problem for us.

So far, stability seems good, aside from the collapsing VPN tunnel issue that we were having due to having a dynamic IP address.

We haven't scaled the product enough to give an accurate answer, but so far it has met our needs.

We have been in contact with technical support, but I have not dealt with them personally.

Previously, for the remote VPN, we were using Aruba. There is a certain amount of complexity, and we had issues in terms of scalability. The Meraki solution was easy to use and allowed us to separate the traffic. It had to be split between our general inter-LAN that includes internet access, and data that is prioritized because it is handling 911 traffic.

The installation was pretty straightforward. I obtained my Meraki certification in one day.

We worked directly with the Meraki team.

ROI is hard to gauge because we are a Not-for-Profit organization. 

My advice to anybody who is implementing this solution is to attend the Meraki classes and obtain your CMNO certification. You have to be familiar with the dashboard, the visibility, and the different products that you will be working on.

I would rate this solution an eight out of ten.

Our primary use case is to deploy and manage the wireless APs and system switches.

One of the ways Meraki improved our organization is just the simplicity of deployment and scalability. We could easily see and monitor the bandwidth at all the stores easily.

The feature that I find most valuable is the product's ability and simplicity.

Probably the thing that could use the most improvement is the terminal monitor issues on ports. According to Meraki support, we need a third-party program to integrate other, non-Meraki switches if they don't have that integrator already. It is not a problem with the Meraki switches, of course.

The stability of the solution is great. The only problems we had is an issue with the firmware, but they replaced that right away and it solved the issue.

We think the scalability of the solution is great as far as the wireless AP. We expanded, so far, by ten access points. Eventually, we are going to do 30 of them.

If we experience any problem I can call technical support right away. If I have to do something like replacing a switch, they send it to me within two business days.

I was not in that position to make any type of call on the product we selected and used at the time it was implemented. 

The initial setup was really pretty straightforward.

The APs are pretty easy to deploy so we did not need the assistance of a vendor or consultant. We just got support directly from Meraki is we had any issue.

I am not in the position to evaluate the return on investment.

Cost and pricing falls outside of my responsibility.

I was not in a position to be involved in the evaluation of options.

As far as this solution I would rate it as a nine out of ten from my experience and comparing it to what I know about other solutions. It's really easy to use. The technical support and customer experience are great and that just adds value to the product.

Any advice I have for people considering the solution is that if they want something that is going to work and be simple to deploy, this is a product they should strongly consider. I don't think the simplicity of the product is matched for what it provides.

My primary use case is managing the LAN, the Local Area Network, in our shops. We have a total of 40 shops in France, so I'm using Meraki for managing my LAN, my access point, my switches my VLAN, my SSIDs, etc.

Meraki is easy to use. You don't have to be a network engineer to use it. That's why I like it. I'm in IT, I know how our network works, but if you give that solution to my mom, for example, she would have used it like a normal, she could have opened a shop for example. That's what I like about Meraki Dashboard - all your switches, all your access points are all in one place, and it's easy to use. 

The MDM needs improvement. I know that we used to use the MDM for a long time, for one or two years, but we had to leave it because it wasn't really good enough for us. THe MDM should be improved.

The stability is okay. In three years, we've only had two or three problems, but one of them was our fault. The other one was on Meraki's side, but it still worked. Meraki was not working, we couldn't use them, but the products were okay, the LAN was okay. So I guess the stability is great. 

We have five administrators that work on the dashboard.

Technical support is great. They've been great.

We used Aruba for about six months before Meraki. We switched because we thought that the Aruba Dashboard was really poor in terms of features and things you can do in management. Also, the managing area of Aruba was really bad compared to Meraki. That's why we switched.

The initial setup is really easy. You just have to open an account. It's also really easy to add equipment.

We used the Meraki team, but beyond that, we didn't get help from anyone else. We installed all the switches and all of the access points.

We thought about Aruba, but the features weren't enough, compared to Meraki.

We use the solution every day, every hour. We usually check the dashboard once a day.

Be aware that it's really easy to use, so you can easily make the wrong changes for example, but can get help easily from good people. Meraki is very accessible.

It's a solution that can be used by anyone - by administrators, by end-users, by a lot of people. You have to be aware that it is pretty easy to be used, but you have to use it well. Use it well and it will be fine.

The MDM, however, is bad. We're using another MDM now because Meraki was so bad.

I would rate the solution 9 out of 10.