Meraki SD-WAN Reviews

Meraki SD-WAN serves as our SD-WAN. As I previously stated, we have over a thousand retail stores across the country, and we have Cisco Meraki at each one. 

I'm not particularly close to it. Because our infrastructure team is in charge of that. I'm more on the information security side. But, from what I understand, the product works well and there isn't much that can be done to improve it.

More automation is always a good thing, but I'm not particularly close to the Meraki. That is more of an infrastructure team's responsibility. I'm not too familiar with the Meraki environment, but I suppose more automation is always a good thing.

We have over a thousand retail locations across the country, and we use Cisco Meraki for our SD-WAN solutions in all of them.

While I am new to the company and have only been with them for five months, I have been using this solution for a few years.

We are working with the latest version.

I'm not directly involved in SD-WAN monitoring and maintenance, but based on what I've heard from our infrastructure team, it's working well.

Meraki SD-WAN is a stable solution.

Meraki SD-WAN is scalable.

We have approximately 4,000 users in our company.

I have not contacted technical support. That is something that our infrastructure team handles.

We do not use Juniper.

The initial setup is straightforward.

I am not aware of the licensing fees.

I would rate Meraki SD-WAN a nine out of ten.

I am the architecture lead.

I believe this solution does a perfect job. It delivers what it's supposed to do and it's secure. The Meraki interface is really well driven and very mature. I like that it's a dashboard on the cloud so profile settings can be done from anywhere.

I think Meracki still has some work to do in terms of catching up with other companies when it comes to AI. 

I've been using this solution for a year. 

The solution is stable. 

When it comes to scalability, there's no compromise with Cisco, there is always scalability. 

Our technical support is local, from Saudi Arabia, and I believe the Smart Tech function is really awesome. 

The initial setup is straightforward, everything is built-in, and it's plug-and-play.

You need to pay for quality. We don't have a problem with the price but I know there is competition. We have an enterprise contract with Cisco. 

I take this solution 10 out of 10. 

What we do is, we sell Meraki SD-WAN to our customers as a service and they use it for multiple purposes. For example, they use it for data, voice traffic, video, and services that are now in their data centers.

Meraki SD-WAN could improve on the lead time, but this is not a problem only with Cisco. there's a global shortage of chipsets. Additionally, the solution has limited features. It's quite a standard product and not very easily upgradeable or stackable. 

We have not been using Meraki SD-WAN very long.

Meraki SD-WAN is stable and the performance is good.

The scalability of Meraki SD-WAN is limited, it could improve.

I typically work with large business accounts which use Meraki SD-WAN. However, I have colleagues who have many accounts with smaller businesses that use Meraki SD-WAN. The solution is suitable for small to large businesses. We sell to small and medium businesses when they demand less complexity.

We have used the support from Cisco for our clients and they are very good. We know them quite well.

The implementation of the solution is rather standard. It is not difficult.

We do the implementation and support of the solution.

One of the most valuable aspects of Meraki SD-WAN is the price. It is highly cost-effective.

Meraki SD-WAN is a perfect fit for those customers who want to implement SD-WAN with competitive pricing. There is not much demand when it comes to complexity and additional features. If customers want a standard SD-WAN solution, Meraki SD-WAN is a perfect fit for those customers.

I rate Meraki SD-WAN an eight out of ten.

I work for a carrier, and we consume, resell, and integrate Cisco products. I'm a product manager, and I have a couple of products that are built around Cisco Meraki's offerings. One of them is a managed business wifi solution, and the other one is an SD-WAN solution. I own both of these products. 

Meraki is really big in retail and education, and that's where we see a lot of use cases. It is a low-cost or entry product. It is not a sophisticated, complete solution. People who are very concerned about the total cost of ownership will look at a Meraki solution more. 

The deployment is a combination. The orchestration is on a public cloud, and then the customer locations are all premise-based Meraki devices.

They're known for their ease of use and ubiquitous management platform that covers everything. Meraki really excels in plug-and-play solutions. You just plug it up, and everything works. All of the components—the firewall/router, the switches, the access points, the cameras—work very nicely together, and they all can be managed from one platform. That is probably their biggest selling point. Everything comes in one ubiquitous package, and you don't have to manage different components from different platforms. You can see everything from one platform.

From the vice perspective, they just are not as robust as some of the other vendors. They have limitations in throughput and the number of circuits that they can support on a wide area network. Their higher-end security is all cloud-based. They have some capability with the premise-based solutions, but the higher ends are all cloud-based, and that's via Cisco Umbrella.

Their support can be better. They do not offer a lot of hands-on support for their products.

I have probably been using this solution for three years.

From the stability perspective, everybody is pretty much on the same level playing field. I don't really see anybody standing out more than anybody else. Meraki is a low-cost equipment provider, so they're not offering big metal devices that plug into racks and a data center. They're more along the lines of the hard plastic desktop type of units. They have the same meantime between failure as most other products, so it's difficult to put them above or below anybody else. They all are pretty much on the same level playing field.

Scalability is good as long as you're doing a simple task. If you're just deploying SD-WAN and you're not putting in cameras, wifi access points, and a lot of different components, scalability is really good. From that perspective, they do well. Their niche is retail and education, and both of these areas can be very large networks depending on the provider.

We do not have plans to increase its usage. They are really premise-based solutions that are managed from the network, and we are not staying with that same type of approach in our product lines. We are moving to a fully-integrated network approach to security, connectivity, and management.

I would rate them one out of five. They do not offer a lot of hands-on support for their products.

We use three or four other SD-WAN providers to offer the same type of product. We have VeloCloud, Fortinet, and Versa. The main differences are more capabilities, more functionality, better support, better value, and a better total cost of ownership.

Everything is plug-and-play. If you're using all Meraki components, it is very easy to deploy.

The deployment duration is very short. There are not a lot of design concerns. There is not a lot of configuration. Everything can be done over the air from a network-based platform. So, it is very easy and very fast to deploy.

We've created a lot of things internally to compare different vendors and different technologies. From a customer perspective, I don't really do ROIs for evaluating vendors, but I'm familiar with the ROI. It really varies. There are other vendors that are also considered low-cost that technically perform better than Meraki. So, from a comparison perspective, it's difficult to know if you've got a better ROI with one vendor versus another without really understanding what it is that you're trying to accomplish.

Some customers may put a high value on ease of management, ease of deployment, and ease of managing and monitoring. Meraki does a decent job at all of that, whereas other companies may put a higher value on the features and functionality, security, and other things that are inherent to other products. Therefore, it is difficult to put them into a single bucket or category. From a low-cost provider perspective, their ROI for a customer is probably in line with that category of vendors.

They have a baseline software license, and then they've got an SD-WAN software license, and then they've got an advanced security software license. 

They're low cost, and they'll provide any amount of flexibility that you want from a modeling perspective for payment. Typically, it's either annually or multi-year, but they are a lower-cost company. They're not the most expensive by far.

There is an additional cost of the equipment that doesn't tend to be high.

Meraki is known as a lower-end SD-WAN solution. It has limitations from the hardware and the software perspective. They've gotten better over the years, but they were always viewed as a low-cost or entry type of product. They don't do a lot of the more sophisticated features and functionality of some of the other SD-WAN providers.

From a customer perspective, it really depends on:

• What are they looking for?
• What are they concerned about?
• Do they have any other products?
• Are they using any other security mechanism and is it network-based or premise-based?

It is just about what fits into their network and what they're currently using.

I would advise having a good understanding of the physical requirements for the facility that it's being deployed. You should have a good understanding of what you need from a component perspective, such as extra switches or extra access points. That's probably the biggest thing. There are other products for which you may have to pay a little bit more, but they are going to be better performing, and they will give you better service. So, you need to understand, especially if you're going with a low-cost vendor, that you might end up having to pay more because you had to add more components to the solution.

I would put it a little bit over halfway. I would rate it a six out of 10. It is certainly a good product. They have a lot of basic features and functionality. They can provide a good solution, but you may end up having to pay more than what you anticipated to get everything that you want because they don't include as much as some of the other vendors.

The solution is used principally to have high availability services, high-quality services, and communication with two or more service providers in the same place.

The administration in the cloud that Merakioffers is great.

The solution is user-friendly.

Its integrations are good.

We haven't had any issues with customization.

Overall, it's a good product.

The product is easy to deploy.

We have found the scalability to be good.

The solution is stable. 

Pricing is very affordable. 

I do need to explore the solution a bit more before really finding fault in anything.

The distribution could be improved. We have a lot of problems with distribution. The late deliveries likely have to do with the time it takes for the fabrication of components. It is a principal problem at this moment.

It would be helpful if there was reporting. I'd like to be able to hand reports related to performance right over to clients. 

I've used the solution for maybe a year or a year and a half at this point. 

Overall, the solution has been stable. It doesn't crash or freeze. There are no bugs or glitches. It's pretty reliable. 

Our company has many projects that employ Meraki's SD-WAN.

The scalability of the product is quite nice. 

I haven't dealt with technical support. However, MEWraki is pretty simple to use, and therefore, we haven't really needed support from Cisco. 

The initial setup is fairly straightforward. It's not overly complex. 

Deployment would take a week or two at a maximum. It depends on the customer's requirements. 

As a service provider, we install SD-WAN services in the sites of our customers.

The pricing is pretty reasonable. 

I'm a Cisco distributor in Mexico. We are a service provider. We install SD-WAN services in the sites of customers.

We have multiple deployments, both on cloud and on-premises. 

I'd recommend the solution. the management is easy and the solution is pretty reasonably priced.

I would rate the solution at a ten out of ten.

I have been using this solution in my house for testing security devices.

I have found the dashboard very useful, you can configure all of your devices at the same time by just changing some menus. It is configurated virtually on the cloud and it can send the information to the device when it connects to the internet.

You need to have internet access to configure the solution. You cannot do it locally, there should be a local option.

When comparing this solution to Fortinet, the firewall and reports that you can deliver and control relating to blocking and access are better on Fortinet. Additionally, you can only have two WANs on this solution and with Fortinet, you can have at least six. However, I prefer this solution.

I rate Meraki SD-WAN an eight out of ten.

We are resellers. We provide solutions including Meraki SD-WAN to our clients.

I like the entire set of features and the analytics.

If you compare Meraki with other solutions, the level of security is minimal.

The security needs to be improved, which is why we also use FortiGate. Meraki offers the client basic security, it is not the same as what FortiGate is offering. The customers question the security as they see that they have some loopholes. They feel that a hacker can easily enter your data. When you operate the network to the family, on the outside a hacker can see the IP address inside the network.

Customers will request a firewall to protect the network.

I would like to see Meraki include firewall security. Also, they should have encryption inside the router to make the data secure.

I have been working with Meraki SD-WAN for more than three years.

We are using models MX64 and MX100.

So far it has been stable. We have no issues with stability.

Currently, we have 10 customers who each have 30 to 50 clients using Meraki SD-WAN.

Technical support is good.

When we have encountered problems, technical support has been quick to respond.

We are also working with Fortinet.

It is easier to deploy Meraki when you compare it with FortiGate.

Meraki SD-WAN is better suited for customers who have small branches, who don't have secure data to be transferred.

Meraki is not suitable for companies that require high security.

I would rate Meraki SD-WAN a six out of ten.

We have multiple ISP's connected, usually it's two. Two ISP's per site and we have to make sure that the site-to-site connectivity is managed and is maintained — the redundancy has to be maintained. 

The different services that we offer from different offices are available wherever we need them. That's the purpose of going with the Meraki SD-WAN solution versus another company. It's very straightforward. Their full mesh network just works. That's important.

The seamless end-to-end setup is really what makes it beautiful; that's why Meraki is good. It's much easier than some of the other vendors to manage and keep track of what's going on because you can see it in real-time on the portal. I don't really feel like VALO Cloud gives you a good idea of what's going on. VALO Cloud devices don't work nearly as well, in my opinion, as the Meraki devices.

I think they should enhance the security. I feel like the security is decent, but some other people that I work with say there are better options available. Cisco requires you to upgrade the firmware to custom firmware on the devices you want to go beyond Diffie-Hellman five. DH5 is in the lower part of the spectrum. Other devices, even Cisco devices are using DH15 or higher. I think DH24 is the highest that's currently available. 

The feature set right now requires a firmware upgrade that's custom to enable that kind of encryption. They should just have it in a dropdown. If they could fix that, I could tell my other colleagues, "Hey, look, Cisco can do it right out of the box." To enable higher-end encryption, higher than Diffie-Hellman five, DH5, requires a custom firmware. If they could make that built into the standard firmware as an option, I would love that. 

I think that from Cisco's perspective, they've chosen not to do that simply because it requires more performance.

That's how they keep it because they say, "Oh, look at the performance. It's the same as the other guy." Yeah, but the other guy's using DH15 or DH14 and you're using DH5. The level of encryption means more horsepower required from the processor on the devices so that's why it increases the footprint. The more CPU, the hotter it gets and then it doesn't last as long; the performance is not as good because it's using more resources, etc. Cisco should definitely sell equipment with better processes or better performance for our processes because that would give us a higher level of encryption on our firewalls.

I have been using Meraki SD-WAN for roughly four to five years.

The setup time is excellent. The ease of setup is excellent. It's a set it and forget it solution. Once we created the mesh network, if we have to change an ISP, it doesn't mean we have to change an entire configuration. We just unplug it, plug the new one in, change the IPs and it works. Some SD-WAN providers give you a valid internet IP address as part of their solution, and others don't. A lot of the SD-WAN providers that provide internet access use Meraki devices as a black box. They just hand off one interface to the client-side and that's it.

Overall, on a scale from one to ten, I would give Meraki SD-WAN a rating of eight. If they could do better on the performance side, that really would make a difference.