NETGEAR Switches Reviews

We mainly use NETGEAR Switches for some switching and tethering.

I'm satisfied with the stability of NETGEAR Switches.

NETGEAR Switches could be more secure. Scalability could also be better. This infrastructure is a bit old, and we need something that will be more secure. Something that will introduce WLAN, and we will need the knowledge to go with that.

Some of the switches were used for more than seven years. I think it was just their lifespan that was exhausted. But other than that, there haven't been any issues that required us to complain or get concerned.

I have been using NETGEAR Switches for a few years.

I'm satisfied with the stability of NETGEAR Switches.

NETGEAR Switches could be more scalable. We have about 200 users using this solution.

I don't remember the initial setup. We have about five managers and technical people to deploy and manage this solution. 

I can't recommend this solution to potential users. 

On a scale from one to ten, I would give NETGEAR Switches an eight.

We are primarily using the solution on the client side. We use it in our office.

I haven't had any issues so far. It's worked quite well.

The cost of the solution is very good. We enjoy the price point they offer.

We've found the stability to be very good. The performance is excellent.

The cloud service is not so good. They can't make some application on a cloud for the switch. It's not a good idea.

The management needs to be improved. If you manage the switch by the cloud, you can't manage it by the web interface.

The initial setup takes a long time. It's a long, drawn-out process.

The problem is not on the cloud services end. It's on setup. You have to make an account and you lose a lot of time. If you don't want to manage by the cloud, I don't understand why you have to register your switch there.

They have to make the feature to manage all switches within a team.

I've been working with the solution for 20 years or so. It's been two decades. It's been a while.

The solution is quite stable. There are no bugs or glitches. It doesn't crash or freeze. It's reliable.

It's not very good in terms of scalability. You have to make a switch for the data center. It's limited.

I've never been in touch with technical support. I can't speak to how knowledgeable or responsive they are. We have an internal team that can handle troubleshooting for the most part.

I also use D-Link.

The installation process is long. It takes one hour to make an account, to go to the switch web interface, et cetera. If you don't make an account, if you don't notice your switch, it's not fully manageable. You have to do a lot of things before your switch will be manageable. And you have to do this for all your switches. You lose one hour for every switch. This is not good. It's so very time-consuming.

The solution has a very reasonable cost.

I sell the solution and manage it as well. However, I am not a customer.

If a client needs to switch from one solution to another, Netgear may not be right, as there may be some compatibility issues.

I'd rate the solution at an eight out of ten.

I use these switches in my home-based business.

The most valuable feature is familiarity.

The technical support could be more helpful.

I have been working with NETGEAR Switches for between five and ten years.

Stability-wise, I haven't had any issues.

This product is not scalable. It is fixed at eight ports, which is why I am now looking for something new.

I have spoken with their technical support, albeit not about this switch, but about a router. I would say that the technical support was not very helpful.

Specifically, they were helpful but only to a point. It helps when they can figure out the problem for you.

The initial setup is pretty easy.

This is a one-time purchase and there are no licensing fees.

I am currently looking for a replacement because I have recently moved offices and I now have more devices plugged in. I am looking into purchasing a 24-port Ubiquiti switch. I am looking at the Ubiquiti line because I don't want to pay a yearly fee.

For what I used this switch for, it did well.

I would rate this solution an eight out of ten.

The primary use case is generally small office, and multiple users with the same customer.

For us, the Insight platform is a consistent experience from one office to the next. A user can connect to one access point in one office and then automatically connect to another access point in the office, without having to do any WiFi connections or passwords. So the user experience is seamless.

And that also saves time. It's only a few minutes per user for each office we go to, but it soon adds up and reduces frustration.

The most valuable feature is the Insight application itself, with its ease of management. 

Also, the remote management tools are fantastic. The combination of the webpage as well as the app makes life so much easier. I don't need to go and visit sites to do upgrades or any sorts of changes. The firmware can all be deployed remotely. I can see the traffic on each of the switch ports remotely as well, so I can see if we've got problems, down to an individual port. It's very granular.

It's easy to use and deploy. It's just a simple case of assigning a switch to one of the already-configured network offices. Then, as soon as the device pairs up, it downloads the configuration and it's good to go. It's very simple.

The management tools are very straightforward. They're well laid out in terms of the concepts, and configuration and adding new devices are very easy. It's very straightforward.

My one issue with it is that not all the features of the switch can currently be managed via the portal. For some of the more advanced features, you still have to configure the switch. We tend not to use those features, so it's not a problem.

It's coming along. Quite regularly, the platform is being updated so those features are definitely coming. Every month or two, when I log in, there are new features available online. So we can start to implement the features that, historically, we'd have to go to site to implement. They're not features that are critical to our use.

It's the wireless access-point aspect and some of the routing capabilities on the wireless access point that I'm referring to. For example, the peer-to-peer bridging isn't available. You have to configure the access points directly for that.

The stability is very good. We've only had one problem and that turned out not to be the switch. It was another device. But it highlighted where the problem was, so it was very good.

They do come in different sizes: small, medium, and large. From our perspective, the scalability is great. It suits all our needs. At most, I think we have three of the 24-port switches in one location. The scalability is very good.

That would be for 25 people, maximum. Everybody has two devices so there would be 50 or 60 on it, in total, once we add in tablets and phones.

I've never needed to contact tech support. The switches come with a quite extensive warranty of three or five years, and 90 days worth of free initial support. But it is that straightforward to set up and configure that we've never needed to contact them.

We used existing, legacy NETGEAR devices in the past. We were just keeping up to date and seeing the changes in the products they were bringing, and that's how we came across Insight.

At the office, on the Insight platform, the individual switch setup is very straightforward. You just scan the barcode and you plug it in. That said, setting up in an office is very straightforward as well because it's all web or app-driven.

For an individual device, it probably takes longer to put it in the rack and screw it in. To actually install it, have it configured and running, it's less than 30 minutes.

In terms of an implementation strategy, each office is different sized and has different capabilities and different requirements. So there isn't a generic strategy in that sense. But configuration is all centrally managed. The individual switches are sized based on the office. A smaller office might have two or three of the smaller Ethernet switches, just for redundancy. A very small office might just have a single switch. But all that configuration is done centrally so the actual implementation strategy is just: Turn up on site and plug it in.

You don't need to be an IT expert to deploy and support a network. It is that straightforward. It requires no staff for deployment. Because it's all centrally configured, you don't need to have any staff to deploy it. You just need to be able to plug in the cable.

The fact they continue to work and can be managed remotely is all about cost savings. We don't incur travel costs to update switches. None of the switches have been faulty.

We've carried out four or five firmware updates this year, remotely. That has probably reduced travel by 300 or 400 miles. That saves travel costs and travel time.

They're good value. They're good entry-level switches. I know Cisco generally has a lot more capability. But, for an organization this size, we don't need that. So they're good value for the cost and what we need.

The cost of the hardware and additional services is low compared to others. Anything that's cheaper, for the same output, is a good thing for our business.

Go for it They're very straightforward to purchase and setup time is very minimal, especially if you've got a lot of small, remote offices, because you get the central management. The big feature for us that centralized management and the remote capabilities.

The apps for the phones are good. I have an Android phone, and it's also available on iOS. You can remotely manage and monitor even without having to sit at a desk. That is very useful.

The Insight platform itself - for VPN, firewalls, and storage devices - is a good, centralized platform for managing all of that. Although we've only really talked about the switching, it has other features as well, which make it sensible for us as a centralized management platform. It's appropriate for medium to large businesses. 

I haven't really had to use the remote troubleshooting much. The one time I did, it was very detailed regarding the point where the problem was and we could identify the problem. It ended up being on a non-switch device so we had to have an engineer go to the site to fix it. But it was very quick to identify exactly where that problem was, down to an individual port and the device connected into that port. I have been troubleshooting the network as opposed to the devices and, in my experience, it's very good.

In terms of maintenance, it's all done remotely so we've needed only one staff member, with very little overhead. At one of the offices, for example, they turn everything off at night. We get an alert saying the network is down, but when they turn it back on in the morning, we get an alert saying the network is back up. There's very little management on top of that.

The businesses where we deploy them have plants and office locations. As they sign up and grow, we'll definitely deploy more.

• We have used their SOHO switches and some of their enterprise-class switches in our educational environment.
• Mainly just to get more ports in an office or other room.
  

They are reasonably priced and have worked pretty well for us.

• The price, and for the most part it has been reliable. 
• Their enterprise-class switches have a way to go with their CLI as compared to for instance Cisco, etc. This is I think due to a lack of maturity in this market.

They need to implement a fully-featured CLI in their enterprise-class switches if they want to compete in that space and market.

We're an IT services provider so we have them installed at various clients' sites, and for various applications. The primary use case is for local area networks.

We're able to pre-configure a device, before it gets deployed, in the cloud. We don't even have to open up the box, we can just preconfigure it in the cloud. As soon as we deploy it onsite, it automatically gets configured.

The most valuable feature is the fact that Insight is cloud-managed. The whole reason behind it is that there is one central place to manage it. You can pre-configure everything and you can get access to it without having to get onto the client's network. That makes it easy to use and deploy.

Remote troubleshooting is good and easy.

The remote management tools still need work. They're good, but they still need work.

One of the big drawbacks is that the whole tiered administration doesn't work. They've got a tiered user structure where there is a global admin, and then what they call a manager, and then there is a user. The problem is, if anywhere along the line somebody opens up a support ticket, all the correspondence winds up going to the global admin, it doesn't go to the person who opened up the support ticket. They can't seem to get that changed, even when you tell them specifically that the global admin is not the person dealing with this problem. That's very frustrating.

Another issue, a technical problem they can't seem to solve, is that it doesn't support multicast packets. In layman's terms, Mac computers can't print over the network.

Also, they've got some PoE models, but they need to expand that line a little bit.

Finally, it would be nice to have the ability to have SNMP enabled at the same time Net Insight. I would also like to see integration with Auvik.

It still needs some work. It's got a couple of quirks where it will shut off ports because it thinks there's an IP conflict when there really isn't.

The scalability is good. It could probably go to 100 connections. That would probably be the equivalent of 30 to 40 users.

We are a Netgear partner, so we get preferential support. Because we get preferential support, it's pretty good. We've had a few hiccups, but overall, they're good.

We were using Cisco and HPE. A big factor in our switch to NETGEAR vs Cisco Ethernet Switches is cost. Simplicity is another. Support is another because the support for HPE and Cisco is absolutely horrid.

The setup is straightforward. It's all done in the cloud and you can manage everything from there. It's a whole lot easier than the traditional way of doing it. Deployment takes an hour, if that.

The best strategy is to preconfigure it in the cloud before it gets physically deployed.

As to whether you need to be an IT expert to deploy it and support your network, it depends on the complexity of the network. For simple applications, no. For complex applications, like multiple VLANs, and QoS, and PoE power management, etc, you've got to know what you're doing to set all that up properly.

We see ROI in labor savings. Deployment time is probably cut in half. We're billing for a regular deployment, but it only takes half the amount of time. That's $200 profit for us.

There are two parts to the pricing. There's the pricing of the device itself, which is good. Their licensing model needs work, though. The licensing model doesn't fit the way MSPs do business. They need to revise it to something that makes more sense for an MSP. And here, I'm specifically talking about Insight Pro licensing.

The cost of hardware and additional service is low. That helps our business because it's easier to make a sale.

We were aware of lots of other options, but we didn't do any formal evaluation of any others.

If you are an MSP, you should definitely look into it and plan to use it. I would recommend it.

Overall, we're very happy with the product. It's become our standard going forward. But there are some exceptions. One being the tiered administration. The other one is lack of support for support multicast packets.

Regarding staff for deployment and maintenance, it depends on if you're looking at our entire fleet of these Ethernet switches, which is scattered across multiple clients; then it's probably a tenth of a person. If it's one switch, it's less than a tenth of a person. Switches are low maintenance as a device, it doesn't matter whose they are.

We've got half a dozen deployed at various clients right now. And there will be more because we've got projects in the queue.

Overall, I would rate it an eight out of ten. The issues I mentioned that still need to be resolved come to mind, as well as the licensing structure that doesn't really make sense for us.

We use them for Layer 2. We use the GSMs. We use the M4300s. We use pretty much all the Layer 2 and 3 switches. We use them for Layer 3 routers. We divide subnets up with them. The management interface isn't the best because the browsers aren't consistent, you have to use many browsers to get into them, but we use many of them: 24-port, 8-port, 16-port, 5-port. We connect them, 5 or 10-gig modules.

The ability to manage them is the big valuable feature. The ease of use is great.

It's very cost-effective. All my guys know them. They're pretty consistent across the platforms. There are some inconsistencies but, for the most part, they're pretty darn good. They are something all my guys are familiar with at this point and they work very well. They're guaranteed for life, covering all the things that you don't think about until something happens.

It is consistent and that means a lot. The interface doesn't change a lot and that's important. When you get a new management interface all the time, it makes it tough.

The management of them, itself, is not so good. You have to go between many different browsers, even some super-old browsers, to be able to do it. That is a super pain. That's critical. If this list were much longer than that, nobody would use their product.

I wouldn't be using them if they weren't stable.

It is a very scalable product.

I would give tech support a "C" or a "B." Their support is not what I would like it to be. The pre-sale support is excellent. The post-sale support is average.

I didn't have a previous solution. I've always used NETGEAR. 

The registration of the product is very easy to do. You register an upgrade code and away you go. In terms of how long deployment takes, I put one, two, three, four, or five in every office so, as a partner, I don't have a single deployment. I have a lot of different places that I have these in.

The implementation strategy is to get them cut over and back up and working as quickly as I can.

Regarding whether you need to be an IT expert to deploy and support a network, deploy: no; support: yes. Deployment would depend on the complexity of the user's network.

We do everything internally.

The return on investment for us is the replacement warranty, cut and dry. That is why it's worth its weight to me. If they have a problem, we get them cross-shipped and they're taken care of.

The price to performance of this solution is very good. When it comes to pricing, as far as I'm concerned, they're very comparable with Ubiquity. NETGEAR has pricing that is as good as it gets. That's why I use them.

Regarding licensing, there is none. You register them and they're good to go.

You have a lot of options. You always have Cisco. You had Nortel. There are many. They have a lot of competition. I'm a NETGEAR shop. I don't consider Cisco products.

I don't know of any remote management tools. Everything we manage them with is onsite.

I would give it an eight out of ten. It's the most cost-effective solution out there. The management, as I said, from a browser standpoint, is very difficult in some cases, because we have some of them that are very old and we have to bounce around between browsers to manage them.

For the enterprise-level solution, it's for small to medium businesses. I'm quoting NETGEAR to pretty much everyone, instead of any other type of switch.

In terms of the NETGEAR models we use, it depends on the situation. We've used 4300s, 3300s, we've used a lot of Smart Stacks and Smart Switches and Plus Switches. We don't use really anything that can't be slightly managed, so it has to have at least a web interface.

We're an MSP. Let's say we do an entire network retrofit with a customer. We're talking about increasing bandwidth backbones ten to 20-fold, from one gigabit to 20 gigabits, utilizing the virtual stacking with the switches. It allows our workflow, managing their systems, to be quick and easy. We can do it remotely very well and we can do a lot of very granular programming changes without having to be onsite.

It's hard to give you metrics because what we do is rebuild entire networks, and most of them are old and dilapidated. They may have been okay in their day, but we're talking 10-year-old networks a lot of times. What we're doing is increasing their bandwidth, increasing security, and increasing the flow of traffic and data, depending on type, etc.

• Network monitoring 
• Ease of programming for VLANs, etc.

Also, I especially like NETGEAR because it's easy to teach system administrators how to use them, how to look at them, how to make changes to them without having the complexity of CLIs, but still having a CLI should we need it.

There's very little that I see as having large room for improvement, as far as the switches we're using go, for the most part. What I'd like to see is more compatibility with virtual stacking, so that 4300-series switches and 3300-series switches will actually stack together and that virtual switch stacks, themselves, are not limited to just six devices, so that they can create larger loops with more bandwidth and more redundancy.

I like the NETGEARs because they do everything exactly how I want them to, for the most part. There's not a lot that I would require for them to do better. It might be nice to see the little things like providing some switches with four SFP ports like they used to have, instead of just two, in those lines that we're looking at on the stackable side. Right now, it seems I have to have either eight SFP ports or two and there's no in-between, that's also stackable and managed, or at least stackable. The problem is that there's got to be enough of a need for them to actually create them. For me, those are little things that I would like to have, just to allow for a little more flexibility in what we're doing.

Regarding the switches, etc., the uptime is going to be comparable, the same as any other types of Ethernet switches that would be fulfilling the same roles. It may even be better in some cases because of the ability to have lifetime warranties and replacements.

I've currently maxed out the scalability of the switches, and this revolves around the virtual stacks. I would love to be able to add more switches into the virtual stacks. That's probably the only expandability I worry about right now. We've just implemented 10-gig to 20-gig connections, so we're pretty much at the top end of the spectrum.

The thing we would like to do at some point is to start looking at the 2.5-gig and 5-gig switches, possibly, for access points. But I think I might just go straight to 10-gig to be future-proof. They already have those switches in place. The industry itself is not going at that speed at the desktop level, so they're perfectly positioned. The scalability is such that it wouldn't have to be done for another four to five years and maybe not even then.

I have limited experience with their technical support because the switches are easy enough to understand so I haven't needed it much.

As far as the technical support we have gotten, it's more the automated technical support that I would like to see. I'd like to see a better Knowledge Base, better articles, things written by NETGEAR engineers to explain step-by-step how-tos, not just for me, but so that I can give them to my technicians and assistant administrators. It would be helpful if they could look at them on the screen and know how to do things, as opposed to having to call someone.

If we have to call someone, then it's already gone beyond the point of getting help. It means we probably need to replace the device.

Previous solutions were all over the place. I've always liked NETGEAR, I've always liked their price point. I've used them pretty much everywhere that I can, at least on the business level. I'm not really fond of the consumer grade, but I work in a business atmosphere so consumer grade shouldn't be there anyway. 

We've used the Ciscos, we've used Dell EMC, we've used HPE. They're all good, but NETGEAR has really cleaned up its act and made it look good and easy to use.

For the initial setup with the NETGEARs, there could be a little bit better help documentation for it. Small how-tos, and better explanations of what all the features are, because they do have a lot of features - which is wonderful. That involved a little bit of a ramp-up time, but it really wasn't a whole lot. 

The initial setup is really easy with them. It's easy to create a standard setup with them that can then be repeated across multiple customers, which then helps when technicians are maintaining them.

We do multiple deployments. One deployment, for a small business, could take a few days. Another deployment for a medium-sized business, depending on the number of locations, could take a few months. 

For instance, one of our customers has six locations across the United States, so we had to be able to get to those locations and then set up for, and be ready for, the entire installation and replacement of the old switches with the new. That implementation took time because it had to be planned. This particular customer is a 24/7 customer, they never go down. We were trying to maintain as close to a 99% uptime as possible, while still replacing their entire infrastructure.

The switches themselves have can be worked pretty flawlessly and quickly and enable us to make on-the-fly configuration changes onsite very quickly. One of the other reasons I like them is because it's just that easy to use them.

Our implementation strategy is typically trying to schedule some amount of downtime and then checking on the configs of the old switches, possibly pre-programming switches before they come into place, if I have that capability. We then bring those switches in onsite, bring the old switches offline, and put new NETGEARs in online. That is for existing customers. For new customers, we just program ahead of time and almost just drop them in and they're ready to go at that point.

As to whether you need to be an IT expert to deploy and support such a network, it depends on what you consider to be an IT expert. I think I'm an IT expert and I can do it. Someone at a much lower level than mine can also deploy and maintain these Ethernet switches. Are they IT experts? Well, it depends on what they know. 

The problem is that I'll see people who think they're IT experts but they know very little about actual IP and VLAN-ing and the like. They don't really know what Layer 2 or Layer 3 is or what the whole OSI structure is. It depends on what you call an expert: Is it someone who knows the whole structure or is it someone who knows the intricacies of routing BGP and OSPF and RIP? You don't need to be at the CCNP level. You don't even really need to be a CCNA-level, if we're talking about Cisco equivalency, because it's very easy to do but also very easy to teach.

We have not yet seen ROI. It's only been a couple of years since we first started. The return on investment is going to be hard to put a number on a because we sold these and they're working really well. If it continues the way it's going, then we're going to make a healthy profit, while still providing top-tier support for our customers with top-tier equipment.

It's a great price-to-performance solution. I think it's singularly the best price-per-performance we can find, if not just straight performance to begin with.

We like the idea that they're going with the Insight Pro licensing. We like that it's a per-device and it's handled by us, the MSP, versus being handled by them. For instance, with the Merakis, all the licensing is handled by Meraki, and Meraki will try to undersell you or sell you right out of your own client, when it comes to reopening subscriptions.

NETGEAR has taken a different approach and values its partners much better. That's something that's very important to me. There's not a lot of need for licensing other than that, because, while I can buy some types of subscription for some of these, for support and such, we don't really need them. They have a lifetime warranty and we have staff on hand to be able to handle most of the more complex issues that we would have, other than things that need hardware replacement.

The cost of hardware and additional services is lower, absolutely. I wouldn't say "low," but we found it to be lower than other options, and that helps us resell this back to customers who are looking at other things like a Cisco Meraki, where the money is very important. On the school level, municipalities have very limited funds and if they can get more bang for their buck and it really means that much more, then it's a lot easier to sell a NETGEAR than a Cisco Meraki, especially since the longevity is there and there's a better warranty on them.

We've looked at Cisco's Merakis vs NETGEAR and HPEs vs NETGEAR and done price comparisons versus manageability, but the NETGEARs, far and away, were better. Merakis are very good, but the price point is way too high, and the required subscriptions could leave some of our smaller customers without connections because they're forgetful or just don't know to do these things or don't want to pay for them, constantly, like that. I like the way that NETGEARs work. They go well with our business model.

We did not consider Ubiquiti. We need something more mainstream and we weren't willing to go with them. We don't think they've been in the game enough.

Strongly consider using NETGEAR in replacement of some of the other larger switch manufacturers. Recognize that the manageability is there at a lower level so you can employ less-highly-skilled people to maintain the devices. As far as small and medium businesses go, they need to be able to have that ability because they don't always have dedicated IT people. You're better off going with this type of implementation because the features are there, the ability to program is there, and the ability to understand them is far easier than it is for a lot of others, making the implementation a lot easier.

In terms of the AV over IP, we split everything up in the VLAN so we don't differentiate AV. We don't have a lot of AV traveling over the networks, just yet, other than the occasional IP camera. Most of them are still in their own switch network.

Deployment could take one or two people. A lot of times it would be myself as the network architect and then another system administrator to help move things, unplug things. It's more of a physical issue. The switches themselves are very quick and easy and barely even take any time out of my schedule. I don't really schedule for them because they can be done on the fly. It's more about the physical limitations that cause scheduling to go awry.

As for extent of usage, for us, any new or refurbished network is 100 percent NETGEAR as far as the backbone and switching go. We will continue to be using them. They're making good advancements in their product lines and they're well-positioned where they are now for how we need to use them. I'm very happy with them.

I would rate NETGEAR at about an eight out of ten, only because I always think everyone has room for improvement. As I said, they need a little bit better Knowledge Base, they need a little better help or support online, directly on the switches or from the switches. Documentation is key for me. And, as I said, I need more stacking when I do virtual stacks. I want to be able to do a lot larger virtual stacks.