We performed a comparison between Cisco Meraki Wireless LAN and Cisco Wireless based on our users’ reviews in five categories. After reading all of the collected data, you can find our conclusion below.
Comparison Results: While Cisco users across the board feel that both products are very expensive and provide very good customer service and support, users reported a better ROI from Cisco Meraki Wireless LAN.
"The artificial intelligence feature is very good."
"The solution is very secure."
"It provides private network access, helping us protect our company’s devices."
"The most valuable feature of the solution is Marvis, the AI-driven network management system."
"The most useful feature of Juniper Wireless AP is the reporting Marvis."
"The solution is stable."
"The AI capabilities of Mist Wireless are superior to other OEMs."
"You can easily monitor, manage, and cover all your IT equipment."
"There are many valuable features of Cisco Meraki, including the switches, stacking, and layer 3 routing."
"The solution is stable and reliable."
"Meraki is a decent solution for a small company, and we use it in a pretty typical way. We need Teams and Zoom to work, and we need a high level of security because we want our business to remain confidential."
"It makes the process much easier by providing visibility and centralized control over the network."
"It's easy to manage and provides a clear network view, allowing efficient navigation down to the network details."
"The network security the solution provides is its most valuable aspect."
"The captive portal feature is my favorite. It allows us to keep track of how many people are entering our client's businesses."
"The most valuable features of Cisco Meraki Wireless LAN are the ease of use and the ability to manage it from the cloud."
"Cisco's support team is the best in the industry."
"The product enables mobility and centralized control."
"Before COVID, the emphasis was primarily on wireless connectivity in specific areas like conference rooms. However, with the shift to remote work and increased mobility, coverage areas needed to be expanded to accommodate users throughout the entire location. We are beginning to expand our infrastructure."
"This increased mobility has helped our organization. We can talk to one another from different locations and stay in constant contact and with employees across the enterprise. Everyone has access to up-to-the-minute communications and all documents and applications on our network."
"The speed and security are most valuable."
"Some of the features I find valuable are the FlexConnect and overall it is a good global solution."
"The tool is mainly improving our productivity."
"For me, there are two important features: 1) WLAN grouping – Allows us to have different groups and, within those groups, specific WLANs, so there is no overlapping. 2) FlexConnect – Enables us to have remote offices at different locations. We can have a central WLC to control all the locations."
"They should include SD-WAN features to it."
"Juniper Wireless AP can improve by continually improving its reporting and integration with other systems."
"Juniper Wireless Access Points (AP Series) could improve if the MIST platform had a built-in master key. This would be an advantage."
"If you want to do more specific stuff, it's a bit limited."
"The price could be better."
"There is room for improvement in terms of support and installation."
"Juniper Mist Wireless Access Points’ support services need improvement."
"The product should include adaptive Wi-Fi to show a more accurate location."
"The ease of use is average. It could be more user-friendly."
"The signal coverage radius could be extended."
"There is a processing limitation when you have multiple SSIDs, above three or four."
"The way Cisco Meraki Wireless LAN groups certain things, as far as the devices for either monitoring and or configuring them should be done better. They should be grouped a little bit differently because if I want to configure something, a different setting on an SSID, I have to go to their specific area where I would have thought it should be clumped as a dropdown menu in another area."
"I'd like better integration with security providers."
"if there is a better feature, they write it as beta so you have to be careful."
"Recently I have seen that the Meraki access point, maybe due to congestion, just kicks off my customers, mostly when they are in Zoom meetings or Teams meetings and they have to reconnect."
"Cisco Meraki must improve the integration between its own family of products."
"Improvements can be made to the telemetry. The licensing gets in the way here. It makes it impossible to record the different flows across the wireless network."
"The pricing could be reduced."
"It's very scalable, but when you shift gears sometimes, you have to do more work than people anticipate."
"What my company doesn't like about the product is related to the coverage it provides to access points, an area which is one of the most important ones for us."
"Cisco Wireless needs to improve pricing. I understand that Cisco products are typically more expensive than other vendors. Therefore, I believe that adjusting the pricing could potentially be beneficial. Discounts may be available depending on the customer or type of purchase, which could help offset the higher costs."
"The reporting tool in Cisco Wireless could improve. If I am trying to receive information about a client or user, it's cumbersome to retrieve the information on the controller system. If I'm trying to find out where a client's been, it's cumbersome. You need another tool for Historical logs, but it should be all in one."
"There should be an option for a wireless bridge that can be used to join two access points."
"Sometimes our customers do not get proper IP addresses from the DHCP pool."
More Juniper Mist Wireless Access Points Pricing and Cost Advice →
Cisco Meraki Wireless LAN is ranked 4th in Wireless LAN with 115 reviews while Cisco Wireless is ranked 2nd in Wireless LAN with 147 reviews. Cisco Meraki Wireless LAN is rated 8.2, while Cisco Wireless is rated 8.2. The top reviewer of Cisco Meraki Wireless LAN writes "Offers good mobility, stability and scalability ". On the other hand, the top reviewer of Cisco Wireless writes "Allows us to deploy a wide range of wireless products with stable WiFi". Cisco Meraki Wireless LAN is most compared with Aruba Wireless, Ruckus Wireless, Ubiquiti Wireless, Mist AI and Cloud and Huawei Wireless, whereas Cisco Wireless is most compared with Aruba Wireless, Ruckus Wireless, Ubiquiti WLAN, Mist AI and Cloud and Omada Access Points. See our Cisco Meraki Wireless LAN vs. Cisco Wireless report.
See our list of best Wireless LAN vendors.
We monitor all Wireless LAN reviews to prevent fraudulent reviews and keep review quality high. We do not post reviews by company employees or direct competitors. We validate each review for authenticity via cross-reference with LinkedIn, and personal follow-up with the reviewer when necessary.
Cisco Wireless is very robust, very rugged, and can handle indoor and outdoor coverage extremely well. We found it to be very reliable and to consistently run very efficiently. Cisco Wireless helped us get more network access to more people wirelessly across some very large spaces.
It is expensive, though. The Cisco Wireless portal, like many Cisco products, can be very complex. The flexibility of the controllers needs fixing and Cisco Wireless requires a bit of tweaking to get the stability right. We would also like to see the reporting improved - this would help make troubleshooting easier.
Cisco Meraki Wireless LAN is very user-friendly. You don’t have to be a wireless engineer to set it up. Cisco Meraki Wireless LAN is cloud-based, which is very convenient as you don’t have to have a physical controller, saving valuable space, power, and redundancy. This solution offers advanced configurations that are a great fit for small to medium-sized businesses that can’t employ an advanced tech team. Cisco Meraki Wireless LAN is high-performance, stable, scalable, and very easy to deploy, and offers a dashboard that makes managing the solution very easy.
Some of the built-in capabilities and filtering with Cisco Meraki Wireless LAN needs to be made easier to use. Cisco Meraki Wireless LAN needs to better identify devices, and the TAC reading and interpretation capabilities are not always accurate. There are also some processing limitations when you have multiple SSIDs.
Conclusion
As these are both Cisco products, they offer brand recognition you can trust, great quality, and good durability.
We found that Cisco Wireless offered slightly better access points and improved coverage, allowing the creation of better networks. Cisco Wireless takes a one-time payment for the hardware, and then annual payments. If you employ Cisco’s knowledgeable team members, this will be a good fit for you.
The huge selling point for Cisco Meraki Wireless LAN is its ease of use. You don’t need to have a lot of knowledge to deploy or manage processes, which makes this a great product for smaller businesses with a less tech-savvy team.
The standard answer to such a question is: it depends.
The pricing for both solutions is very similar: per-AP, Meraki is more expensive than Cisco Wireless. Cisco APs are cheaper, but the controller raises the solution price to be almost equal to Meraki.
Meraki is subscription-based and requires constant internet access to manage the system. If the annual license expires, the APs will work, but you can't manage them or read reports of the Meraki portal.
Cisco Wireless is a one-time payment for the hardware with annual support payments. if you have a small office with only a few APs needed, you can use the Cisco Mobility Express Controller (which uses one of the APs or a Catalyst Switch as the controller) but that has a limit of 100 APs.