Meraki Dashboard Reviews

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. 

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.

The primary use case of this solution is to provide a wireless and networking solution for the office or home. I use it at home and at work. 

It has improved my organization in the way that we've got a much better wireless coverage than we had before, and secondly, we have the visibility of all the users.

The most valuable features would be its ease of use and the easy integration.

You can't really clone or replicate a device, that sort of feature would be useful. You can clone the site but you cannot clone the device.

As far as I know, it is very stable. 

The scalability is unlimited. You can scale as much as you want, at least for the environment that I'm in. We don't have thousands, we've only got under ten. It's right for our organization. I think scalability-wise it's capable of scaling up to around 200, maybe a couple thousand. It's all cloud based so we don't control anything.

We have around 45 users using this solution. Their roles are primarily developers. We only require one staff member for the deployment and maintenance which is me. 

It is used in the office environment and if we get more people joining us, we might need more Meraki access points and maybe more filters. 

Technical support is pretty good. They come back to me with the answers or at least help me with how to get answers.

We switched to Meraki from Fortinet. We switched because it was not easy to manage. 

The initial setup was straightforward. The guys from the Meraki website were quite good.

The deployment took a few minutes but the congregation took a couple of days. 

I did the deployment myself.

Licensing is around under 1000 pounds. The licensing is either one year, three years, five years or ten years and during the licensing, we can choose to renew it per year or per every three years. We've got a license for three years. It's about 160 or about 200 pounds each.

I would advise someone considering this solution to go for it. 

I would rate it a nine out of ten. 

We use Meraki Dashboard to manage all our Cisco Meraki network equipment, SD-WAN, firewalls, DHCP, routers, switches, etc. We have firewalls at three locations, and each site has about 200 users.  

Meraki Dashboard centralizes control of all our equipment into one cloud-based console, so we can manage it from anywhere. We can resolve problems remotely outside of business hours because it is on the cloud. You can use the dashboard to change security settings or configure routers and switches. 

Meraki Dashboard could improve integration with non-Cisco platforms. 

I have used Meraki Dashboard for about seven years.

Meraki Dashboard is stable. 

It isn't hard to set up Meraki Dashboard if you have some experience with Cisco solutions. You need some knowledge about networks and firewall rules. We just followed the manual. 

I rate Meraki Dashboard 10 out of 10. It's the best solution. 

Our use case for this solution is primarily monitoring and configuration of the Meraki database.

Meraki Dashboard is the feature I find most valuable because it gives you remote feasibility of managing all the devices worldwide. You don't need to be in the local location already.

I think this product could be improved with a CLI for more directives.

In the next release, I would like to see a little more user intervention or more control given to the engineer.

I have been working with Meraki Dashboard for around five years.

I would rate the stability of this solution a nine, on a scale from one to 10, with one being the worst and 10 being the best.

My impression is that this solution is quite scalable. We have some 10 users currently in our organization.

The initial setup process is quite simple. I would rate it a 10, on a scale from one to 10, with one being the worst and 10 being the best. This solution is deployed on the cloud.

We compared Meraki Dashboard with Fortinet. FortiManager gives you options, but Meraki Dashboard has more feasibility and more control over all of the Meraki products.

I would recommend this solution to other users.

Overall, I would rate this solution a seven, on a scale from one to 10, with one being the worst, and 10 being the best.

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.

The Meraki Dashboard we are using for the cloud. On-premise, we build or fix division racks and all the customer recommend configurations. We'll go and inspects, for example, what is the VLAN? What is the solution? 

We will do the configuration and everything remotely. We do everything on the backend, including Meraki switches, Meraki access points, and Meraki firewalls. We'll take the remote session and open that and handle things remotely.

With this product, we get a better sense of if something is changing the configuration. In other firewalls, we're not able to change anything, however, we can revert back. 

The initial setup was easy.

The solution is stable.

We like the ability to see everything in one single console.

We can log in from anywhere in the world.

The filtering on offer is good. 

We need to log into the solution separately. We can only log into a single access point. For example, we can log into one firewall or access point and do configurations. We cannot do multiple configurations across multiple endpoints. 

We'd like more support on the side of the ISP. 

The solution can be expensive. 

We'd like to be able to see new, upcoming features and have alerts when they are available or coming up.

I've been using the solution for the last six months. 

There are no bugs or glitches. It doesn't crash or freeze. Everything is fine. It is stable. 

It's a scalable product. We haven't had any conflicts in that sense. 

At this point, we have four people using the solution. They are network engineers. 

I've never needed the assistance of technical support. I've learned some basic knowledge and that has been enough so far. 

If there is something we cannot fix, we will reach out to support. For example, we are trying to do the packet capture. The traffic is not going. We'll try to check the configuration first and we'll try to check the logs. Still, if we are not able to find the issue, we'll look into how we can get the issue resolved and may ask for help.

We also work with Fortigate. 

It's an easy product to set up. We know the architecture and the configurations. If we don't know the concept, then it can be more difficult to set up. 

This is a small company. We can do an implementation in a day or maybe two. It's pretty fast.

I handled the initial implementation process. 

While I cannot speak to the exact cost, it is my understanding the price is high. 

We are a partner. 

We are using the latest update of the product. 

I'd recommend the solution to others. 

I would rate the solution eight out of ten.