Meraki MX Reviews

Using it as an endpoint firewall on different locations. We used different MX devices to setup a VPN from off-site locations to our main office. It is a firewall for dummies. Almost sets itself up.

Minimal fuss. Stable and fast enough. Easy to administer and saves time when you have many smaller locations that you have to manage.

Auto-setup VPN between locations and the simple "cloud-panel" to administer all devices with an elegant overview, all from one place.

It can always improve pricewise regarding throughput.

No.

No.

Have not contacted customer service/technical support yet.

Smaller devices: SonicWall, ZyXel, etc.

We switched to get the Auto VPN function and the brilliant administrator panel, where all devices are accessible from one place.

Initial setup was straightforward and extremely easy.

No need for a vendor team to implement. Used in-house expertise.

Not measured.

You get what you pay for.

With this device, "anybody" can set it up.  Should keep IT man hours to a minimum.

Did not really evaluate other solutions as this was a side project to our "main" firewalls. At the time, we did some research on the Internet and did not really find anything comparable to Meraki.

The solution is simple, fast to set up, and brilliant for its use.

• Easy deployment
• Easy configuration
• Great reports

I can have the firewall up and running and configured in one hour.

• Automatic site to site VPN
• Content caching
• Automatic ISP failover
• Easy to troubleshoot
• Everything done true dashboard.

I do not seeing any areas that need improvement.

I've used it for two years.

Not at all.

Not at all just make sure you using a proper model for your environment, as you don't want to overload the firewall.

If you are overloading the firewall, you need to buy the next model as there is no upgrade path.

It's brilliant, 10/10 - you can open case online, or call them and you will be talking directly to the tech, who has access to your environment.

10/10.

I used Checkpoint, Cisco ASA, Palo Altos, Juniper. To configure the devices you need days, to spin up Meraki Firewall you need minutes.

It's very simple.

We did it in house, across five offices and the data center.

It saves time on spinning up new offices, and on managing the firewall.

Juniper switches.

I will never go back to any other solution. Right now our corporate network, across the five offices and the data center, is 100% Meraki, Meraki Firewalls, Meraki Switches, and Meraki APs.

Our company and clients use this solution. Our clients range in size from small, medium, and large organizations. Within our company, there are roughly 50 people using this solution. 

I love the simplicity of Meraki MX — specifically, the simplicity of the dashboard.

Currently, I don't see any big areas for improvement; although, It lacks some switching features. For instance, when you use MX to link the firewall to a stack, you cannot use LACP.  You cannot use switching behaviors as you see on the Meraki switch. This would be a really cool feature to have — real switching features on Meraki MX.

I have been using Meraki MX for five years.

Meraki MX is very stable. We haven't experienced any issues relating to stability. It's also very scalable, too.

We are in the first line of support, so we use the support differently than traditional customers — they are good.

Yes. We used Cisco, Palo Alto, a bit of Fortinet, and others. Currently, we only provide Meraki and Meraki-related devices.

The price could be lower, but compared to the TCO of other products, it's not really that expensive. When we sell it to customers, the first fee of the quote is often a bit odd; however, consider the small number of resources needed to manage it, there is an advantage to using Meraki MX.

You need to be ready to change your mindset of classical firewalls. Meraki is really more powerful with the full stack, which is the real purpose of this solution.

The real advantage with Meraki is the interaction between different prototypes, like Xpoint which is Amex — this is a game-changer. It's great when you have the full stack and you can play with the different settings and interact between Meraki devices.

Overall, on a scale from one to ten, I would give Meraki MX a rating of eight.

The primary use case is a zero-touch deployment.

It has very good features; it's easy to use, configure, set up, and deploy.

Also, the support is very good.

While it's reasonably priced, it could always be lowered to compete with others.

In the next release, because the security is pretty basic, I think they could include additional security features.

We used this solution for a very small project.

Meraki MX is quite stable. We have not had any issues.

It's a scalable solution.

Cisco's technical support is good, they are very responsive.

It's easy to set up and configure.

It was a very small project and it only took four or five minutes to install.

Four or five switches can be deployed in a day.

We have a team of several engineers to deploy and maintain this solution.

The price is slightly increased, but reasonable.

It's a good solution. If they're looking for something that is easy to use, easy to deploy, and easy to support, maybe they should consider Meraki, given the product is very stable.

The features are good. 

The price point is one thing that we need to consider, but it's expected because good products come with slightly increased pricing.

I would rate this solution an eight out of ten.

I like the automatic firmware updates. We use the Active Directory to authenticate VPN users. 

Expensive licensing and firewall stops immediately working if the licence is not renewed at the expiration date.

It's very stable. I haven't had any issues with the stability. 

I have not used the scalable features at all. We have around ten users using this solution at the moment. We don't have plans to increase the usage, all business is exhausted. 

It doesn't require staff to maintain it. It's up and running. Tops it requires is one staff checking on it once a month. 

Their technical support has been great. 

We did previously use a different solution. We switched because that solution wasn't stable. 

The initial setup was straightforward. The deployment took around four hours. 

I deployed it myself. 

I did evaluate other solutions but once I found Meraki, I wanted to give it a try. 

I would rate it a ten out of ten. I'm very happy with the solution. 

Our primary use is perhaps a little unusual. Many of our clients like the product, or want to consider the product, and we own it so that we can do valid product comparison and testing.

These particular firewalls are a very good solution for a company that doesn't have an IT employee working directly on IT. For small companies with no IT department, it is very user-friendly. 

The feature I find most valuable is the auto VPN. That is because it is really easy to configure and it's really reliable. The way we do traffic shaping and the way we block trafficking, it's very easy to configure. It is also easy for clients to maintain even without IT employees.

The product could improve most by improving the client VPN. The auto VPN works for site-to-site but they have an issue with the client VPN. For example, if I connect the client VPN, I cannot block clients for specific access inside of the company. Because of the limitation, you need to make a rule for everyone and it's not very easy to do. What you really want is to have a specific client VPN with specific (fine-grained) access to different areas.

One other thing that they should have to improve product utility is some kind of templates.  For example, templates for configuration of use in a vertical market would be useful.

They have a very good product. If you contact technical support, they should already know more about your methods and your needs. Management of the firewall is on the cloud and to be so easy for the user to configure, they remove some of the more complicated options. If you want an option, you need to contact support in order to enable it. They could have, for example, a different dashboard for more advanced features that you would be responsible to pay more for.

The solution is very stable. We don't have a measurable percentage of return on the equipment.

We don't have big clients that need to scale a lot. Our biggest clients have five firewalls. At most, we are talking about 200 users all on the same side under the same firewall. We don't do much scaling.

The technical support is very good. Anytime we ask about some issue that we cannot solve we send an email for Meraki and receive a reply in minutes. 

We are installing Sophos for clients as well. Because we had so many clients interested in the capabilities of the Meraki products, it was time for us to know more about the client needs and how we could help them. If they want everything integrated, like antivirus, the products are implemented differently and may be more fitting to the client's situation depending on the client's needs. 

In our organization, we only have one Meraki firewall. I bought an MX to explore using this product for customers.

The installation is straightforward. With Cisco Meraki, it takes only half-an-hour. For very specific, customized rules that some clients want it takes more time. The standard firewall working with regular rules would take one-hour maximum.

We are certified by Cisco. As we are certified technicians we do the installations. We do it with a two-person crew deployed to our clients.

We are using the advanced Meraki license. We pay on a monthly basis. The cost depends on the size of the company, of course. The prices of all different brands — Cisco, Sophos, Palo Alto, FortiGate, Check Point — are almost the same. We are talking about a maximum of 10% difference. If you do a very good comparison, they are very similar in functionality and price.

Every brand has its own licensing model. Cisco has two different license types. Sophos has more license types and modules that you can put on your firewall like FortiGate and Check Point. Of course, if you want more features, you have to pay for it. If you want the basic models, it is much cheaper. So it is very difficult to say. The price can increase with basic models if you need to add on, but if you buy with a total protection license, you don't have additional costs but the initial costs are higher.

Every time we consider introducing a new brand here in the company, we need to evaluate it very well. If you mix a lot of brands, you need a broader knowledge base and more technical guys to give you support. I need a guy to understand Sophos, I need a guy to understand Cisco. If I support installations of another brand, I need more people who have a specialty in that new brand.

We looked into Palo Alto, we needed to know more about that solution. We had a meeting one year ago with Check Point. We decided to keep on working with Sophos and Cisco Meraki.

I would give this solution about an eight out of ten. They can buy the brand directly or from a partner. They need to consider performance. I have to be totally honest about Meraki. Because of the client VPN, the lack of an easy way to implement templates with Meraki, that's really only enough for an eight.

We usually work with small businesses, so their requirements are simple. They just need to have a firewall to protect their internal network. Mainly that is it. So it's a simple firewall.

If Meraki could handle more than one internet connection and a bonding formula then that would be valuable. Load balancing options and ability to manage a couple of Internet connections, that's it. This is the main thing I see that the solution needs.

We've used Meraki for one year, so it's not enough time to evaluate the ability but it's still working.

Since we've only used it for one year, there's still a question about scalability.

We usually buy it and we install it ourselves. So we don't need support.

The initial setup is straightforward for a simple firewall. Deployment takes no more than one working day.  For deployment, you only need a technician, a well-trained technician to go onsite and just install it. The rest could be supported online, if they need on-site support it's very rare.

In terms of advice, I would say you should really prepare for open source because you have more control. For us here, we are well trained in firewalling as we have access to open source software and we are good at it. Open source gets rid of all the licensing issues. Meraki is a good solution, but it's not the best solution out there.

I would rate this solution a five out of ten.

The application visibility, performance visibility, and the failover capability for VPN are excellent.

The security is not as strong as it could be. The lack of HTTPS encryption is a big challenge that I have with Meraki. Essentially, the Meraki device is blind to any threats that are encrypted, and currently, somewhere in the neighborhood of 3/4 to 80% of all internet traffic is encrypted. In other words, you basically have a blind security guard watching the network.

I have been using Meraki MX for over five years.

We've had no issues with the scalability or the stability of this solution.

The price varies depending on the hardware platform as well as the type of license and whether you're adding security or not. 

If you're going to go with Meraki as your primary gateway, I'd recommend having a secondary security solution in your back pocket.

On a scale from one to ten, I would give this solution a rating of seven.