Meraki SD-WAN Reviews

We are using this solution for productivity, in terms of the users, and simplicity in terms of ease of management, although the capabilities of the platforms are a little restricted. As is the resilience, just because of the hub and spoke nature at significant volume. I use the solution a lot in retail stores.

The solution is deployed on-prem and on the cloud. We are using the latest version.

The solution is pretty reliable.

Scalability could be improved. Yes, you can add more than 300 or 400 sites onto it, but because it's not a true SD-WAN and, effectively, it's just a Multi-VRF, it's all hub and spoke at that point. That's the nature of the design, but that's what keeps it simple to administer. So, it's a trade off.

I have been using this solution for about 10 years.

We haven't had any issues with stability.

The scalability could be better. Typically, when I get beyond 300 or 400 sites, depending on the criticality of service, I will normally move away from Meraki and look at either Viptela or Versa.

We have 4,000 end users and no plans to increase that number.

I can fall back on my service provider if I need any additional technical support.

Initial setup is straightforward. For deployment and maintenance, I have three people that are capable of dealing with it and that is basically just to  make sure I've got cover within the team, but typically one person is administrating at any one time.

There are no licensing costs for the product subscription.

I would rate this solution 8 out of 10. 

I would recommend this solution, particularly supported by VM02.

I use the tool for some purposes related to technical checks.

Meraki as SD-WAN has improved our organization's work since it is a resilient tool and serves as a cloud-based product.

The solution's most valuable feature is its ease of maintenance. The tool's cost-effectiveness and value-cost optimization have also been helpful. In case you need the software upgrade, you can centrally push the software upgrades. You can push the application process from the central point.

Meraki SD-WAN has to significantly improve the company's network performance. Though Meraki SD-WAN's network performance is better than that of the MPLS circuit and other technologies, it can still improve.

The tool needs to focus on network stability, better prices, good performance, and low-cost bandwidth to improve its solution. I want the tool's cost to be less and performance to be higher.

I have been using Meraki SD-WAN for two years. I am a customer and partner of the tool.

It is a stable solution. Stability-wise, I rate the solution a ten out of ten.

There has been a medium to low impact on our devices in terms of stability whenever we had to experience a downtime.

Scalability-wise, I rate the solution a ten out of ten.

Around 100 to 200 people use the tool.

I plan to increase the use of the tool in my company.

I have contacted the solution's technical support via the web and some toll-free numbers. The tool's support team has been super helpful. I rate the technical support a ten out of ten.

Positive

Before Meraki SD-WAN, I used to use an independent router and switches from Cisco. My company started to use Meraki SD-WAN since we wanted to bypass the existing device since without it we were unable to go for upgrades.

The product's initial setup phase was fast. If one is difficult and ten is easy, I rate the product's initial setup phase a ten out of ten.

Five to six people manage the product's deployment phase.

The solution is deployed on an on-premises model.

The solution can be deployed in six months.

Five to six people manage the product's maintenance phase.

The tool helps save some money.

The tool is costly. I rate the tool's price as a ten out of ten since it is very expensive.

I did not evaluate other tools.

I use Meraki SD-WAN in our multi-branch network operations. We use it in multiple branches.

The tool is used since it bypasses the existing devices, and then we can install Meraki's router.

The tool can enhance our network security and management since it serves as a software-defined network.

I use Meraki Auto VPN feature, and it has been useful for me in the area of network performance. When it comes to network security and management, the Meraki Auto VPN feature is good, but if we consider the network bandwidth, it depends on the network connectivity. The security and management depend on the connectivity of the whole network.

The tool's performance helped overcome the challenges in network management.

I rate the tool a ten out of ten.

I use the solution in my company for the firewall, specifically Cisco Meraki MX, which we use mostly for the wireless and the LAN or switching part.

The most valuable feature of the solution is the auto-VPN functionality, which helps you quickly connect the branch-to-branch kind of scenario is very helpful.

In Meraki SD-WAN, we have some limitations with the traffic shaping capabilities.

There is nothing specific that I want to say, but the solution is improving daily. The tool comes up with new features and new capabilities. The solution is moving away from small business use cases to large-sized enterprise customers.

I am okay with whatever Meraki is currently supporting in the solution. My concern revolves around the WAN part of the solution since if we consider traditional routing, it doesn't support all routing protocols. Right now, my company is very limited in BGP and OSPF scenarios.

I have been using Meraki SD-WAN for almost five years. My company is a gold partner of Cisco.

It is a stable solution. Stability-wise, I rate the solution a nine out of ten.

From a scalability point of view, I would say the tool is not so great. Scalability-wise, I rate the solution a seven out of ten. There are some limitations around the WAN protocols.

The product is a good fit for retail customers and offices that opt for a wireless kind of approach. The product is good for office locations. My company has observed that a lot of our customer base belongs to either the retail industry or are just offices.

The solution's technical support is good. I rate the technical support a nine out of ten.

Positive

The product's initial setup phase is simple.

For any new site rollout, as per our company's experience, if everything is planned out, we can get a site up within four to five hours. We require two days of some little bit of planning work over the IPs and all such things. The actual work starts once the box is connected to the internet, after which, it takes not more than four hours. It is less than a day kind of scenario.

The solution is deployed on the cloud.

The product does help with the cost savings part.

The product's price falls under the mid-range category, especially if we consider the new licensing model. The tool is not cheap anymore.

Meraki SD-WAN can be compared with its competitors' products, like Fortinet, which is almost the same as Meraki. The other competitor of Meraki's product is Versa. Versa is a better product when it comes to SD-WAN, especially when compared to Fortinet and Meraki, which are on the same level.

When we compare Meraki SD-WAN with Cisco SD-WAN or the old traditional product CatalystVPN, the tool's traffic shaping capabilities are not fully present.

The automation or UI-based features of the product are easy to operate.

My company has not integrated any AI features into the product. Meraki SD-WAN's dashboard provides my company with good telemetry functionalities. My company has tried using the AI features with Cisco DNA Spaces.

I recommend the tool to those who plan to use it.

I rate the tool an eight out of ten.

We are using it for branch to branch connectivity. We have set up servers and devices all over the DCC to provide local Wi-Fi for all branches to access the server.

It is secure. To connect the other branches to us, that's all it needed.

It's very good, especially for vendors from other countries to reconnect with us. We can control and monitor everything.

Sometimes we face issues with VPN connections when someone connects from a different time zone, like from Georgia to the Middle East. These kinds of issues occur, but other than that, nothing major.

I have been working with the Meraki SD-WAN for almost ten years.

We did not face much downtime. Our business operations have been stable.

I am not aware of any limitations in terms of scalability.

Sometimes technical support response is delayed. I would rate it seven out of ten.

Positive

I have not used any other SD-WAN solutions before.

The initial setup was delayed due to shipment issues with the hardware. However, once everything arrived, we could complete it in about one to one and a half months.

We have an in-house team and support from a third-party local vendor. We have contracts with them for periodic testing. We have six people involved in maintenance — three for hardware and three for other areas.

We have seen a return on investment.

There are many cheap solutions available. Local vendors offer their own products, so compared to those, Meraki seems a bit expensive.

It depends on a business's needs. For businesses that need it, Meraki SD-WAN is good, however, there are other cheaper cloud solutions available like SaaS or AWS.

I'd rate the solution nine 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.

Meraki SD-WAN enhances connectivity across various business locations. There are around five to six locations, so we have SD-WAN connectivity.

The security features within Meraki SD-WAN support organization because this is site-to-site connectivity. There is no chance of data leaks from our side because it works through a secure tunnel.

Earlier, we used MPLS and switched over to Meraki. 

Meraki SD-WAN is very convenient to use. That’s the reason we adopted it. The configuration is simple, and maintenance is very easy. That’s why we switched to SD-WAN.

If Meraki can add more features on the reporting side, that will be convenient for us because we have to rely on a different product for monitoring and reporting. That is one of the challenges. Apart from that, everything is good.

If I gauge the reporting features, suppose for device performance-related things and transactions, in terms of throughput and the types of issues we receive on the network side. If those can come into the reporting format, it will be very helpful. 

Many customers ask for their performance, transactions, and throughput. It is very difficult to get the report from connected devices. In that case, we have to go for additional management tools or monitoring tools, which can give us good features. Like earlier, we used Cisco Works. In the same way, we need to implement another product.

In the past, I have used it up to a 250 Mbps device. If we add around seven hundred to eight hundred users, the performance degrades. Meraki might have recently added more devices with higher capacity, but I haven’t had hands-on experience with those. 

I have been using it for the last year. 

As a company grows, if there are more sites from the customer side, then we need to implement. But, the scalability has been constant over the last year. I couldn’t see much change in that. 

On the monitoring side, it’s good. 

We have mostly SMB types of accounts. For very big organizations, there are some limitations. Apart from that, it is very comfortable for SMBs.

Technical support is good. We still get prompt support from their side.

Positive

We also deal with Cisco Meraki, Cisco Catalyst, and other Cisco products. Mostly we are dealing with Cisco. Apart from them, we also handle some products from Juniper.

The pricing is reasonable. Compared to other solutions, it is reasonable.

There is a separate licensing fee for the product we are using. Apart from that, we are not seeing anything additional.

We generally recommend Meraki because it is very simple. The configuration and all those things are very simple. If you have the technical knowledge, there is very little chance of making mistakes.

Even I have given training to the L1 team, and they can handle it very well. We do not need highly skilled people to handle these devices.

I would not recommend this tool to very large-scale organizations. I have not recommended it as of now. But for small and medium-sized organizations, where they do not have many transactions and have a strength of around 500 to 600, we recommend Meraki devices.

Overall, I would rate it a ten out of ten. 

The tool makes it easier for us to communicate with other offices without using an MPLS network.

The solution is easy to use. The product enables us to connect with other offices easily. It provides alerts to notify us if a site is down or up. I haven’t faced any challenges while integrating Meraki into existing infrastructures.

The solution must provide more security features.

I haven’t had any issues with the tool’s stability. That is why we use it.

The tool is scalable. We deal with medium-sized businesses with around 100 users.

The support is pretty good. The support team is pretty knowledgeable.

Positive

The initial setup is straightforward. I rate the ease of setup a ten out of ten. The deployment can be done in an hour if everything is connected properly. We need two network technicians for the deployment. It is simple to use. It does not require any maintenance.

The product is not very expensive. I rate the pricing a five out of ten. The price is not a huge deal-breaker.

I evaluated other products, but Meraki was cheaper.

We configured the VPN feature in our organization. It works well. I will recommend the solution. It is easy to use. Overall, I rate the product a ten out of ten.

I'm able to access various ports for simple switches and then check things, like the information that I've gotten. We use the solution on a day-to-day basis. 

I like the part with the accessibility to the switches, the access point, and the firewalls. Having to set up a closed system singlehandedly and a lifetime guarantee on the equipment is a valuable part of this solution.

The area I think this solution should improve is the pricing.

I have been using this solution for about five years.

My impression is that this solution is quite scalable. There are around 800 users of this solution in our company right now.

My impression is that it was quite easy to set up this solution. Our model of deployment is hybrid.

When we were first looking to implement this solution, we were looking at pre-systems as we handle this one. Even though it was the priciest one, the day-to-day basis and the security were the best.

It was all done through a two-person team. Another member who wasn't on-site is an administrator and I was someone who is on-site. For example, the administrator sets up a new server from scratch and I take over from there, so we worked in collaboration all the time. I am also the person responsible for maintaining this solution.

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

When it comes to giving advice to other people looking into this solution, I'd just say that this system is easy to maintain and quite secure with good quality equipment.

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