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Cisco Meraki SD-WAN vs. HPE Aruba Networking EdgeConnect

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    Overview
    ProductRatingMost Used ByProduct SummaryStarting Price

    Cisco Meraki SD-WAN

    Score8.6 out of 10
    N/ACisco Meraki SD-WAN is a cloud-managed solution that simplifies and secures wide area networking across branch, campus, and remote locations. Built on Meraki’s dashboard, it delivers centralized visibility, automation, and traffic optimization without the complexity of traditional WAN deployments. The solution improves application performance by dynamically routing traffic based on real-time conditions, integrating advanced security, and providing seamless multicloud connectivity. With support…N/A

    HPE Aruba Networking EdgeConnect

    Score7.7 out of 10
    N/AThe HPE Aruba Networking EdgeConnect SD-WAN platform addresses the challenges associated with backhauling cloud-destined traffic to the data center, thereby reducing the cost of bandwidth connectivity from the data center to cloud providers.N/A
    Pricing
    Cisco Meraki SD-WANHPE Aruba Networking EdgeConnect
    Editions & Modules
    No answers on this topic
    No answers on this topic
    Offerings
    Pricing Offerings
    Cisco Meraki SD-WANHPE Aruba Networking EdgeConnect
    Free Trial
    NoNo
    Free/Freemium Version
    NoNo
    Premium Consulting/Integration Services
    NoNo
    Entry-level Setup FeeNo setup feeNo setup fee
    Additional Details——
    More Pricing Information
    Community Pulse
    Cisco Meraki SD-WANHPE Aruba Networking EdgeConnect
    Considered Both Products
    Cisco
    No answer on this topic
    Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE)
    No answer on this topic
    Key User Insights
    Would buy again
    95%
    Would buy again
    78 Answers
    No answers on this topic
    Delivers good value for the price
    99%
    Delivers good value for the price
    78 Answers
    No answers on this topic
    Happy with the feature set
    94%
    Happy with the feature set
    77 Answers
    No answers on this topic
    Lived up to sales and marketing promises
    96%
    Lived up to sales and marketing promises
    68 Answers
    No answers on this topic
    Implementation went as expected
    97%
    Implementation went as expected
    77 Answers
    No answers on this topic
    Best Alternatives
    Cisco Meraki SD-WANHPE Aruba Networking EdgeConnect
    Small Businesses
    No answers on this topic
    No answers on this topic
    Medium-sized Companies
    Cisco Catalyst SD-WAN
    Score8.7 out of 10
    Cisco Meraki SD-WAN
    Score8.6 out of 10
    Enterprises
    Cisco Catalyst SD-WAN
    Score8.7 out of 10
    Cisco Catalyst SD-WAN
    Score8.7 out of 10
    All AlternativesView all alternativesView all alternatives
    User Ratings
    Cisco Meraki SD-WANHPE Aruba Networking EdgeConnect
    Likelihood to Recommend
    8.7
    (87 ratings)
    8.2
    (3 ratings)
    Likelihood to Renew
    9.1
    (2 ratings)
    -
    (0 ratings)
    Usability
    -
    (0 ratings)
    8.0
    (1 ratings)
    Support Rating
    8.1
    (2 ratings)
    -
    (0 ratings)
    Product Scalability
    8.2
    (85 ratings)
    -
    (0 ratings)
    Vendor post-sale
    9.1
    (1 ratings)
    -
    (0 ratings)
    Vendor pre-sale
    9.1
    (1 ratings)
    -
    (0 ratings)
    User Testimonials
    Cisco Meraki SD-WANHPE Aruba Networking EdgeConnect
    Likelihood to Recommend
    Cisco
    I believe it is well suited for "pop-up" offices of a small number of people. 5 to 10 is ideal. It can be setup with a minimum of involvement from the IT infrastructure group. It is a very simple way to connect a remote site securely and quickly with the confidence that the connection will be stable. I believe it is less suited for a large organization requiring complex routing and routing protocols. It only works with Meraki endpoints and so there must be Meraki firewalls at both ends. It cannot be used with IPSEC tunnels
    Incentivized
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    Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE)
    The HPE Aruba Networking EdgeConnect SD-WAN excel in environments where you do a lot of your East - West segmentation is done by another device. While these devices can do basic firewall functions, it's their not true intent. If you can group what you want your traffic to do into a few basic groups, this product will work great (think all Guest Traffic gets low priority and sent directly to the internet, VoIP gets sent directly out but high priority, and most internal traffic gets medium throughput). There are ways to really tinker reach the desired goals but this can be a double-edged sword of those configurations being forgotten about. There is also the use of templating which if you have a larger environment, this product will make some normal configs (think SNMP) more streamlined. The units are also highly reliable, built with HA in mind - our company has only experienced a single version that had a memory leak that we just needed to remember to reboot every 90 days while we waited for the next update (which came in like 4 months).
    Incentivized
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    Pros
    Cisco
    • I really like the firewalls and the access points, like the wireless ones. From a wireless access point perspective, we recently moved to the new MR57s, multi-gig bandwidth as well as Wi-Fi 6, which helps users connect wirelessly regardless of where they sit in the office. The experience they get doesn’t matter wherever they move—it’s fantastic. So we’ve moved from the previous iteration of Meraki Access Points to the new iteration, like two weeks ago, and we’ve seen a major shift in the user experience.
    Read full review
    Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE)
    • Fairly easy to manage once its setup and running
    • Updates are easy and handled with little downtime
    • Price is just right for the product functionality
    Incentivized
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    Cons
    Cisco
    • I personally think that this particular place is on the logging side. I have seen where the event log is that what they call in terms of capturing all the log events is the area which I personally feel can actually be improved. Even this could be similar, like how I said about packet capture where you could have a flexibility of having a high level information or deep level regardless you should have that kind of option where you could also see the logging site as granular as per the requirement. So that's the area which I think is a bit little behind compared to other vendors.
    Incentivized
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    Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE)
    • Ran into some weird bugs along the way that required support to address
    • Not having physical devices that you can reboot yourself takes a bit of control away
    • Administrators have a bit of a learning curve in figuring out the new system
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Likelihood to Renew
    Cisco
    Because so far the solution showed great stability during the time, easy to use and deploy. There is still room for improvements like adding a smarter way to manage the policies to apply to the tunneled traffic, today the way to configure and manage them is quite old style, It would be better an "object" oriented way to create them.
    Incentivized
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    Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE)
    No answers on this topic
    Usability
    Cisco
    Its usable very well
    Incentivized
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    Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE)
    The product and its management as a whole are worth investigating for any kind of people interested in looking at new SD-WAN appliances. The devices possess a lot of capability for granularity which makes them much more advanced than other products I've worked with in the past. Ironically, for all the granularity though, this product is held back that you can ultimately only have 7 different policies for routing decisions. We've ran into instances where we wanted two sites to only share certain routes between each other (through the use of tags which are basically an arbitrary way to say this traffic is special) but then we had to collapse some of our routing decisions in order to make a specific route table for these two to be able which felt like a step back in the advanced routing decisions we had previously made
    Incentivized
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    Support Rating
    Cisco
    Fast and efficient. The only issue currently is that the support is only overseas support and not in South Africa, which causes delays in resolution for some cases. Escalating issues is quite simple and the opening of new cases from the dashboard is easy. I have never had a support issue that could not be resolved.
    Incentivized
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    Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE)
    No answers on this topic
    Alternatives Considered
    Cisco
    We did a very stringent valuation a few years ago. And we evaluated probably about a dozen suppliers on paper that we evaluate just by capabilities. And, we of some other business criteria, and we whittled that down to a list of five. And out of those five, we brought four of those into our lab environment where we ran approximately 350 different test cases on, we really beat on it pretty heavily. And some of those other suppliers would've been companies like Fortinet Versa Networks Silver Peak, which is now owned by Hewlett Packard.
    Incentivized
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    Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE)
    Prisma SD-WAN is a very simple solution to configure and maintain (so much to the point that in that environment, I questioned if my skills as a Network Engineer were needed). However it worked almost primarily on its own with very little input, by default and at the time of review had no way to do fully mesh (which was desired), and constantly suffered from memory leak. Its integrations were through the use of obscure tags and suffered from a "when it works - it works but when it doesn't - it doesn't and you don't know why" mentality. In contrast, HPE Aruba Networking EdgeConnect SD-WAN gives you a lot of insight into what is going on with the site, the integrations are done easily within Orchestrator (the control plane), and ultimately the product is typically a very stable product with many ways to configure and tweak the solution to fit your business needs.
    Incentivized
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    Scalability
    Cisco
    With the implementation of Cisco Meraki SD-WAN on our new site, this has enabled us to optimize the bandwidth of our 3 links. Thanks to this, updates pushed by Microsoft Intune, such as Microsoft CRM operations, are running smoothly. The same applies to SAP and our Teams meetings. And I almost forgot our Cisco telephone system.
    Incentivized
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    Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE)
    No answers on this topic
    Return on Investment
    Cisco
    • Cisco Meraki SD-WAN gave us a new perspective on SDN, ZTP and other automation tools we didn't have before
    • The sizing of Meraki MX series cannot compete very large and robust networks, only if we use virtual appliances. In this case, I would recommend on other vendors like Fortinet
    Incentivized
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    Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE)
    • It has created a bit of overhead as another control panel that needs to be managed
    • Recovery of invested costs will take some time
    • Time is saved on the separate management of sites
    Incentivized
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    ScreenShots