TrustRadius: an HG Insights company

Cisco Application Centric Infrastructure (Cisco ACI) vs. Cisco Catalyst SD-WAN

Save this comparison

Save this comparison

Add Product

Recommended Comparisons

    Overview
    ProductRatingMost Used ByProduct SummaryStarting Price

    Cisco ACI

    Score8.5 out of 10
    N/ACisco Application Centric Infrastructure (ACI) is network virtualization technology.N/A

    Cisco Catalyst SD-WAN

    Score8.7 out of 10
    N/ACisco Catalyst SD-WAN is a software-defined wide area network solution designed to simplify and optimize enterprise network connectivity in complex digital landscapes. It enables organizations to connect any user to any application, whether on-premises, in data centers, or across multiple clouds, with integrated capabilities for multicloud support, security, predictive automation, and enhanced network visibility—all built on a Secure Access Service Edge (SASE)-enabled…N/A
    Pricing
    Cisco ACICisco Catalyst SD-WAN
    Editions & Modules
    No answers on this topic
    No answers on this topic
    Offerings
    Pricing Offerings
    Cisco ACICisco Catalyst SD-WAN
    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 ACICisco Catalyst SD-WAN
    Considered Both Products
    Cisco
    Chose Cisco ACI
    I do not found any solution that has the same maturity of Cisco Application Centric Infrastructure (Cisco ACI) with other constructors. I tried NEXUS Dashboard fabric controller to try similar usage with nx-os mode and evpn vxlan. NDFC is quiet near to Cisco Application Centric …
    Incentivized
    Chose Cisco ACI
    Cisco ACI is more a complementary solution to separate the underlay and overlay network than VMware NSX.
    Incentivized
    Chose Cisco ACI
    It’s native support to applications through Application centric mode it’s attractive when deploying in a private cloud environment and it’s ease integration to compute/VMM resources allows the deployment procedure to be much efficient. Also Cisco is a lead in the market that …
    Incentivized
    Chose Cisco ACI
    Reliability
    Scalability
    Compatibility
    Incentivized
    Chose Cisco ACI
    I had been involved on a project that involved ACI, SD-ACCESS and SD-WAN implementation and one of the better things the level of integration of the solutions on the policies level.
    Incentivized
    Chose Cisco ACI
    NSX is much easier to use but is expensive and the VMware teams usually do not want to support it.
    Incentivized
    Cisco
    Chose Cisco Catalyst SD-WAN
    ir1100 industrial router which should be installed in open area required LTE and fiber connectivity, 4000 the site in data center which acting as a hub site for all the spoke sites where we have 1r1100, limited band width and performance is required on remote sites while …
    Incentivized
    Chose Cisco Catalyst SD-WAN
    Much more stable and technical support is top notch.
    Incentivized
    Key User Insights
    Would buy again
    96%
    Would buy again
    113 Answers
    96%
    Would buy again
    133 Answers
    Delivers good value for the price
    98%
    Delivers good value for the price
    96 Answers
    94%
    Delivers good value for the price
    116 Answers
    Happy with the feature set
    97%
    Happy with the feature set
    115 Answers
    97%
    Happy with the feature set
    135 Answers
    Lived up to sales and marketing promises
    94%
    Lived up to sales and marketing promises
    82 Answers
    91%
    Lived up to sales and marketing promises
    93 Answers
    Implementation went as expected
    89%
    Implementation went as expected
    93 Answers
    87%
    Implementation went as expected
    109 Answers
    Best Alternatives
    Cisco ACICisco Catalyst SD-WAN
    Small Businesses
    No answers on this topic
    No answers on this topic
    Medium-sized Companies
    IBM Cloud Internet Services
    Score9.8 out of 10
    Cisco Meraki SD-WAN
    Score8.6 out of 10
    Enterprises
    IBM Cloud Internet Services
    Score9.8 out of 10
    VMware SD-WAN
    Score7.9 out of 10
    All AlternativesView all alternativesView all alternatives
    User Ratings
    Cisco ACICisco Catalyst SD-WAN
    Likelihood to Recommend
    8.5
    (131 ratings)
    8.7
    (150 ratings)
    Likelihood to Renew
    9.7
    (10 ratings)
    8.9
    (4 ratings)
    Usability
    5.1
    (8 ratings)
    8.7
    (67 ratings)
    Availability
    9.1
    (2 ratings)
    8.0
    (1 ratings)
    Performance
    9.1
    (9 ratings)
    8.0
    (1 ratings)
    Support Rating
    7.5
    (11 ratings)
    8.3
    (15 ratings)
    In-Person Training
    8.2
    (1 ratings)
    -
    (0 ratings)
    Implementation Rating
    6.0
    (5 ratings)
    -
    (0 ratings)
    Configurability
    -
    (0 ratings)
    10.0
    (1 ratings)
    Contract Terms and Pricing Model
    -
    (0 ratings)
    8.0
    (1 ratings)
    Product Scalability
    8.6
    (9 ratings)
    9.0
    (1 ratings)
    Vendor post-sale
    5.5
    (1 ratings)
    8.0
    (1 ratings)
    Vendor pre-sale
    -
    (0 ratings)
    7.0
    (1 ratings)
    User Testimonials
    Cisco ACICisco Catalyst SD-WAN
    Likelihood to Recommend
    Cisco
    The ACI solution is perfectly fit for a large or multi-site data center environment. It permits simplifying deployment, management, automation, and security. ACI is especially valuable when strong scalability, automation, security, and segmentation are required. However, ACI is less suitable for a small environment due to its complexity and high cost.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Cisco
    It's great for connectivity. I think if you're looking at. There's a lot of players out there that do SD- WAN, you can do hosted solutions, you can do your own. If you're looking to do it yourself, I think this product works out well. I do know it's hosted elsewhere by some other companies, but for us, we want the control and we don't have a huge amount of sites, so being able to control that's important and the data that we can get out of the product, we can see just seeing the application experience through Cisco Catalyst SD-WAN, really gives us good information.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Pros
    Cisco
    • Cisco ACI, The object model is very complicated. It's something difficult to understand and also because there is a user interface, there's a web user interface, but it's not optimal to use it because if you want to deploy a large amount of VLAN or a large amount of tenants, it's quite difficult to do it or it's quite challenging. Maybe if you want to configure a large amount of ports using the web interface, it's not appropriate because it takes a lot of time. It also provides APIs to do that, but as I say, the object model is very difficult to understand and there is very little documentation about automation of the ACI and maybe there is but it's not so easy to find.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Cisco
    • We are able to use a multiple different circuits to go into the cloud, so we are not relying on just one particular private wireless. We're relying on wine circuits, ethernet, ethernet out. So it provides us that flexibility where we didn't have that before. Provides security that is very robust and flexible and scalable and it provides us with, the biggest thing is redundancy, where we have backup. For example, we have a Starlink for nuclear power plants. If our main circuits go down, we have that. And without Cisco Catalyst SD-WAN it would be very hard to actually achieve, to accomplish true redundancy. So we're happy with Cisco Catalyst SD-WAN in that regard.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Cons
    Cisco
    • I think something I've just went to a session with hyper fabric and the ideas that hyper fabric has. Keep it really simple because Cisco ACI is a complex system and adopt some of the ideas behind hyper fabric, bring it to ACI that will be really beneficial. So as I said, automation is a great thing, but it's still, you need to have the background and the really complex stuff that happens behind the scenes to leverage the value of that solution. And by adding more simplicity to it, I think that will be a great thing. And also integrating with other applications in terms of the automation.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Cisco
    • I will say the way we use it now, and I think what happened was the way it was deployed, it was fine, but unfortunately over the course of the years we've gotten a little out of hand with our device templates and feature templates. I think if there's any form of feedback that I would give to Cisco is how do we find ways to improve the environment as it stands so we get to a certain point with the environment and then we don't know how to undo it or fix it or optimize the environment. Because right now we're in a position where we're playing a lot of catch up and clean up and if there was a way or some tool or feature that we can take advantage of that would allow us to optimize that environment where we will kind of corner ourselves into a lot of problems in the future. There's some feature or something that we could take advantage of that will allow us to optimize that environment and not let it get out of control pretty easily. That would be my suggestion.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Likelihood to Renew
    Cisco
    Provided with the intensive fault isolation for the CISCO ACI, we are glad that we have this Data Center Solution in place and we will continue to renew as long as the future needed requirements are meet and more helpful features will be enabled in the future with the integration of security
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Cisco
    I would rate SD-WAN highly because it has significantly improved network performance, reliability, and cost-efficiency for my organization. Its ability to optimize traffic dynamically, enhance security, and simplify management across multiple locations has been invaluable. With SD-WAN, we’ve reduced dependency on costly MPLS, improved cloud application performance, and gained greater control over our network infrastructure.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Usability
    Cisco
    You'll need a lot of training and hands on experience to get the most out of the product. There are a lot of very useful features in the ACI product. Often times there are a lot of ways to get to a solution for chalanges in the field. The solutions might be different eacht time. Knowing which one to implement is somtimes a challenge.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Cisco
    The niche configurations are given equal focus as the standard use cases, which can make onboarding difficult in the beginning (ie why am I not using an entire tab of the portal), but aside from that part, the dashboard is relatively easy to navigate and apply the configuration. The metrics and analytics available are also nice to have in a single pane.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Reliability and Availability
    Cisco
    It allways works. If there are problems with links going down by accident (say someone accidentally unpatches something they shouldn't have), we rarely miss more then one packet over the link. Also, using VPCs we are able to upgrade the software on the switches without the attached EPs ever noticing.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Cisco
    I think if we could afford, we could have HA inplace but we planned out outage and workaround to avoid any outages.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Performance
    Cisco
    Day to day operations on Cisco ACI do not require much human intervention, the platform ticks over without any major faults. Being able to rapidly replicate the communication between two groups of machines across multiple sub networks speeds up new application delivery, and the integration into vmWare allows multiple teams within IT to work together to problem solve rapidly.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Cisco
    It does slow down over the period but it's same with other product. you need to clear/reboot services.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Support Rating
    Cisco
    Cisco provides users and partners with a multitude of data for you to consume. I think that the stuff in the public domain goes a long way to assisting you find any answers you may need, plus insights and information from areas such as DevNet provide you with access to more than just the traditional release notes and the like
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Cisco
    Al ser soluciones integradas del portafolio de soluciones de Cisco, el soporte es transversal a cada uno de los componentes implementados, teniendo el cliente la capacidad de resolver sus inconvenientes bajo una misma infraestructura que está totalmente homologada, satisfacciendo de esta manera, las necesidades del cliente asi como permitiendo, que este se concentre en su negocio. Since the Cisco SD-WAN tools are a part of Cisco’s broader portfolio of solutions, support cross-cuts to each of our deployed components, with our company as the customer having the ability to solve our problems through the same, approved infrastructure. Their support team easily satisfies the customer’s needs so that they continue to focus on business functions.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    In-Person Training
    Cisco
    The Cisco ACI training provided by Cisco was in depth, covered all of our requirements, and allowed us to implement and maintain the platform without issues.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Cisco
    No answers on this topic
    Implementation Rating
    Cisco
    Being involved in the implmentation gives you more overview on how things are supposed to be working and communicating, you can easily performce troubleshooting and understanding the troubleshooting scenario
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Cisco
    I was late to participate but my team was very happy with the outcome.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Alternatives Considered
    Cisco
    Actually we start our learning in networking career with Cisco. So it is very useful or easier to learn this product. And honestly speaking, I didn't work in any other data center solution other than Cisco. So I cannot compare what it gives us more than other popular stuff. But this is very nice product like from Cisco.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Cisco
    We've used the old Cisco SD-WAN, which no longer exists. It was a lot more complex to configure what is now called Cisco Catalyst SD-WAN. So they've definitely come a long way in that it is a lot less complicated to set up and template based.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Contract Terms and Pricing Model
    Cisco
    No answers on this topic
    Cisco
    I didn't take part of this decision but it always multiyear contract get best discount.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Scalability
    Cisco
    Cisco ACI scales well and is suited in scenarios such as multi-cloud or large data centre implementations. It is not suited to smaller deployments as the efficiencies that it provides are not fully realised. It is well suited in large environments that contain both virtual and bare-metal machines allowing a great deal of flexibility. It is also perfect to support multi-tenancy platforms.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Cisco
    Really strength in scalability. Only thigs it's depends on some prototype Cisco product which you can't work with other Cisco products.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Return on Investment
    Cisco
    • We've definitely spent quite a bit of time relearning how to do things in ACI, but I think the investment has been well worth while considering that we can now deploy tenants and leaves from the ground up in a matter of seconds.
    • We can if we choose to upgrade an entire datacenters worth of switches in a single night. (We've chosen to break it up for availability requirements, but if you didn't require 99.999% uptime like us you may be able to do it)
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Cisco
    • Our branch offices can connect to our enterprise network and the internet quickly and securely, which has helped to increase productivity and reduce downtime.
    • We have been able to reduce our dependence on expensive MPLS connections, and instead utilize a combination of broadband and LTE connections, which are more cost-effective
    • The centralized location improves network visibility and troubleshooting process
    Read full review
    ScreenShots