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Cisco Application Centric Infrastructure (Cisco ACI) vs. Cloudflare

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    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

    Cloudflare

    Score8.9 out of 10
    N/ACloudflare’s connectivity cloud is a unified platform of cloud-native services designed to help enterprises regain control over their IT environments. Powered by an intelligent, programmable global cloud network, it is built to offer security, performance, visibility, and reliability.

    $20

    per month

    Pricing
    Cisco ACICloudflare
    Editions & Modules
    No answers on this topic
    Pro
    $20
    per month
    Business
    $200
    per month
    Free
    Free
    Enterprise
    Contact sales team
    Offerings
    Pricing Offerings
    Cisco ACICloudflare
    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
    Features
    Cisco ACICloudflare
    DDoS Protection
    Comparison of DDoS Protection features of Cisco Application Centric Infrastructure (Cisco ACI) and Cloudflare
    Feature
    Cisco Application Centric Infrastructure (Cisco ACI)
    -
    Ratings
    Cloudflare
    8.4
    6 Ratings
    4% below category average
    Automatic Scalability00 Ratings9.47 Ratings
    Mitigation SLA00 Ratings8.87 Ratings
    Security policy management00 Ratings8.67 Ratings
    WAF capabilities00 Ratings8.67 Ratings
    Request rate limiting00 Ratings7.87 Ratings
    Traffic filtering00 Ratings7.67 Ratings
    Bot detection00 Ratings8.07 Ratings
    Global threat intelligence00 Ratings8.87 Ratings
    Real-time analytics and reporting00 Ratings7.87 Ratings
    Best Alternatives
    Cisco ACICloudflare
    Small Businesses
    No answers on this topic
    No answers on this topic
    Medium-sized Companies
    IBM Cloud Internet Services
    Score9.8 out of 10
    No answers on this topic
    Enterprises
    IBM Cloud Internet Services
    Score9.8 out of 10
    No answers on this topic
    All AlternativesView all alternativesView all alternatives
    User Ratings
    Cisco ACICloudflare
    Likelihood to Recommend
    8.5
    (131 ratings)
    9.1
    (192 ratings)
    Likelihood to Renew
    9.7
    (10 ratings)
    8.2
    (4 ratings)
    Usability
    5.1
    (8 ratings)
    8.6
    (8 ratings)
    Availability
    9.1
    (2 ratings)
    9.1
    (2 ratings)
    Performance
    9.1
    (9 ratings)
    9.1
    (2 ratings)
    Support Rating
    7.5
    (11 ratings)
    6.6
    (154 ratings)
    In-Person Training
    8.2
    (1 ratings)
    -
    (0 ratings)
    Implementation Rating
    6.0
    (5 ratings)
    8.6
    (2 ratings)
    Configurability
    -
    (0 ratings)
    9.0
    (1 ratings)
    Ease of integration
    -
    (0 ratings)
    9.0
    (2 ratings)
    Product Scalability
    8.6
    (9 ratings)
    9.1
    (2 ratings)
    Vendor post-sale
    5.5
    (1 ratings)
    7.0
    (1 ratings)
    Vendor pre-sale
    -
    (0 ratings)
    8.0
    (1 ratings)
    User Testimonials
    Cisco ACICloudflare
    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
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    Cloudflare
    Cloudflare has features as a CDN/Gateway/Reverse Proxy that simply don't exist in other solutions. Having so many capabilities under a single platform, with solid support and high uptime, has been essential. I would recommend it for hobby projects all the way to enterprise scale. There's a lot of push around AI and workers. Some feel like Cloudflare is following the hype. But after reading a lot about the new features, a decent amount of them has real value.
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    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.
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    Cloudflare
    • The best part is the content delivery network. Cloudflare has a large network of data centres around the world that helps cache and delivers content quickly to our customers.
    • Cloudflare offers us with a fast and reliable DNS service and with the world class features such as Cloudflare workers, SSL verification, certificate management and web application firewall. When all of these are combined together, it provides very strict security for our organization.
    • One of the most important feature that we use is the analytics and threat detection. It provides us with the real time insights of all the threats originating from multiple locations and landing on our websites.
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    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.
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    Cloudflare
    • In some cases, using Cloudflare can actually lead to slower website speeds if the network is congested or if the website's traffic is particularly heavy.
    • Some website owners may find that the level of customization offered by Cloudflare is limited, especially in comparison to other solutions.
    • While Cloudflare is easy to set up and manage, it may be too complex for users who are not familiar with web technologies.
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    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
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    Cloudflare
    lower cost
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    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.
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    Cloudflare
    Everything is extremely concise and all settings apply immediately and take effect globally. There is no reason to explicitly plan/think in terms of individual regions as one would have to traditional cloud offerings (AWS, OCI, Azure). All Cloudflare products integrate seamless as part of a single pipeline that executes from request to response.
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    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.
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    Cloudflare
    In 6+ years of relying on Cloudflare, I think we experienced one or two brief outages that were Cloudflare's fault.
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    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.
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    Cloudflare
    Their Argo for the global network is the core feature we love.
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    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
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    Cloudflare
    While I have had good support in the past from Cloudflare's technical support team, I have had some terrible experiences with billing support. I have had multiple tickets sent to their billing support that I will never receive a reply to for over a month. When I finally do get a reply, it has been an automated email that never gives me an answer to my question.
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    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.
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    Cloudflare
    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
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    Cloudflare
    Very well executed implementation where our team was able to handle the implementation with guidance.
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    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.
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    Cloudflare
    Nothing like it. Organizations can utilize these Cloudflare products to enhance their online presence by improving security, performance, reliability, and developer efficiency. Cloudflare is an American company that delivers services such as DNS, a content delivery network (CDN), and various other additional services to make websites faster and more secure. Cloudflare is used by over 26 million sites, resulting in the processing of more than 1 billion IP addresses each day.
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    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.
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    Cloudflare
    They are built for scale and have the capacity to handle all the traffic we could ever expect to get.
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    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)
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    Cloudflare
    • Immediate ROI on Registrar and DNS hosting while giving a single plane of glass to managing both with domain registrations at cost, and no cost DNS hosting
    • WAF helped us move at risk servers/applications into a protected state allowing us to perform remediations at a measured pace and get them done right instead of band aide solutions.
    • CDN proxying increase the speed of our website while simultaneously reducing server load.
    • DMARC management and report interpretation allow use to identify weak points in our email systems, remediate and move to stricter policies without significantly increasing staff time spent managing it.
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