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Cisco Application Centric Infrastructure (Cisco ACI) vs. Slack

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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

    Slack

    Score9 out of 10
    N/ASlack is a group messaging or team collaboration app that aims to simplify communication for businesses. Features include open discussions, private groups, and direct messaging, as well as deep contextual search and message archiving, and file sharing. Slack integrates with a number of other tools, such as MailChimp, Dropbox, and Google Drive. Slack was acquired by Salesforce in December 2020. The product is free to use, and also has paid plans with more features and greater controls. The…

    $8.75

    per month per user

    Pricing
    Cisco ACISlack
    Editions & Modules
    No answers on this topic
    Free
    $0
    Pro
    $7.25*
    per month per user
    Business+
    $12.50*
    per month per user
    Enterprise
    Contact Sales
    Offerings
    Pricing Offerings
    Cisco ACISlack
    Free Trial
    NoYes
    Free/Freemium Version
    NoYes
    Premium Consulting/Integration Services
    NoNo
    Entry-level Setup FeeNo setup feeNo setup fee
    Additional Details—*Per active user, per month, when paying once a year. Pro is $8.75 USD per active user when paying month to month. Business+ is $15.00 USD per active user when paying month to month.
    More Pricing Information
    Features
    Cisco ACISlack
    Project Management
    Comparison of Project Management features of Cisco Application Centric Infrastructure (Cisco ACI) and Slack
    Feature
    Cisco Application Centric Infrastructure (Cisco ACI)
    -
    Ratings
    Slack
    7.9
    628 Ratings
    2% above category average
    Task Management00 Ratings7.6430 Ratings
    Gantt Charts00 Ratings6.961 Ratings
    Scheduling00 Ratings7.8363 Ratings
    Workflow Automation00 Ratings8.0396 Ratings
    Mobile Access00 Ratings9.4601 Ratings
    Search00 Ratings8.2608 Ratings
    Visual planning tools00 Ratings7.3275 Ratings
    Communication
    Comparison of Communication features of Cisco Application Centric Infrastructure (Cisco ACI) and Slack
    Feature
    Cisco Application Centric Infrastructure (Cisco ACI)
    -
    Ratings
    Slack
    8.7
    636 Ratings
    9% above category average
    Chat00 Ratings9.6635 Ratings
    Notifications00 Ratings8.7632 Ratings
    Discussions00 Ratings9.2620 Ratings
    Surveys00 Ratings8.1413 Ratings
    Internal knowledgebase00 Ratings7.8412 Ratings
    Integrates with GoToMeeting00 Ratings8.9110 Ratings
    Integrates with Gmail and Google Hangouts00 Ratings8.7182 Ratings
    Integrates with Outlook00 Ratings8.9120 Ratings
    File Sharing & Management
    Comparison of File Sharing & Management features of Cisco Application Centric Infrastructure (Cisco ACI) and Slack
    Feature
    Cisco Application Centric Infrastructure (Cisco ACI)
    -
    Ratings
    Slack
    8.4
    603 Ratings
    4% above category average
    Versioning00 Ratings8.2326 Ratings
    Video files00 Ratings8.2541 Ratings
    Audio files00 Ratings8.4527 Ratings
    Document collaboration00 Ratings7.9429 Ratings
    Access control00 Ratings8.3411 Ratings
    Advanced security features00 Ratings8.3362 Ratings
    Integrates with Google Drive00 Ratings9.0211 Ratings
    Device sync00 Ratings9.0455 Ratings
    Best Alternatives
    Cisco ACISlack
    Small Businesses
    No answers on this topic
    Flock
    Score9.5 out of 10
    Medium-sized Companies
    IBM Cloud Internet Services
    Score9.8 out of 10
    Troop Messenger
    Score9.8 out of 10
    Enterprises
    IBM Cloud Internet Services
    Score9.8 out of 10
    Cisco Business Edition 7000 (discontinued)
    Score9 out of 10
    All AlternativesView all alternativesView all alternatives
    User Ratings
    Cisco ACISlack
    Likelihood to Recommend
    8.5
    (131 ratings)
    9.1
    (639 ratings)
    Likelihood to Renew
    9.7
    (10 ratings)
    10.0
    (25 ratings)
    Usability
    5.1
    (8 ratings)
    9.0
    (255 ratings)
    Availability
    9.1
    (2 ratings)
    10.0
    (2 ratings)
    Performance
    9.1
    (9 ratings)
    10.0
    (2 ratings)
    Support Rating
    7.5
    (11 ratings)
    10.0
    (68 ratings)
    In-Person Training
    8.2
    (1 ratings)
    -
    (0 ratings)
    Implementation Rating
    6.0
    (5 ratings)
    8.9
    (5 ratings)
    Configurability
    -
    (0 ratings)
    10.0
    (2 ratings)
    Contract Terms and Pricing Model
    -
    (0 ratings)
    10.0
    (1 ratings)
    Ease of integration
    -
    (0 ratings)
    9.7
    (2 ratings)
    Product Scalability
    8.6
    (9 ratings)
    10.0
    (1 ratings)
    Professional Services
    -
    (0 ratings)
    10.0
    (1 ratings)
    Vendor post-sale
    5.5
    (1 ratings)
    10.0
    (1 ratings)
    Vendor pre-sale
    -
    (0 ratings)
    10.0
    (1 ratings)
    User Testimonials
    Cisco ACISlack
    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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    Salesforce
    Slack is ideal for Scrum and agile teams that need continuous communication during sprint planning, daily stand-ups, backlog refinement, testing, and retrospectives. Slack is well-suited for maintaining team knowledge through searchable conversations and dedicated channels, where experienced team members help onboard new QA analysts.
    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
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    Salesforce
    • Customer issues: Threads feature allows us to group a particular issue in a single thread and discuss within that thread. I can use the thread link to embed in JIRA ticket for tracking progress in JIRA (which is our details engineering tracking system).
    • Ability to add folder to Slack channel helps keep important information, documents easily accessible. e.g., we use this to keep a "ramp up" folder that can be used by any new joiner.
    • Global search is effective when I forget which group a particular message was in.
    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
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    Salesforce
    • Would love a better integration with GitHub. For example, notifications when your PR is updated, when review is requested, @-mention in comments, etc.
    • Improved "Later" tab, for example the ability to create to-do lists or making the "Later" tab into a more powerful to-do list (annotate items with notes)
    • More powerful integrations, e.g. Google Calendar could render a calendar view within Slack, rather than sending the daily schedule
    Incentivized
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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
    Incentivized
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    Salesforce
    To be more transparent, I give 10 because Slack serves our collaboration needs. It provide us a good platform for team communication relaying important update within the company, it has even mobile app where you can install in your phone to monitor any updates within that team that needs your immediate attention and intervention.
    Incentivized
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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.
    Incentivized
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    Salesforce
    Slack has good usability. Devs that are not familiar with the platform are able to jump into conversations and start sharing code and links within just minutes. Non developers are also able to understand the layout such as the Project Managers that are keeping the projects on track. We have not seen any tickets where employees are having trouble understanding Slack.
    Incentivized
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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.
    Incentivized
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    Salesforce
    Yes, the app works 24/7. I don't even recall having any period that we could not use since the implementation. Even the maintenance periods are barely noticeable and our work is not impacted by it when it happens.
    Incentivized
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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.
    Incentivized
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    Salesforce
    Slack is a soft app, we don't have many issues with it. I recall one or two people complaining about something during our usage period, but I didn't have a bad experience. When the app is slow, usually the problem is with my computer or my internet. The app works just fine.
    Incentivized
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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
    Incentivized
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    Salesforce
    Whenever I've had to troubleshoot an issue with Slack (which, to be honest, has not happened very often), their online documentation has been easy to locate, easy to understand, and effective in resolving my issue. Slack's ever-growing popularity also means that there's a large community of practice out there that can be depended upon.
    Incentivized
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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.
    Incentivized
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    Salesforce
    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
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    Salesforce
    I was not part of the implementation team, but I recall being 100% happy and excited to learn and use a new tool. I'm still am to be honest.
    Incentivized
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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.
    Incentivized
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    Salesforce
    I like Slack better than ClickUp, because I would spend 30-60 minutes a day updating my ClickUp tasks. The way ClickUp was used was very micromanaging. I billed by the hour, so I was willing to put in the time to alert the boss what tasks I was working on.
    One of my jobs used Hive - I mostly just ran it in the background in case anyone messaged me. I did not use it often.
    Incentivized
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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.
    Incentivized
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    Salesforce
    No answers on this topic
    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
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    Salesforce
    • Slack has been incredibly helpful in connecting various tech apps and ecosystems, creating a more streamlined and responsive process.
    • Slack has made it significantly easier to communicate with our team members across multiple time zones, creating a more engaging environment for our all-remote team.
    Incentivized
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    ScreenShots