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Cisco Application Centric Infrastructure (Cisco ACI) vs. Zoom Workplace

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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

    Zoom Workplace

    Score8.6 out of 10
    N/AZoom Workplace, Zoom’s open collaboration platform with an AI Companion, empowers teams to be more productive, and strengthen customer relationships throughout the customer lifecycle with Zoom’s Business Services for sales, marketing, and customer experience teams, including Zoom Contact Center.

    $16.99

    per month per user

    Pricing
    Cisco ACIZoom Workplace
    Editions & Modules
    No answers on this topic
    Add-On Zoom Translated Captions
    $5
    per month per license
    Pro
    $16.99
    per month per user
    Business
    $21.99
    per month per user
    Add-On - Conference Room Connector
    $499
    per year
    Basic
    Free
    Enterprise
    Custom
    Add-On - Zoom Whiteboard
    starting at $2.49
    per month per user
    Add-On - Large Meetings
    starting at $600
    per year
    Add-On - Cloud Storage
    starting at $120
    per year
    Add-On Audio Conferencing
    starting at $1200
    per year
    Add-On Zoom Phone Power Pack
    Starting at $300
    per year per user
    Add-On - Quality of Service Subscription
    Contact Sales
    Offerings
    Pricing Offerings
    Cisco ACIZoom Workplace
    Free Trial
    NoYes
    Free/Freemium Version
    NoYes
    Premium Consulting/Integration Services
    NoYes
    Entry-level Setup FeeNo setup feeNo setup fee
    Additional Details—Discount available for annual billing.
    More Pricing Information
    Features
    Cisco ACIZoom Workplace
    Performance & Compatibility of Online Events Software
    Comparison of Performance & Compatibility of Online Events Software features of Cisco Application Centric Infrastructure (Cisco ACI) and Zoom Workplace
    Feature
    Cisco Application Centric Infrastructure (Cisco ACI)
    -
    Ratings
    Zoom Workplace
    8.5
    1006 Ratings
    1% above category average
    High quality audio00 Ratings8.9998 Ratings
    High quality video00 Ratings8.9998 Ratings
    Screen Sharing
    Comparison of Screen Sharing features of Cisco Application Centric Infrastructure (Cisco ACI) and Zoom Workplace
    Feature
    Cisco Application Centric Infrastructure (Cisco ACI)
    -
    Ratings
    Zoom Workplace
    8.7
    1006 Ratings
    2% above category average
    Desktop sharing00 Ratings9.31005 Ratings
    Online Meetings / Events
    Comparison of Online Meetings / Events features of Cisco Application Centric Infrastructure (Cisco ACI) and Zoom Workplace
    Feature
    Cisco Application Centric Infrastructure (Cisco ACI)
    -
    Ratings
    Zoom Workplace
    8.7
    1012 Ratings
    1% above category average
    Calendar integration00 Ratings9.0923 Ratings
    Meeting initiation00 Ratings9.1986 Ratings
    Record meetings / events00 Ratings9.2961 Ratings
    Online Events Collaboration
    Comparison of Online Events Collaboration features of Cisco Application Centric Infrastructure (Cisco ACI) and Zoom Workplace
    Feature
    Cisco Application Centric Infrastructure (Cisco ACI)
    -
    Ratings
    Zoom Workplace
    8.5
    874 Ratings
    2% above category average
    Live chat00 Ratings9.1856 Ratings
    Online Events Security
    Comparison of Online Events Security features of Cisco Application Centric Infrastructure (Cisco ACI) and Zoom Workplace
    Feature
    Cisco Application Centric Infrastructure (Cisco ACI)
    -
    Ratings
    Zoom Workplace
    8.9
    864 Ratings
    11% above category average
    User authentication00 Ratings8.9755 Ratings
    Participant roles & permissions00 Ratings8.7829 Ratings
    Cloud PBX
    Comparison of Cloud PBX features of Cisco Application Centric Infrastructure (Cisco ACI) and Zoom Workplace
    Feature
    Cisco Application Centric Infrastructure (Cisco ACI)
    -
    Ratings
    Zoom Workplace
    8.1
    236 Ratings
    5% below category average
    Hosted PBX00 Ratings8.3112 Ratings
    Multi-level Interactive Voice Response (IVR)00 Ratings7.8141 Ratings
    Directory of employee names00 Ratings8.3218 Ratings
    Call Management
    Comparison of Call Management features of Cisco Application Centric Infrastructure (Cisco ACI) and Zoom Workplace
    Feature
    Cisco Application Centric Infrastructure (Cisco ACI)
    -
    Ratings
    Zoom Workplace
    8.2
    264 Ratings
    6% below category average
    Answering rules00 Ratings8.5192 Ratings
    Call recording00 Ratings8.7240 Ratings
    Call park00 Ratings7.8147 Ratings
    Call screening00 Ratings8.0165 Ratings
    Message alerts00 Ratings8.2210 Ratings
    Business SMS/External Messaging00 Ratings7.9135 Ratings
    Voicemail Transcription00 Ratings7.9183 Ratings
    Mobile apps
    Comparison of Mobile apps features of Cisco Application Centric Infrastructure (Cisco ACI) and Zoom Workplace
    Feature
    Cisco Application Centric Infrastructure (Cisco ACI)
    -
    Ratings
    Zoom Workplace
    8.8
    297 Ratings
    0% below category average
    Mobile app for iOS00 Ratings8.8263 Ratings
    Mobile app for Android00 Ratings8.9181 Ratings
    Unified Communications Platform and Collaboration
    Comparison of Unified Communications Platform and Collaboration features of Cisco Application Centric Infrastructure (Cisco ACI) and Zoom Workplace
    Feature
    Cisco Application Centric Infrastructure (Cisco ACI)
    -
    Ratings
    Zoom Workplace
    8.7
    249 Ratings
    2% above category average
    Centralized communications management00 Ratings8.9199 Ratings
    Team messaging00 Ratings8.9214 Ratings
    Team document sharing00 Ratings8.6193 Ratings
    Call and meeting analytics00 Ratings8.5202 Ratings
    Best Alternatives
    Cisco ACIZoom Workplace
    Small Businesses
    No answers on this topic
    Broadvoice | GoContact
    Score9.1 out of 10
    Medium-sized Companies
    IBM Cloud Internet Services
    Score9.8 out of 10
    Webex Calling
    Score8.8 out of 10
    Enterprises
    IBM Cloud Internet Services
    Score9.8 out of 10
    Webex Calling
    Score8.8 out of 10
    All AlternativesView all alternativesView all alternatives
    User Ratings
    Cisco ACIZoom Workplace
    Likelihood to Recommend
    8.5
    (131 ratings)
    8.8
    (1070 ratings)
    Likelihood to Renew
    9.7
    (10 ratings)
    9.4
    (27 ratings)
    Usability
    5.1
    (8 ratings)
    9.5
    (46 ratings)
    Availability
    9.1
    (2 ratings)
    9.1
    (2 ratings)
    Performance
    9.1
    (9 ratings)
    9.0
    (3 ratings)
    Support Rating
    7.5
    (11 ratings)
    6.4
    (46 ratings)
    In-Person Training
    8.2
    (1 ratings)
    9.1
    (1 ratings)
    Implementation Rating
    6.0
    (5 ratings)
    6.4
    (11 ratings)
    Configurability
    -
    (0 ratings)
    9.1
    (2 ratings)
    Contract Terms and Pricing Model
    -
    (0 ratings)
    8.0
    (13 ratings)
    Ease of integration
    -
    (0 ratings)
    7.3
    (2 ratings)
    Product Scalability
    8.6
    (9 ratings)
    9.8
    (3 ratings)
    Professional Services
    -
    (0 ratings)
    9.2
    (8 ratings)
    Vendor post-sale
    5.5
    (1 ratings)
    9.1
    (2 ratings)
    Vendor pre-sale
    -
    (0 ratings)
    7.3
    (2 ratings)
    User Testimonials
    Cisco ACIZoom Workplace
    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
    Zoom
    In most cases, and I mean almost all, Zoom is vastly superior to Teams in terms of functionality and ease of use. Case in point: I recently tried to join a Teams meeting in the web browser, and it took me multiple attempts to access it. This NEVER happens with a Zoom link.
    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
    Zoom
    • Audio quality of phone calls is spot on. Calls are clear and crisp.
    • Video quality of video meetings are clear and there aren't any pixelization artifacts that some systems can have.
    • Having AI summaries have been life changing for us. We no longer have to concentrate on note taking, like we did in the past. The summaries are accurate and enable us to put our efforts in the meeting or conversation. Plus, we can save them into our practice management system as required.
    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
    Zoom
    • Love notes - allow insertion of table or grid
    • Allow admin to turn off DND
    • Allow a way to group individual people chats - not channels just individual peeps into groups for ease of finding - like how you can group shared calendars into sections in Outlook
    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
    Read full review
    Zoom
    We're sticking with Zoom for the foreseeable future--given its compelling feature set, ease of use, and advanced technology, there's just no other competition to be excited about. Plus it's a Gartner-recognized industry leader, so it's a rather easy choice.
    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
    Zoom
    Zoom is made for the non tech office. It has features that can be made to do what you need to run things on a day to day basis. Immediately we we able to get meetings going with remote employees. The ability to be able to add smartphone connected people was a big plus. Zoom met our needs at the time.
    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
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    Zoom
    There have been less than a handful of outages during our two years with Zoom, and whenever there was one, an email informing us of the outage went out immediately, and they had the issue resolved shortly thereafter.
    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
    Zoom
    Zoom has among the best performance of any video conference platform, as I've mentioned several times. Besides that, their Chat platform works great, and their back end always runs smooth. It's unfortunate that reporting can now only be done by one month at a time, but nonetheless, it only takes a second to run any kind of Zoom report, whether it's an attendee report, Poll results, a user report, a list of meetings from the past month, etc.
    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
    Zoom
    Because I got a response right away, and was assigned one specific individual to work with me from the beginning to the resolution. I had an actual email address and direct contact with this person without having to start over and over every time I contacted Zoom - this singular individual remained attentive and was well informed on the subject matter and quite able to resolve my needs.
    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
    Read full review
    Zoom
    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
    Zoom
    If you receive any pushback from higher ups, point to any of the various positive reviews like this one. Or show Zoom's excellent Gartner report, or articles describing Zoom's partnership with Sequoia capital. It's not difficult to show how Zoom is a trustworthy industry leader with best-in-class technology.
    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
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    Zoom
    Zoom Workplace is typically on the more expensive end against other options, but it's the industry leader for a reason. It has the most brand credibility by far, but that doesn't mean it's perfect. There are limitations when it comes to technical performance, customization and video/audio quality. I prefer Slack myself for communication apps, but Zoom Workplace is a good alternative.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Contract Terms and Pricing Model
    Cisco
    No answers on this topic
    Zoom
    The billing and price model is really fair for so many functions that they offer, our remote work requires each of the features that Zoom offers, so accepting payment for a tool like this is the least we can do. I like that billing arrives on time and that they offer opportunities and payment times.
    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
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    Zoom
    Because the Basic licenses are completely free, and because it's very easy to configure and install Zoom, and because anyone can join Zoom from a link without needing an account, scaling is a Breeze. There are absolutely no roadblocks. My company keeps adding more Zoom Pro license every week since it's so in demand. We were able to convert users from several different platforms onto Zoom with no trouble at all.
    Read full review
    Professional Services
    Cisco
    No answers on this topic
    Zoom
    Zoom is perfect for our business. We use it to video chat with prospective clients. The name recognition alone gives us credibility and it is very easy to screen share and send content out.
    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
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    Zoom
    • We have not lost much productivity in our teamwork during the pandemic because of the ability to have Zoom video calls and keep everyone in touch. This is definitely a positive.
    • We are able to have more people participate in coaching sessions (described earlier) because we don't have room space limitations. This is a big positive.
    • Being able to start a meeting instantly is great when we are doing support and/or training with a client over the phone and need to be able to share a visible
    Incentivized
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    ScreenShots

    Zoom Workplace Screenshots

    Screenshot of an example collaboration feature. These are used to:
Transcribe, summarize, and capture action items with AI Companion from your in-person meetings.
Improve visibility and alignment by sharing emails to chats
Elevate a chat to a meeting or phone call to get to resolution faster. 
Continue meeting conversations and easily access shared information in Team Chat.Screenshot of an example of Zoom's productivity features. These features are used to:
Improve productivity across teams, locations, and time zones.
Organize project deliverables and assets in a centralized, collaborative doc.
Collaborate and map out projects visually on a whiteboard.
Jumpstart brainstorming sessions using AI and templates.
Gather valuable team input for well-informed decision-making with surveys and polls.
Stay on top of action items surfaced from across Zoom Workplace.Screenshot of some additional collaboration features. These are used to:
Optimize office experiences and in-person time.
Make sure remote participants feel connected with what is going on in the room.
Collaborate across remote and in-person teams on a virtual whiteboard.
Easily know and identify who is in the room and who is speaking in a Zoom Room with smart name tags and smart speaker tags.Screenshot of an example of Zoom's AI companion. This feature is used to streamline communications, improve productivity, increase employee engagement, and optimize flexible work.Screenshot of additional AI Companion features. The tools is also used to:
Launch internal campaigns.
Deliver visually rich updates with live streams, billboards, and videos.
Ensure critical comms are never missed with read receipts.
Send updates to deskless workers with Workvivo TV and Chat.