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Cisco Catalyst 9800 Series Wireless Controllers vs. Microsoft Entra ID

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    Overview
    ProductRatingMost Used ByProduct SummaryStarting Price

    Cisco Catalyst 9800 Series Wireless Controllers

    Score9 out of 10
    N/AThe Cisco Catalyst 9800-80 is a modular wireless controller with optional 100 Gigabit Ethernet (G) modular uplinks boasting seamless software updates for large enterprises and campuses, and security with ETA and SD-Access.N/A

    Microsoft Entra ID

    Score8.8 out of 10
    N/AMicrosoft Entra ID (formerly Microsoft Azure Active Directory or Azure AD) is a cloud-based identity and access management (IAM) solution supporting restricted access to applications with Azure Multi-Factor Authentication (MFA) built-in, single sign-on (SSO), B2B collaboration controls, self-service password, and integration with Microsoft productivity and cloud storage (Office 365, OneDrive, etc) as well as 3rd party services.

    $6

    per user/per month

    Pricing
    Cisco Catalyst 9800 Series Wireless ControllersMicrosoft Entra ID
    Editions & Modules
    No answers on this topic
    Premium P1
    $6.00
    per user/per month
    Premium P2
    $9.00
    per user/per month
    Offerings
    Pricing Offerings
    Cisco Catalyst 9800 Series Wireless ControllersMicrosoft Entra ID
    Free Trial
    NoYes
    Free/Freemium Version
    NoYes
    Premium Consulting/Integration Services
    NoNo
    Entry-level Setup FeeNo setup feeNo setup fee
    Additional Details——
    More Pricing Information
    Community Pulse
    Cisco Catalyst 9800 Series Wireless ControllersMicrosoft Entra ID
    Considered Both Products
    Cisco
    No answer on this topic
    Microsoft
    No answer on this topic
    Key User Insights
    Would buy again
    99%
    Would buy again
    103 Answers
    100%
    Would buy again
    227 Answers
    Delivers good value for the price
    96%
    Delivers good value for the price
    92 Answers
    99%
    Delivers good value for the price
    206 Answers
    Happy with the feature set
    97%
    Happy with the feature set
    101 Answers
    99%
    Happy with the feature set
    225 Answers
    Lived up to sales and marketing promises
    94%
    Lived up to sales and marketing promises
    76 Answers
    94%
    Lived up to sales and marketing promises
    155 Answers
    Implementation went as expected
    86%
    Implementation went as expected
    83 Answers
    95%
    Implementation went as expected
    183 Answers
    Features
    Cisco Catalyst 9800 Series Wireless ControllersMicrosoft Entra ID
    Identity Management
    Comparison of Identity Management features of Cisco Catalyst 9800 Series Wireless Controllers and Microsoft Entra ID
    Feature
    Cisco Catalyst 9800 Series Wireless Controllers
    -
    Ratings
    Microsoft Entra ID
    8.6
    123 Ratings
    5% above category average
    ID-Management Access Control00 Ratings9.1122 Ratings
    ID Management Single-Sign On (SSO)00 Ratings9.5119 Ratings
    Multi-Factor Authentication00 Ratings9.2121 Ratings
    Password Management00 Ratings8.2113 Ratings
    Account Provisioning and De-provisioning00 Ratings8.5114 Ratings
    ID Management Workflow Automation00 Ratings8.290 Ratings
    ID Risk Management00 Ratings7.797 Ratings
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    User Ratings
    Cisco Catalyst 9800 Series Wireless ControllersMicrosoft Entra ID
    Likelihood to Recommend
    9.0
    (109 ratings)
    8.9
    (241 ratings)
    Likelihood to Renew
    8.7
    (6 ratings)
    9.8
    (16 ratings)
    Usability
    9.0
    (2 ratings)
    8.6
    (57 ratings)
    Availability
    8.9
    (107 ratings)
    9.0
    (1 ratings)
    Performance
    8.7
    (108 ratings)
    9.0
    (1 ratings)
    Support Rating
    8.5
    (3 ratings)
    7.1
    (21 ratings)
    Online Training
    -
    (0 ratings)
    5.0
    (1 ratings)
    Implementation Rating
    9.0
    (1 ratings)
    9.7
    (3 ratings)
    Configurability
    10.0
    (1 ratings)
    8.0
    (1 ratings)
    Contract Terms and Pricing Model
    -
    (0 ratings)
    7.4
    (2 ratings)
    Ease of integration
    9.0
    (1 ratings)
    -
    (0 ratings)
    Product Scalability
    10.0
    (1 ratings)
    9.0
    (1 ratings)
    Professional Services
    -
    (0 ratings)
    9.0
    (1 ratings)
    Vendor post-sale
    8.0
    (1 ratings)
    -
    (0 ratings)
    Vendor pre-sale
    8.0
    (1 ratings)
    -
    (0 ratings)
    User Testimonials
    Cisco Catalyst 9800 Series Wireless ControllersMicrosoft Entra ID
    Likelihood to Recommend
    Cisco
    Well suited for most of our customer base because it is a versatile, scalable, large multi-campus organizations. Not so: Brandish deployments where there's a much more simplified feature set needed. So where we can basically rely on Meraki as a cloud base with easier to deploy.
    Incentivized
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    Microsoft
    Overall, the Microsoft Entra ID platform is best utilized by people looking to have one platform that manages all interactions between other platforms. The Microsoft Entra ID platform allows for a seemless SSO integration, and can also integrate with Intune for MDM. Additionally, and probably the most easy to understand integration, is the integration with Active Directory, and controls associated with that.
    Incentivized
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    Pros
    Cisco
    • I think the updates are great. ISSU upgrading code is fantastic. I think the speed with which CAPWAP converges or reconverges, I think the redundancy mechanisms for roaming APs to other controllers is very good. I think overall, getting away from more of a monolithic processor where subprocesses handle what they call the WNCD tasks, I think fundamentally is an improvement in performance.
    • The radioactive tracing, all of the troubleshooting and all of the logging and all of the importing and exporting features for logging and analytics within the controller itself is really, really good compared to the predecessor AireOS.
    Incentivized
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    Microsoft
    • Application integration is really good for single sign-on and managing identity overall. The correlation with Active Directory on-prem is really good, so we can manage it in a single place. It's easy to manage the users and integrate other Microsoft products. It is the base of everything else.
    Incentivized
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    Cons
    Cisco
    • The biggest issues we have had have been software related. Requiring code upgrades or reloads to fix an unfixable problem.
    • Some of the troubleshooting utilities aren't perfectly clear as to what theyre doing or how to set them up or what to expect results wise or resource wise.
    • I think there is a lack of filtering in certain displays where you cannot use the "contains" option for certain device type filtering. But those options should be universal in all views.
    Incentivized
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    Microsoft
    • I would like more risk policy suggestions. I guess that situation where we had outsourced employees in a country where somehow their location was changing too often, that we would have room to go, “Hey, this needs to be a lower risk.” Or maybe having easier options to let people log in when they're deemed high risk. It’s tricky because I feel like it’s really easy to do that wrong, but it’s the main area that I think could be improved. I guess also a little bit tighter administrative integration with other Microsoft products.
    Incentivized
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    Likelihood to Renew
    Cisco
    Despite common software and hardware issues this is still the best product on the market for large scale enterprise deployments. Cisco has worked with us extensively to reduce the amount of bugs in every iteration however new bugs are introduced or new incompatibilities always arise with major releases. Thus, while I'm hesitant to recommend the product it's still much better than all the other competitors such as Aruba and Juniper in the WIFi space. There is also extensive integration with DNAC/Catalyst Center and ISE in an SDA deployment. Recently there has been a number of critical issues with the controller software and Cisco has proved themselves to be incapable of timely troubleshooting and diagnosis. This has reduced our confidence in the product and it's current and future stability and maintainability. At it's current state the product is taking up too much of our engineering resources to maintain despite also paying for premium support from Cisco. As such I have reduced by rating as we are likely to look at alternative vendors for our long-term wireless management solution
    Incentivized
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    Microsoft
    MSFT Entra ID has been essential for managing our geographically dispersed team. We're confident that it will scale with us as grow, and we'll be able to take advantage of additional security and ID management features as they become necessary. Being able to centrally manage our user access from anywhere with a small support team is such a relief.
    Incentivized
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    Usability
    Cisco
    It's not simple, but this is the result of being very deeply configurable
    Incentivized
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    Microsoft
    From a user perspective, 10. From an admin perspective, 7 or 8. From the user perspective, it's very easy to use, but from the admin perspective, there's a lot of things that are not easily clear, testable, or verifiable without just trying a whole bunch of scenarios.
    Incentivized
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    Reliability and Availability
    Cisco
    Honestly, in the six years that we've been using it, we've had one, I would say show stopping event. There was an issue with in an HA setup they would every so often when rebooted lose all configuration. So that was a bit disappointing, required quite a few hours to resolve, but Cisco had to fix very quickly and once we implemented that, we've not had any further additional issues.
    Incentivized
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    Microsoft
    There has been a handful of outages but they have been either minimal or rarely severe
    Incentivized
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    Performance
    Cisco
    We have been using the Cisco Catalyst 9800 Series Wireless Controllers for over 2 years and the whole system has been very stable. We currently run them in HA and have found when this has been activated (due to power issues etc.) the units change roles seamlessly, minimising the downtime to almost nothing. Except when we have had major issues, our wireless networks have a solid uptime and keeps our whole borough up 24/7 without problems.
    Incentivized
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    Microsoft
    I could probably rate this a 10 but I'm always conservative on giving out perfect scored bt performance has not been a problem for us using Entra ID.
    Incentivized
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    Support Rating
    Cisco
    the overall support on the 9800 Wireless lan controller is good. Wireless issues are sometimes hard to troubleshoot since it's the RF that make it complex and the diversity in clients and requirements. The engineers do a good job in understanding the scope and issue, altough not all issues can be solved
    Incentivized
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    Microsoft
    I have not needed to engage support for anything at this time. I have been able to find the answers either online or in a knowledgebase. I tried to skip the question but it would not let me, so I rated a 9 based on other interactions with Microsoft support I have had
    Incentivized
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    Online Training
    Cisco
    No answers on this topic
    Microsoft
    Most training was internally produced
    Incentivized
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    Implementation Rating
    Cisco
    You need to understand wifi basics
    Incentivized
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    Microsoft
    Make sure you use a good partner. Our implementation was a bit longer and more problematic than we expected. Our partner got it done, but, in my opinion, some of their inexperience and staffing issues were evident.
    Incentivized
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    Alternatives Considered
    Cisco
    Ubiquiti WLAN is very much a consumer platform. It is not production ready, it is buggy, it has issues. It is cheaper than Cisco, but you get what you pay for. Aruba doesn't integrate nicely with our existing largely Cisco based networks, so when time came to replace AireOS, the Cisco Catalyst 9800 Series Wireless Controllers came out on top.
    Incentivized
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    Microsoft
    We've done stuff with Okta for Identity and Duo. Those would probably be the two big ones that I would say that people would recognize and stuff. There's some other smaller players we've talked to, but those are the two big ones that we play with. We're still using it. So, because it was integrated into everything we've already done, it just made it almost indispensable.
    Incentivized
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    Contract Terms and Pricing Model
    Cisco
    No answers on this topic
    Microsoft
    The features are getting addresses per requirements and their value for Money. The proposed ROI and actual ROI build confidence.
    Read full review
    Scalability
    Cisco
    There are different vesrions for different requirements, there's HA as well.
    Incentivized
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    Microsoft
    Scalability is pretty trival for Entra ID. It's not difficult to manage a few or many accounts.
    Incentivized
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    Professional Services
    Cisco
    No answers on this topic
    Microsoft
    Microsoft Professional Services' technical knowledge is appreciable as consultants design the solution as per customer requirements. Mapping of features per user specifications and assisting Customer IT engineers to implement so they can manage and administer the services.
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    Return on Investment
    Cisco
    • Positive impacts, yeah, is good to have a central location to control all these profiles for different countries and locations. And the drawback, like I said to you really because of the too many integrations that have a dependency on the software version. For example, Cisco ONE for Access have certain software that can run through and then this scatter center need to make sure it's working with the others APS version that is currently working. And we also, the Cisco Catalyst Center also have some kind another version of software that you need to support this controller. So it's like two tier three tiers of the software version that we need to match. Then only it can work.
    Incentivized
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    Microsoft
    • We are doing a lot of sign-ins and working on it, and it worked quite well. We do have Microsoft support, so yes, we can handle all of the small issues we are sometimes having. But if you want to define it, I would say yes, we like it. Overall positive.
    Incentivized
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