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    Overview
    ProductRatingMost Used ByProduct SummaryStarting Price

    Cisco Catalyst Center

    Score8.5 out of 10
    N/ACisco Catalyst Center provides an intent-based platform for managing enterprise networks across campus, branch, and edge environments. It combines automation, analytics, and assurance to streamline IT operations, improve security posture, and reduce manual tasks. With integratedAI/ML-driven insights, policy-based controls, and end-to-end visibility across wired and wireless infrastructures, Catalyst Center empowers IT teams toproactively detect issues, enforce compliance, and accelerate…N/A

    IBM Terraform

    Score8.7 out of 10
    N/AIBM Terraform (formerly Hashicorp Terraform) is a cloud infrastructure automation tool used to create, change, and improve production infrastructure, and it allows infrastructure to be expressed as code. It is available Open Source, and via Cloud and Self-Hosted editions.

    $0

    Pricing
    Cisco Catalyst CenterIBM Terraform
    Editions & Modules
    No answers on this topic
    Open Source
    $0
    Team & Governance
    $20/user
    per user/per month
    Enterprise
    Contact sales team
    Offerings
    Pricing Offerings
    Cisco Catalyst CenterIBM Terraform
    Free Trial
    NoNo
    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 CenterIBM Terraform
    Considered Both Products
    Cisco
    No answer on this topic
    IBM
    No answer on this topic
    Key User Insights
    Would buy again
    92%
    Would buy again
    306 Answers
    95%
    Would buy again
    21 Answers
    Delivers good value for the price
    90%
    Delivers good value for the price
    245 Answers
    100%
    Delivers good value for the price
    20 Answers
    Happy with the feature set
    96%
    Happy with the feature set
    319 Answers
    95%
    Happy with the feature set
    21 Answers
    Lived up to sales and marketing promises
    83%
    Lived up to sales and marketing promises
    195 Answers
    100%
    Lived up to sales and marketing promises
    14 Answers
    Implementation went as expected
    80%
    Implementation went as expected
    229 Answers
    95%
    Implementation went as expected
    18 Answers
    Best Alternatives
    Cisco Catalyst CenterIBM Terraform
    Small Businesses
    No answers on this topic
    HashiCorp Vagrant
    Score9 out of 10
    Medium-sized Companies
    Cisco Meraki Dashboard
    Score9 out of 10
    HashiCorp Vagrant
    Score9 out of 10
    Enterprises
    Cisco Prime LAN Management (discontinued)
    Score7.7 out of 10
    AWS CloudFormation
    Score8.2 out of 10
    All AlternativesView all alternativesView all alternatives
    User Ratings
    Cisco Catalyst CenterIBM Terraform
    Likelihood to Recommend
    8.4
    (343 ratings)
    7.8
    (33 ratings)
    Likelihood to Renew
    8.9
    (9 ratings)
    9.0
    (2 ratings)
    Usability
    7.9
    (19 ratings)
    8.8
    (8 ratings)
    Performance
    -
    (0 ratings)
    9.4
    (3 ratings)
    Support Rating
    8.7
    (33 ratings)
    8.0
    (6 ratings)
    Online Training
    8.0
    (1 ratings)
    -
    (0 ratings)
    Implementation Rating
    -
    (0 ratings)
    8.0
    (1 ratings)
    Ease of integration
    -
    (0 ratings)
    9.2
    (3 ratings)
    User Testimonials
    Cisco Catalyst CenterIBM Terraform
    Likelihood to Recommend
    Cisco
    Would recommend Cisco Catalyst Center to medium to large scale organizations that have many cookie-cutter sites and the resources to properly provision all their devices. I would not recommend to teams that do not have a strong network engineering team that can navigate the various intricacies of the platform.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    IBM
    Anything that needs to be repeated en masse. Terraform is great at taking a template and have it be repeated across your estate. You can dynamically change the assets they're generating depending on certain variables. Which means though templated assets will all be similar, they're allowed to have unique properties about them. For example flattening JSON into tabular data and ensuring the flattening code is unique to the file's schema.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Pros
    Cisco
    • Again, the ease of use of the APIs and the API Explorer provides the tools needed to write these custom workflows that allow us to do a lot of the automation we’re doing now, saving hundreds of hours by using those tools.
    • The product is very intuitive, and there is a lot of support out there in the DevNet community to help with that.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    IBM
    • Terraform is cloud agnostic. Just select the suitable provider for the cloud and it will do the job.
    • Templating is possible to make the Terraform templates reusable.
    • Variables can be created to make the templates generic so that it can be reused for different environments or resources.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Cons
    Cisco
    • Within its Tasks - Audit, it can sometimes allow plaintext data, including passwords, to be seen. There should be functionality to detect password usage and appropriately obfuscate the data.
    • Occasionally, Catalyst Center does not sync changes properly within templates, which requires deleting and reconfiguring the template version. Better processes here would be beneficial.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    IBM
    • The language itself is a bit unusual and this makes it hard for new users to get onboarded into the codebase. While it's improving with later releases, basic concepts like "map an array of options into a set of configurations" or "apply this logic if a variable is specified" are possible but unnecessarily cumbersome.
    • The 'Terraform Plan' operation could be substantially more sophisticated. There are many situations where a Terraform file could never work but successfully passes the 'plan' phase only to fail during the 'apply' phase.
    • Environment migrations could be smoother. Renaming/refactoring files is a challenge because of the need to use 'Terraform mv' commands, etc.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Likelihood to Renew
    Cisco
    I think new products are often "half-baked" or over hyped when they release, as was the case with DNAC. We were well ahead of the curve in acquiring it. But as it has matured it is now a fantastic addition to our infrastructure. I think we are easing into a stage where it is hard to envision a large organization NOT having Catalyst Center in place. If for nothing outside of the mapping and troubleshooting aspects; using it as a "source of truth".
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    IBM
    Still the best provisioning tool out there and good support from the community as well in terms of shared knowledge
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Usability
    Cisco
    Cisco DNA Center is going to help us in security, simplicity and ease of administration. Cisco DNA Center is complete management and control platform that simplifies and streamlines network operations. Cisco DNA Center offers a single dashboard for every core function in your network. With this platform, IT can become more nimble and respond to changes and challenges faster and more intelligently.
    Read full review
    IBM
    The syntax itself is pretty straightforward. The documentation is well-maintained & easy to follow. Most cloud providers, even smaller ones, maintain official provider libraries, making discovery & learning a breeze. Some, like GCP, even provide high-level libraries on top of their own more primitive provider, making building complex infra much more manageable. The language itself is cloud-agnostic, so you can literally manage resources from multiple providers in a single Terraform repo.
    Read full review
    Performance
    Cisco
    No answers on this topic
    IBM
    Terraform's performance is quite amazing when it comes to deployment of resources in AWS. Of course, the deployment times depend on various parameters like the number of resources to deploy and different regions to deploy. Terraform cannot control that. The only minor drawback probably shows up when a terraform job is terminated mid way. Then in many cases, time-consuming manual cleanup is required.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Support Rating
    Cisco
    El soporte de CISCO DNA Center es muy bueno, responden a mis dudas pero no he tenido oportunidad de reportar un incidente o determinar un tiempo de respuesta critico. The support of CISCO DNA Center is very good, they answer my questions, but I have not had the opportunity to report an incident or determine a critical response time.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    IBM
    I have yet to have an opportunity to reach out directly to HashiCorp for support on Terraform. However, I have spent a great deal of time considering their documentation as I use the tool. This opinion is based solely on that. I find the Terraform documentation to have great breadth but lacking in depth in many areas. I appreciate that all of the tool's resources have an entry in the docs but often the examples are lacking. Often, the examples provided are very basic and prompt additional exploration. Also, the links in the documentation often link back to the same page where one might expect to be linked to a different source with additional information.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Online Training
    Cisco
    It was informative, but the labs were not available long enough for us to get intimately familiar with CCNA before it was closed. The course instructor was well informed and got us as close to ready as she could.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    IBM
    No answers on this topic
    Implementation Rating
    Cisco
    No answers on this topic
    IBM
    Implementation is straight forward. Never had issues as the team is already very familiar with Terraform installation from previous projects and roles
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Alternatives Considered
    Cisco
    Cisco Catalyst Centeris basic zero-touch provisioning out of the box. You just rack and stack the switches, patch 'em in, and the controller pushes the config automatically. No need to console into every single box or spend hours script-running over CLI.The AI-driven assurance and telemetry are top-tier. Instead of getting flooded with useless syslog alerts when a link drops, it correlates the telemetry data to give you proactive health checks. It literally pinpoints wireless anomalies and bandwidth chokepoints before the users even start opening tickets.It handles fabric microsegmentation like a boss through SD-Access and TrustSec. You can easily enforce group-based policies right at the hardware level. It drops IoT gear, guests, and corporate traffic into their own secure buckets dynamically, without you having to manage a trillion messy VLANs and ACLs.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    IBM
    Terraform is the solid leader in the space. It allows you to do more then just provisioning within a pre-existing servers. It is more extensible and has more providers available than it competitors. It is also open source and more adopted by the community then some of the other solutions that are available in the market place.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Return on Investment
    Cisco
    • I have used it for upgrading devices, and it's does a great job at that, however out operations team for whatever reason has not adopted the feature.
    • Overall it feels like Cisco Catalyst Center has been huge waste of time. I feel like my time would be better spent on other projects and looking at other products and tools
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    IBM
    • we are able to deploy our infrastructure in a couple of ours in an automated and repeatable way, before this could take weeks if the work was done manually and was a lot of error prone.
    • having the state file, you can see a diff of what things have changed manually out side of Terraform which is a huge plus
    • if state file gets corrupted, it is very hard to debug or restore it without an impact or spending hours ..
    • writing big scale code can be very challenging and hard to be efficient so it's usable by the whole team
    Read full review
    ScreenShots

    Cisco Catalyst Center Screenshots

    Screenshot of AIOpsScreenshot of BaselinesScreenshot of PoliciesScreenshot of HealthScreenshot of Network HierarchyScreenshot of PoE

    IBM Terraform Screenshots

    Screenshot of Terraform StateScreenshot of Terraform RunsScreenshot of Terraform VariablesScreenshot of Terraform WorkspacesScreenshot of Terraform Cost Estimation