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    Overview
    ProductRatingMost Used ByProduct SummaryStarting Price

    Cisco Catalyst SD-WAN

    Score8.7 out of 10
    N/ACisco Catalyst SD-WAN is a software-defined wide area network solution designed to simplify and optimize enterprise network connectivity in complex digital landscapes. It enables organizations to connect any user to any application, whether on-premises, in data centers, or across multiple clouds, with integrated capabilities for multicloud support, security, predictive automation, and enhanced network visibility—all built on a Secure Access Service Edge (SASE)-enabled…N/A

    Cisco Meraki SD-WAN

    Score8.6 out of 10
    N/ACisco Meraki SD-WAN is a cloud-managed solution that simplifies and secures wide area networking across branch, campus, and remote locations. Built on Meraki’s dashboard, it delivers centralized visibility, automation, and traffic optimization without the complexity of traditional WAN deployments. The solution improves application performance by dynamically routing traffic based on real-time conditions, integrating advanced security, and providing seamless multicloud connectivity. With support…N/A
    Pricing
    Cisco Catalyst SD-WANCisco Meraki SD-WAN
    Editions & Modules
    No answers on this topic
    No answers on this topic
    Offerings
    Pricing Offerings
    Cisco Catalyst SD-WANCisco Meraki SD-WAN
    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
    Community Pulse
    Cisco Catalyst SD-WANCisco Meraki SD-WAN
    Considered Both Products
    Cisco
    Chose Cisco Catalyst SD-WAN
    Meraki SD-WAN is overall simpler to deploy and manage, but don't have the features like multi-tenancy as in Cisco Catalyst SD-WAN.
    Incentivized
    Chose Cisco Catalyst SD-WAN
    Silver Peak is a pretty solid product as well. It does not offer as many customizations, but that also makes onboarding significantly easier. It's a tradeoff between the amount of supported features and the complexity of the dashboard. Similarly if you are willing to …
    Incentivized
    Chose Cisco Catalyst SD-WAN
    Cisco Catalyst SD-WAN is more sophisticated and has a wider range of functionalities than the Meraki SD-WAN solution. For Meraki SD-WAN you cannot configure all policies that it is possible for Cisco Catalyst SD-WAN. Meraki SD-WAN is more as plug and play solution. For Cisco …
    Incentivized
    Chose Cisco Catalyst SD-WAN
    Actually quite well, I will say. Like I said, I think the one thing that is probably holding us back is what do we need to do to clean up our environment now if we're able to do that right now, I think we wouldn't even be in this RFP process.
    Incentivized
    Chose Cisco Catalyst SD-WAN
    When we analyzed Meraki it was clear for us, that our company complexity and need required another level of maturity that was not present for there but it was for Viptela SDWAN now Cisco SDWAN.
    Incentivized
    Chose Cisco Catalyst SD-WAN
    Complex networks, segmentation and scalability
    Incentivized
    Chose Cisco Catalyst SD-WAN
    Efficient enterprise solution for multi-cloud environments with optimum support and a company which has been leader in the market and keep up to date with latest tendencies, appropriate solution providers in network world
    Incentivized
    Chose Cisco Catalyst SD-WAN
    We compared Cisco WD-WAN with several other vendors, including service providers. We are already a Cisco shop, so that gave Cisco and Meraki a leg up. With our hope to expand this beyond Telecommuters to actual sites, we wanted to maintain an in-house solution rather than a …
    Incentivized
    Chose Cisco Catalyst SD-WAN
    Por ahorro de costos en enlaces MPLS de bajo ancho de banda

    For cost-savings on low-bandwidth MPLS links
    Incentivized
    Chose Cisco Catalyst SD-WAN
    Cisco Meraki auto-VPN works great and easily in SMBs. Meraki has few limitations that won’t make it as number 1 choice for big customers. Cisco vip tela solution is more inclusive. It has all the integration's capability
    Incentivized
    Cisco
    Chose Cisco Meraki SD-WAN
    For certain environments, Meraki SD-WAN fits the purpose and easier than other solutions to deploy and support.
    Incentivized
    Chose Cisco Meraki SD-WAN
    The facility for the management
    Incentivized
    Chose Cisco Meraki SD-WAN
    Cisco Meraki SD-WAN is easy to manage and configure
    Incentivized
    Key User Insights
    Would buy again
    96%
    Would buy again
    133 Answers
    95%
    Would buy again
    78 Answers
    Delivers good value for the price
    94%
    Delivers good value for the price
    116 Answers
    99%
    Delivers good value for the price
    78 Answers
    Happy with the feature set
    97%
    Happy with the feature set
    135 Answers
    94%
    Happy with the feature set
    77 Answers
    Lived up to sales and marketing promises
    91%
    Lived up to sales and marketing promises
    93 Answers
    96%
    Lived up to sales and marketing promises
    68 Answers
    Implementation went as expected
    87%
    Implementation went as expected
    109 Answers
    97%
    Implementation went as expected
    77 Answers
    Best Alternatives
    Cisco Catalyst SD-WANCisco Meraki SD-WAN
    Small Businesses
    No answers on this topic
    No answers on this topic
    Medium-sized Companies
    Cisco Meraki SD-WAN
    Score8.6 out of 10
    Cisco Catalyst SD-WAN
    Score8.7 out of 10
    Enterprises
    VMware SD-WAN
    Score7.9 out of 10
    Cisco Catalyst SD-WAN
    Score8.7 out of 10
    All AlternativesView all alternativesView all alternatives
    User Ratings
    Cisco Catalyst SD-WANCisco Meraki SD-WAN
    Likelihood to Recommend
    8.7
    (150 ratings)
    8.7
    (87 ratings)
    Likelihood to Renew
    8.9
    (4 ratings)
    9.1
    (2 ratings)
    Usability
    8.7
    (67 ratings)
    -
    (0 ratings)
    Availability
    8.0
    (1 ratings)
    -
    (0 ratings)
    Performance
    8.0
    (1 ratings)
    -
    (0 ratings)
    Support Rating
    8.3
    (15 ratings)
    8.1
    (2 ratings)
    Configurability
    10.0
    (1 ratings)
    -
    (0 ratings)
    Contract Terms and Pricing Model
    8.0
    (1 ratings)
    -
    (0 ratings)
    Product Scalability
    9.0
    (1 ratings)
    8.2
    (85 ratings)
    Vendor post-sale
    8.0
    (1 ratings)
    9.1
    (1 ratings)
    Vendor pre-sale
    7.0
    (1 ratings)
    9.1
    (1 ratings)
    User Testimonials
    Cisco Catalyst SD-WANCisco Meraki SD-WAN
    Likelihood to Recommend
    Cisco
    It's great for connectivity. I think if you're looking at. There's a lot of players out there that do SD- WAN, you can do hosted solutions, you can do your own. If you're looking to do it yourself, I think this product works out well. I do know it's hosted elsewhere by some other companies, but for us, we want the control and we don't have a huge amount of sites, so being able to control that's important and the data that we can get out of the product, we can see just seeing the application experience through Cisco Catalyst SD-WAN, really gives us good information.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Cisco
    I believe it is well suited for "pop-up" offices of a small number of people. 5 to 10 is ideal. It can be setup with a minimum of involvement from the IT infrastructure group. It is a very simple way to connect a remote site securely and quickly with the confidence that the connection will be stable. I believe it is less suited for a large organization requiring complex routing and routing protocols. It only works with Meraki endpoints and so there must be Meraki firewalls at both ends. It cannot be used with IPSEC tunnels
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Pros
    Cisco
    • We are able to use a multiple different circuits to go into the cloud, so we are not relying on just one particular private wireless. We're relying on wine circuits, ethernet, ethernet out. So it provides us that flexibility where we didn't have that before. Provides security that is very robust and flexible and scalable and it provides us with, the biggest thing is redundancy, where we have backup. For example, we have a Starlink for nuclear power plants. If our main circuits go down, we have that. And without Cisco Catalyst SD-WAN it would be very hard to actually achieve, to accomplish true redundancy. So we're happy with Cisco Catalyst SD-WAN in that regard.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Cisco
    • I really like the firewalls and the access points, like the wireless ones. From a wireless access point perspective, we recently moved to the new MR57s, multi-gig bandwidth as well as Wi-Fi 6, which helps users connect wirelessly regardless of where they sit in the office. The experience they get doesn’t matter wherever they move—it’s fantastic. So we’ve moved from the previous iteration of Meraki Access Points to the new iteration, like two weeks ago, and we’ve seen a major shift in the user experience.
    Read full review
    Cons
    Cisco
    • I will say the way we use it now, and I think what happened was the way it was deployed, it was fine, but unfortunately over the course of the years we've gotten a little out of hand with our device templates and feature templates. I think if there's any form of feedback that I would give to Cisco is how do we find ways to improve the environment as it stands so we get to a certain point with the environment and then we don't know how to undo it or fix it or optimize the environment. Because right now we're in a position where we're playing a lot of catch up and clean up and if there was a way or some tool or feature that we can take advantage of that would allow us to optimize that environment where we will kind of corner ourselves into a lot of problems in the future. There's some feature or something that we could take advantage of that will allow us to optimize that environment and not let it get out of control pretty easily. That would be my suggestion.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Cisco
    • I personally think that this particular place is on the logging side. I have seen where the event log is that what they call in terms of capturing all the log events is the area which I personally feel can actually be improved. Even this could be similar, like how I said about packet capture where you could have a flexibility of having a high level information or deep level regardless you should have that kind of option where you could also see the logging site as granular as per the requirement. So that's the area which I think is a bit little behind compared to other vendors.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Likelihood to Renew
    Cisco
    I would rate SD-WAN highly because it has significantly improved network performance, reliability, and cost-efficiency for my organization. Its ability to optimize traffic dynamically, enhance security, and simplify management across multiple locations has been invaluable. With SD-WAN, we’ve reduced dependency on costly MPLS, improved cloud application performance, and gained greater control over our network infrastructure.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Cisco
    Because so far the solution showed great stability during the time, easy to use and deploy. There is still room for improvements like adding a smarter way to manage the policies to apply to the tunneled traffic, today the way to configure and manage them is quite old style, It would be better an "object" oriented way to create them.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Usability
    Cisco
    The niche configurations are given equal focus as the standard use cases, which can make onboarding difficult in the beginning (ie why am I not using an entire tab of the portal), but aside from that part, the dashboard is relatively easy to navigate and apply the configuration. The metrics and analytics available are also nice to have in a single pane.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Cisco
    Its usable very well
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Reliability and Availability
    Cisco
    I think if we could afford, we could have HA inplace but we planned out outage and workaround to avoid any outages.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Cisco
    No answers on this topic
    Performance
    Cisco
    It does slow down over the period but it's same with other product. you need to clear/reboot services.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Cisco
    No answers on this topic
    Support Rating
    Cisco
    Al ser soluciones integradas del portafolio de soluciones de Cisco, el soporte es transversal a cada uno de los componentes implementados, teniendo el cliente la capacidad de resolver sus inconvenientes bajo una misma infraestructura que está totalmente homologada, satisfacciendo de esta manera, las necesidades del cliente asi como permitiendo, que este se concentre en su negocio. Since the Cisco SD-WAN tools are a part of Cisco’s broader portfolio of solutions, support cross-cuts to each of our deployed components, with our company as the customer having the ability to solve our problems through the same, approved infrastructure. Their support team easily satisfies the customer’s needs so that they continue to focus on business functions.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Cisco
    Fast and efficient. The only issue currently is that the support is only overseas support and not in South Africa, which causes delays in resolution for some cases. Escalating issues is quite simple and the opening of new cases from the dashboard is easy. I have never had a support issue that could not be resolved.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Implementation Rating
    Cisco
    I was late to participate but my team was very happy with the outcome.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Cisco
    No answers on this topic
    Alternatives Considered
    Cisco
    We've used the old Cisco SD-WAN, which no longer exists. It was a lot more complex to configure what is now called Cisco Catalyst SD-WAN. So they've definitely come a long way in that it is a lot less complicated to set up and template based.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Cisco
    We did a very stringent valuation a few years ago. And we evaluated probably about a dozen suppliers on paper that we evaluate just by capabilities. And, we of some other business criteria, and we whittled that down to a list of five. And out of those five, we brought four of those into our lab environment where we ran approximately 350 different test cases on, we really beat on it pretty heavily. And some of those other suppliers would've been companies like Fortinet Versa Networks Silver Peak, which is now owned by Hewlett Packard.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Contract Terms and Pricing Model
    Cisco
    I didn't take part of this decision but it always multiyear contract get best discount.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Cisco
    No answers on this topic
    Scalability
    Cisco
    Really strength in scalability. Only thigs it's depends on some prototype Cisco product which you can't work with other Cisco products.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Cisco
    With the implementation of Cisco Meraki SD-WAN on our new site, this has enabled us to optimize the bandwidth of our 3 links. Thanks to this, updates pushed by Microsoft Intune, such as Microsoft CRM operations, are running smoothly. The same applies to SAP and our Teams meetings. And I almost forgot our Cisco telephone system.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Return on Investment
    Cisco
    • Our branch offices can connect to our enterprise network and the internet quickly and securely, which has helped to increase productivity and reduce downtime.
    • We have been able to reduce our dependence on expensive MPLS connections, and instead utilize a combination of broadband and LTE connections, which are more cost-effective
    • The centralized location improves network visibility and troubleshooting process
    Read full review
    Cisco
    • Cisco Meraki SD-WAN gave us a new perspective on SDN, ZTP and other automation tools we didn't have before
    • The sizing of Meraki MX series cannot compete very large and robust networks, only if we use virtual appliances. In this case, I would recommend on other vendors like Fortinet
    Incentivized
    Read full review
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