Cisco Firepower 2100 Series vs. Cisco Meraki MX

The Cisco [Firepower] 2100 [Series] is an easy sell for anyone looking. You already know Cisco excels in the security department, but now that firepower lives right on the box and inline with the rest of the firewall data flow you can save yourself a lot of time and headaches. Unless you cant quite afford Cisco's 2100 line, there's not much reason to go with the competition.

Incentivized

The facility that Cisco Meraki MX has helps to be well used, for example, in a site that can be used as a hub for others because you can monitor and solve the issues more easily and segment that section that belongs to the same. But for example, if you are going to manage a very large site with multiple devices and information it might be better to stick with a Cisco ISR router.

Incentivized

• For us, to power the whole system does scaling quite a bit. So we can definitely have a lot of room to grow if needed. The device can support a lot of way more than we need right now, but in the future, if we need more it seems to be a big pro of that. Also the support of Cisco, knowing that it's backed by Cisco definitely is good. You guys are the largest players in the market

Incentivized

• I'm very happy with their analytics now with the tie in with Thousandeyes, it's been really great insight. We now are SD wan, so insight's been really good. So as you know, everyone blames the network and having that kind of analytics from a single pane glass has been wonderful.

Incentivized

• Cisco patches bugs quickly but patches are slow to install and reboot
• Smart licensing is getting better but still can be troublesome
• Some weird visual interface glitches that require clicking the same options a few extra times

Incentivized

• The biggest frustration with the MX series would be the firmware upgrade, not the procedure, but just the frequency of updates with the code. And oftentimes with the code there's caveats where there'll be reboots of the devices intermittently. So we've had issues with that. Typically in a Cisco iOS environment, we wait maybe six months or so after a code's released, make sure that a lot of the bugs are worked out. But with Meraki, there's a lot of security updates that become available immediately. So we want to adopt the new firmware a bit quicker, but it doesn't give a proper amount of time for the bugs to be worked out of that software before it gets put into our production environment.

Incentivized

As we have it in place now, we will continue to keep it at our remote sites. Future expansion is something we are reviewing, and may well start with some of the larger switches as they seem to offer good performance and management at a reasonable price. Wireless is also something we're investing in and their devices are great for that.

Incentivized

The Cisco Meraki MX series is very easy to use. Setting up user VPN access, site to site VPN to tie multiple locations together and managing all your devices. You can even download the latest firmware and install without ever leaving the dashboard. Meraki is the very definition of easy to use

Incentivized

I haven't ever had a bad experience with Meraki support. On the few occasions where I wasn't understanding the UI or needed some clarification about what a setting actually would do, I contacted them and they were very quickly able to provide help. Returns are simple and fast, too. We had to return a defective device one time and they shipped the replacement before we had even un-racked the one that was faulty. Unlike many other vendors, they didn't ask use to a do long list of scripted diagnostics, they just took my word for it that the device was broken and sent out a replacement immediately

Incentivized

Good product and simple to use.

Incentivized

We're really using the Meraki more and more, everything from the wireless. We started doing some work with the cameras and security. Meraki has been a great product for our company so far. We use it for a lot of our outer campuses as the VPN Tunneling primary with SD wan. So it's working out very well for us.

Incentivized

That's based on, not necessarily that the product isn't doing what we need, but it could also be that some of the stuff that we're deploying, we're not actually deploying it in that manner. We're actually deploying it in other manners when we talk about deploying the software.

Incentivized

• It's keeping threats out like a firewall should. Definitely cost wise it is at a higher cost center than other alternatives. Especially when it comes to licensing. Cisco is generally the higher, for perhaps, definitely for good reason, right? I mean, definitely positive impact as far as working as it should that's at cost.

Incentivized

• Equipment is very affordable
• It does not work without license, which is not cheap
• Lifetime warranty (understand warranty as long as you pay license and the device is not EOS)
• Price for the equipment can be reduced by 60% when you buy a lot
• Price of the licenses can be reduced by 50% if you go with Enterprise agreement licensing