Cisco Meraki Insight vs. Nmap

Within healthcare, services, or manufacturing organizations the Cisco Meraki systems have performed remarkably well. The security standpoint of Cisco aligned equipment needs no additional mentioning other than they are the top choice for Federal, State, and Local governments as well as a plethora of organizations from different market areas.

Incentivized

If you're a sysadmin, or anyone who's had to deploy network services, you've almost certainly had to use Nmap at some point or other. Need to see what devices are on your LAN? Nmap can tell you that. Want to check which ports your web server has open to the internet? Nmap is your friend.

Nmap is a powerful command-line tool and has many options that require some reading of documentation to get the best out of (although generally straightforward). If the thought of working at the command-line scares you (presumably not if you're reading this review), then you may want a much simpler tool, or at least check out Zenmap GUI.

Incentivized

• Configuration options.
• Easy to use Dashboard.
• Reporting

Incentivized

• NMap provides a very fast and a very thorough network "sweep" that allows you to quickly map out exactly what's on your network.
• NMap is highly configurable. The "canned" choices are very good in most instances, but using various switches and options, you can create a very specific scan and get exactly the results you're looking for.
• NMap is easy to use. Even a new administrator will be able to use the graphical version (Zenmap) with efficiency right away.

Incentivized

• Expensive maintenance fee.
• Expensive equipment.

Incentivized

• The GUI version on Nmap could use some improvement with the options that are available to do scans. For example, they could make it easier to select options for the different types of scanning for people who are beginners
• There are no abilities to schedule a scan in the Nmap tool.
• An intensive scan sometimes takes too much time to complete.

Incentivized

Nmap uses are very practical and I don't think there is a better tools for what Nmap does. It is open-sources that therefore there is no cost to use it. It offers a number of benefits, including but not limited to network mapping, port scanning and more. It is very reliable as a network scanning tool.

Incentivized

There is a very large support community and a robust selection of add-ons and scripts. Once you get the use down this is one of the most powerful tools and you can find anything you are looking for as far as examples on the web. While not having official support its not lacking by any means.

Incentivized

Cisco Meraki has made the world of management so much easier, allowing IT Administrators and Business Management personnel to enjoy more time on the business needs and less time managing equipment.

Incentivized

Alternatives to Nmap (other IP scanners) are often much more limited in what they can do; They often only allow you to scan a specific subset of ports or a limited number of IP addresses in one command. Nmap is unrestricted in that regard. What makes Nmap stand out above the rest, is the complete network analysis package you get with it. It allows IP scanner, network deep-dives, hardware analysis, vulnerability analysis, encryption detailing, and so much more, in one free application

Incentivized

Just about every department we've been asked to provide access to has been able to utilize this system. Be it from a CCTV perspective or for environment reporting, Cisco Meraki Insight can fit into this situation with ease, and without a great deal of training, our users found the system very intuitive.

Incentivized

• The ease of use saved us many hours of billable time.
• Support added lots of value.
• Licensing and equipment cost really put a damper on overall value (being so high).

Incentivized

• Nmap with Wireshark is free, so it's been a great combo team to gather info and test.
• It's allowed us to avoid fines from false positives and to fix actual issues ourselves.
• Great for finding hosts, helps keep the network secure.

Incentivized