Hands down Cisco Meraki switches beat out the competition. Yes, you have to have the licensing, but it is worth it to centrally managing them all from a "single pane of glass."
The NetGear and Linksys switches do not even compare to the Cisco Meraki. The majority of those I've used are unmanaged. You just plug and go and have no control over routing. The Cisco Catalyst is much better than the Meraki. It's meant for more of a backbone/server/san …
Meraki is much easier to manage and train other IT admins on. The configuration is extremely straightforward so there is minimal time to replace any equipment and it automatically will download configurations to match outgoing equipment.
Cisco Meraki MS suits a lot of environments, it can be connected to all kinds of vendors, but the scenario that will give you more control and visibility of your network is if you have more Meraki solutions to use and admin all from the dashboard. But if you only use Cisco Meraki MS you can also have all the functions and features from the switch, using in most of the cases as access layer.
Great for entry-level networking, and the cost-to-quality ratio is great for the average consumer. I've used them in a crawl space that is not climate controlled, and it just works and provides the switching capabilities I need. These are great for users that don't have a ton of experience and can simply try to troubleshoot with a simple power cycle.
I think when it comes to the Meraki products, it's just the ease of use and ease of troubleshooting because it's all cloud-based, easy to access from anywhere I can literally get on now and troubleshoot. So I think it's just the ease of use, which is great.
I think it may be fixed now, but for a long time, there was no equivalent of "show version" to see the exact uptime of a switch. This led to questions from upper management sometimes like "when was this device last rebooted?" and there was no way to answer if it had been longer than 3 months.
Sometimes there are somewhat "generic" errors on the Dashboard when looking at devices (those yellow error messages like DHCP error). If the error messages were a little bit more detailed it could go a long way into troubleshooting issues faster.
Being on the cloud its very easy to manage. We have layer 7 visibility and Cisco has introduced stackable MX switches which is even better! The Meraki portal can be accessed via SSO which is important to my organization (although it was a bit difficult to get that implemented initially!)
Meraki support is excellent. They are also highly proactive. They literally replaced all of a particular model of our MS switches when it was discovered that they were not sure about the longevity of a particular chassis fan inside those switches. Without us having to do anything other than ask, they shipped us all new replacements (with a better fan in them) for the 10 or so of the switches that were in the affected model group, and we shipped the defective ones back to them int he same packaging, prepaid. None of the recalled switches had ever experienced a fan failure, but they were not willing to let them run in a production environment. I like that. Meraki MS support staff are also quick to get back to you and very knowledgeable about their product. I actually contact our Meraki rep to instigate a support case (although i could call support directly), and he gets the details from me first, then opens the ticket for us and explains it to support. This means that I only even need to talk to one person, and I like that, too. Meraki MS switches are designed to be essentially "plug and play", so support is generally not needed unless the end user is not following the deployment and operation guides
Well, we've been using it for quite a number of years, so I guess I have evaluated, this is on the wireless side, the Ruckus platform, and it did not compare to the Cisco Meraki dashboard as far as the way it is utilized.
While the Ubiquiti are much easier to manage remotely through their cloud controllers, the Netgear is much more reliable in harsh environments than the other simple switches we use, as they seem less susceptive to high temperatures and humidity. (TP-Link and Zycel are the other major brands we use for simple switches.)
I would say probably eight. I think there's a lot of, the scalability is very nice and I've definitely deployed a lot of sites quickly. I think for us right now that we have to pivot away from manual configurations and using automated configurations. And so just being sure we prevent things like drift between sites is kind of important right now for us. And so I think that's the next steps for us in that product. And so I think if there was better documentation or better best practices about how to automate and deploy standardized, I think that would help.