Cisco Meraki MX vs. Nagios Core

Overview
ProductRatingMost Used ByProduct SummaryStarting Price
Cisco Meraki MX
Score 9.0 out of 10
N/A
Cisco Meraki MX Firewalls is a combined UTM and Software-Defined WAN solution. Meraki is managed via the cloud, and provides core firewall services, including site-to-site VPN, plus network monitoring.
$595
per appliance
Nagios Core
Score 8.5 out of 10
N/A
Nagios provides monitoring of all mission-critical infrastructure components. Multiple APIs and community-build add-ons enable integration and monitoring with in-house and third-party applications for optimized scaling.N/A
Pricing
Cisco Meraki MXNagios Core
Editions & Modules
MX64
$595
per appliance
MX67
$695
per appliance
MX68
$995
per appliance
MX84
$1,995
per appliance
MX100
$4,995
per appliance
MX250
$9,995
per appliance
MX450
$19,995
per appliance
Single License
Free
Single License
Free
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
Cisco Meraki MXNagios Core
Free Trial
NoYes
Free/Freemium Version
NoYes
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
NoYes
Entry-level Setup FeeNo setup feeNo setup fee
Additional Details
More Pricing Information
Community Pulse
Cisco Meraki MXNagios Core
Considered Both Products
Cisco Meraki MX
Chose Cisco Meraki MX
Checkpoint does not have the portal setup for centralised management.
Nagios Core

No answer on this topic

Top Pros
Top Cons
Features
Cisco Meraki MXNagios Core
Firewall
Comparison of Firewall features of Product A and Product B
Cisco Meraki MX
8.0
104 Ratings
7% below category average
Nagios Core
-
Ratings
Identification Technologies8.1100 Ratings00 Ratings
Visualization Tools8.698 Ratings00 Ratings
Content Inspection7.997 Ratings00 Ratings
Policy-based Controls8.095 Ratings00 Ratings
Active Directory and LDAP7.486 Ratings00 Ratings
Firewall Management Console8.098 Ratings00 Ratings
Reporting and Logging7.5102 Ratings00 Ratings
VPN8.897 Ratings00 Ratings
High Availability8.898 Ratings00 Ratings
Stateful Inspection8.093 Ratings00 Ratings
Proxy Server6.554 Ratings00 Ratings
Best Alternatives
Cisco Meraki MXNagios Core
Small Businesses
pfSense
pfSense
Score 9.6 out of 10
Auvik
Auvik
Score 8.4 out of 10
Medium-sized Companies
pfSense
pfSense
Score 9.6 out of 10
Icinga
Icinga
Score 7.7 out of 10
Enterprises
Palo Alto Networks Next-Generation Firewalls - PA Series
Palo Alto Networks Next-Generation Firewalls - PA Series
Score 9.5 out of 10
Foglight
Foglight
Score 9.9 out of 10
All AlternativesView all alternativesView all alternatives
User Ratings
Cisco Meraki MXNagios Core
Likelihood to Recommend
9.0
(140 ratings)
8.5
(44 ratings)
Likelihood to Renew
8.8
(6 ratings)
9.9
(3 ratings)
Usability
9.4
(7 ratings)
4.0
(1 ratings)
Availability
9.1
(1 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Performance
9.1
(1 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Support Rating
8.4
(15 ratings)
7.7
(9 ratings)
Implementation Rating
7.0
(1 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Product Scalability
9.0
(107 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
User Testimonials
Cisco Meraki MXNagios Core
Likelihood to Recommend
Cisco
Cisco Meraki MX is great for a short term deployment. An all in one model can combine a cellular router, wireless access point, 10 port switch (with POE). Having a cellular model means seamless failover with a wired link. An included SFP slot on the MX68 series would be beneficial. Maybe in a newer model.
Read full review
Nagios Enterprises
Nagios monitoring is well suited for any mission critical application that requires per/second (or minute) monitoring. This would probably include even a shuttle launch. As Nagios was built around Linux, most (85%) plugins are Linux based, therefore its more suitable for a Linux environment.
As Nagios (and dependent components) requires complex configurations & compilations, an experienced Linux engineer would be needed to install all relevant components.
Any company that has hundreds (or thousands) of servers & services to monitor would require a stable monitoring solution like Nagios. I have seen Nagios used in extremely mediocre ways, but the core power lies when its fully configured with all remaining open-source components (i.e. MySQL, Grafana, NRDP etc). Nagios in the hands of an experienced Linux engineer can transform the organizations monitoring by taking preventative measures before a disaster strikes.
Read full review
Pros
Cisco
  • It provides a really good single pane of glass so you can really easily identify end to end, what is going on in your environment.
  • It provides the ability for someone that doesn't necessarily need a really deep level of knowledge to be able to operate and maintain it. I think that's probably a big selling point, but I think definitely for the people that I'm selling the products who just having a dashboard and being able to log onto it and see if things are good or bad is quite key. So it does that really well.
Read full review
Nagios Enterprises
  • Monitoring of services is one of the biggest benefits for our company. Being able to respond in a timely fashion keeps business smooth.
  • Hardware and device monitoring are easy to set up with proper parameters.
  • Notification to key staff to be able to respond quickly makes issues go away faster.
Read full review
Cons
Cisco
  • Sometimes can be difficult to find a specific device or options in the dashboard if you can multiple networks in your organization
  • No option to open a CLI session
  • It can improve in the way to troubleshoot a VPN L2L connection to see all the sent messages in case there is a issue with in the negotiation.
Read full review
Nagios Enterprises
  • Nagios could use core improvements in HA, though, Nagios itself recommends monitoring itself with just another Nagios installation, which has worked fine for us. Given its stability, and this work-around, a minor need.
  • Nagios could also use improvements, feature wise, to the web gui. There is a lot in Nagios XI which I felt were almost excluded intentionally from the core project. Given the core functionality, a minor need. We have moved admin facing alerts to appear as though they originate from a different service to make interacting with alerts more practical.
Read full review
Likelihood to Renew
Cisco
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.
Read full review
Nagios Enterprises
We're currently looking to combine a bunch of our network montioring solutions into a single platform. Running multiple unique solutions for monitoring, data collection, compliance reporting etc has become a lot to manage.
Read full review
Usability
Cisco
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
Read full review
Nagios Enterprises
The Nagios UI is in need of a complete overhaul. Nice graphics and trendy fonts are easy on the eyes, but the menu system is dated, the lack of built in graphing support is confusing, and the learning curve for a new user is too steep.
Read full review
Support Rating
Cisco
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
Read full review
Nagios Enterprises
I haven't had to use support very often, but when I have, it has been effective in helping to accomplish our goals. Since Nagios has been very popular for a long time, there is also a very large user base from which to learn from and help you get your questions answered.
Read full review
Implementation Rating
Cisco
Good product and simple to use.
Read full review
Nagios Enterprises
No answers on this topic
Alternatives Considered
Cisco
Compared to the regular Cisco devices, the greatest thing will always be the ease of configuration that the Cisco Meraki MX gives by having a dashboard to eliminate a command line that can be difficult for some beginners, it is easier to identify if you make mistakes and fix them since everything is saved and visually you can see something that is not so good.
Read full review
Nagios Enterprises
Because we get all we required in Nagios [Core] and for npm, we have to do lots of configuration as it is not as easy as Comair to Nagios [Core]. On npm UI, there is lots of data, so we are not able to track exact data for analysis, which is why we use Nagios [Core].
Read full review
Scalability
Cisco
Scalability is pretty decent. We run into some issues with the more hubs we create. We've had to tune out the deployment between whether something's a hub or a spoke regionally. So as long as not everything is a hub in this environment and you're creating spokes that talk directly to hubs, that takes a lot of the CPU utilization off of anything that's deemed a hub.
Read full review
Nagios Enterprises
No answers on this topic
Return on Investment
Cisco
  • I'm going to say positive impact. The biggest thing is especially coming from having a third party taking care of our network to us doing it ourselves. The ease of this with the overall high level visual that we can get as to how our day is starting and running reports to see how many outages have we had, what areas have they actually been in running these reports and being able to gather if it's a certain service provider that's causing an issue in a general area, maybe we need to switch service providers for ISP. So it's been great in that mannerism for us. Ease of manage, I mean, we have a limited number of staff, we have a lot of different offices across the country. And then this is relatively new for us because we did have a previous provider doing all of this for us.
Read full review
Nagios Enterprises
  • With it being a free tool, there is no cost associated with it, so it's very valuable to an organization to get something that is so great and widely used for free.
  • You can set up as many alerts as you want without incurring any fees.
Read full review
ScreenShots