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
pfSense
Score 9.5 out of 10
N/A
pfSense is a firewall and load management product available through the open source pfSense Community Edition, as well as a the licensed edition, pfSense Plus (formerly known as pfSense Enterprise). The solution provides combined firewall, VPN, and router functionality, and can be deployed through the cloud (AWS or Azure), or on-premises with a Netgate appliance. It as scalable capacities, with functionality for SMBs. As a firewall, pfSense offers Stateful packet inspection, concurrent…
We continued using Cisco Meraki MX after taking over the client since they are familiar with it and enjoy the reporting it provides. We use pfSense for most new deployments as the controls it gives us are slightly better than the Cisco Meraki MX controls. That isn't to say …
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.
Because pfSense is built around open source software, it is very convenient to be able to deploy in the event of hardware failure. We once had a client with a proprietary router that failed. While the router was under warranty, the expected time for the new router to arrive was about 2 weeks. We decided to implement pfSense for the client as a stop gap and ultimately ended up deploying the full enterprise appliance. Being able to get up and running using commodity hardware was a huge win for the client. We've also had a great amount of success deploying pfSense hardware at apartment complexes. The DNS resolver works great and we've had no issues handling multiple VLANs with various DHCP scopes on it. Finally, we've had clients that require having a failover cluster. Utilizing the built in CARP capabilities, we've been able to provide a very robust failover system that requires little maintenance and no downtime in the event of equipment failure.
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.
Easy to use. Good user interface design! Easy to understand and easy to set up.
Lower hardware requirement. 3 years ago, we used an old PC to run it. Now, we have changed to a router device with Celeron CPU and 8GB RAM. It runs smoothly with a 1000G commercial broadband.
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.
I did kind of mention a Con in the Pro section with OpenVPN.
When I create a config for an employee other employees are able to login to that config.
I could be doing something wrong when I am making it - I am not afraid to admit that as I am pretty new to all of this, but it seems like it builds a key and I would think the key would be unique in some way to each employee, but I could be wrong.
I actually do not have a lot of Con's for this software - I did not get to set this up on our work network so I am not sure of any downfalls when installing.
I installed this on my personal machine in a Hyper-V environment to get a feel for it before I started working on it at work and it seemed pretty smooth. I didn't run into any issues.
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.
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
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
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.
While you can get the performance out of other products, pfSense offers the unique ability to put other services on the same device. Products such as Untagle's NG Firewall and SonicWall's TZ series offer cost effective options for firewall and VPN services, having incoming load balancing and connection proxies on the same device as the firewall offers extremely easy configuration and day to day management of network services
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.
Using pfSense has allowed us to build a professional network in our small office without needing a lot of proprietary hardware, saving thousands of dollars in IT infrastructure investment.
The cost for using pfSense is free, so it's a great option for those who don't have a large IT budget
pfSense utilizes all of the industry standard services to provide all of it's functionality, so support for service-level issues is readily available
Because of how much work has been put into pfSense to make it rock solid and reliable, we're able to support our network with minimal IT staffing, saving us thousands of dollars/year in personnel alone.
