Cisco Meraki SD-WAN vs. VMware SD-WAN

Overview
ProductRatingMost Used ByProduct SummaryStarting Price
Cisco Meraki SD-WAN
Score 8.8 out of 10
N/A
Cisco Meraki SD-WAN is a software-defined WAN offering transport independence, application optimization, intelligent path control, and secure connectivity.N/A
VMware SD-WAN
Score 8.7 out of 10
N/A
VMware SD-WAN (formerly VeloCloud) aims to deliver high-performance, reliable branch access to cloud services, private data centers, and SaaS-based enterprise applications. VeloCloud was acquired by VMware in 2018.N/A
Pricing
Cisco Meraki SD-WANVMware SD-WAN
Editions & Modules
No answers on this topic
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Offerings
Pricing Offerings
Cisco Meraki SD-WANVMware SD-WAN
Free Trial
NoNo
Free/Freemium Version
NoNo
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
NoNo
Entry-level Setup FeeNo setup feeNo setup fee
Additional Details——
More Pricing Information
Community Pulse
Cisco Meraki SD-WANVMware SD-WAN
Considered Both Products
Cisco Meraki SD-WAN
Chose Cisco Meraki SD-WAN
user friendly, cheap and integrates well with other Meraki and Cisco products
VMware SD-WAN
Chose VMware SD-WAN
At the time we made our decision to move forward with VeloCloud, Cisco Viptela and Cisco Meraki were the two players we compared against. Cisco's offerings were very customizable when using Viptela, but there was a big learning curve to implement. Meraki at the time was a lot …
Top Pros
Top Cons
Best Alternatives
Cisco Meraki SD-WANVMware SD-WAN
Small Businesses

No answers on this topic

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Medium-sized Companies
Cisco Routers
Cisco Routers
Score 8.4 out of 10
Cisco Routers
Cisco Routers
Score 8.4 out of 10
Enterprises
Cisco Routers
Cisco Routers
Score 8.4 out of 10
Cisco Routers
Cisco Routers
Score 8.4 out of 10
All AlternativesView all alternativesView all alternatives
User Ratings
Cisco Meraki SD-WANVMware SD-WAN
Likelihood to Recommend
8.9
(43 ratings)
7.1
(5 ratings)
Support Rating
8.1
(2 ratings)
7.2
(3 ratings)
Product Scalability
9.2
(41 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
User Testimonials
Cisco Meraki SD-WANVMware SD-WAN
Likelihood to Recommend
Cisco
At our level, we had to optimize our 3 internet links (MPLS and LTE) with applications like O365, SAP, Microsoft CRM Dynamics and our collaborative work tools like Teams. We also had to ensure that both client workstations and servers could communicate with minimal latency with our Microsoft Intune infrastructure.
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VMware by Broadcom
VMware SD WAN is a great solution for tying multiple locations together that are not physically located close. The link aggregation used in the technology allows for quicker failover to redundant connections, which makes the surface traffic seem to be uninterrupted. If planning to connect multiple locations while utilizing the existing internet, Veloclouds SDWAN provides stable and accurate aggregation of connections that provide a good sense of stability for the price.
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Pros
Cisco
  • Meraki has been beautifully done for people who are actually very lean on the IT infrastructure as in resources wise. So Meraki is a very good solution to give them the simplicity on a single glass plan where they can actually have visibility over all their networks on a single glass plane by a click of button, they could actually see what's happening. They could actually do troubleshooting on the fly, including packet capture, which is such a smooth feature. Usually myself including I've been have an engineering background, all my ears packet capture, I've never seen that smooth and easy to operate that you can actually have a high level understanding or deep level depending on how much you want to go in with the click of a button. That's so beautiful. I mean everything for me Meraki is point of kind of a go ahead for everyone.
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VMware by Broadcom
  • Direct cloud access.
  • Scalable growth for network infrastructure.
  • Flexible control over application data flows.
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Cons
Cisco
  • The platform itself is very feature-rich. One of the difficulties we find is that to do things, for example, in terms of monitoring and obtaining data, it's not consistent. There are multiple interfaces to get them, but you can't get the same data through all interfaces. So you end up having to try to find either the least common denominator or we have to build our own code that then mines through all the interfaces and that becomes very problematic.
  • The other problem we've found is that there are issues where the same amount of expected software quality isn't really there in all releases. Cisco breaks things out by like shorter or long-lived release trains. And the long-lived release trains tend to have good quality by the time you get to the second or third release within it. But then those are skips. There are like 12, 18 months skips in between those. So if you start releasing features on versions in between there practically to be safe, you have to wait until you know much later. So to be able to see new future capabilities as they come out and deploy those readily needs to improve, it needs to be much faster.
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VMware by Broadcom
  • The learning curve of deploying VeloCloud is steep, so unless you're a networking expert, the initial setup might be over your head.
  • I think they may be able to improve their web interface to provide a better user interface.
  • I've experienced a couple of interesting bugs which have required reboots to resolve.
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Support Rating
Cisco
Fast and efficient. The only issue currently is that the support is only overseas support and not in South Africa, which causes delays in resolution for some cases. Escalating issues is quite simple and the opening of new cases from the dashboard is easy. I have never had a support issue that could not be resolved.
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VMware by Broadcom
Its good.
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Alternatives Considered
Cisco
The Sonic wall and Cisco ASA required a lot of trial and error to get up and running. Rules and configurations were difficult to setup and were not intuative. Meraki is very ituative.
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VMware by Broadcom
Because the FortiGate is a true firewall with all the UTM features, that is the only thing that I would say beats the VC in that aspect. Silverpeak has a very nice solution, but it is a bit cumbersome when using the GUI to configure and manage. WatchGuard is a UTM firewall, but fall short on the SD-WAN portion of their solution compared to Velocloud.
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Scalability
Cisco
Once your template is set up Meraki is easy to scale. Even creating the template is easy and I was able to learn enough in 4 hours to build, test, and deploy templates for our locations. Best part is you can stage your deployment by adding a unit to a template even before taking it out of the box.
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VMware by Broadcom
No answers on this topic
Return on Investment
Cisco
  • It was mostly around logs. I mean I understand because the aim is to provide the simplified solution to the people as an end user, be it an IT manager or the oil team. So I understand where you don't have lots of tools assigned where you can actually take help from the track. But in terms of having that logging information, I think that's where it's been a bit of a kind of journey where struggling, we have been struggling there.
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VMware by Broadcom
  • Inclusion of this product has led to our removal of old point to point and self managed wireless tower communication.
  • Switching to Velocloud SDWAN allowed us to remove distributed repository style framework and embrace a newer option.
  • Switching to SDWAN has already mitigated several instances of connections going down and the quick failover means there was no business interruption.
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ScreenShots