Cisco Meraki SM vs. Jamf Now vs. Lansweeper

It is very helpful if you need to restrict the apps a student or employee can have on their device. I had teachers using Netflix on the iPads before I brought them under management. Restricting them will make you unpopular with some of your employees, however, I advise them the device is being provided for business use and, therefore we have the right and responsibility to manage it.

Incentivized

Anywhere with under 100 Apple devices, I would recommend this service. It was always so simple to add a device you recently purchased to your inventory and be able to check in on it anytime. If they had more than 100, I would recommend Jamf Pro, the enterprise version of this software.

Incentivized

Lansweeper I believe is well suited for any environment - its low cost and small footprint make it an easy addition to any organization, big or small, that is looking for an asset inventory solution that can either replace or supplement existing asset management systems. It may not be well suited for situations where a lot of customization is necessary, such as pulling in custom fields or details from equipment that don't reside in a registry.

Incentivized

• We can create templates for our mobile devices that make new hardware deployments a breeze.
• Pushing out new with Apple Business Manager is easy and efficient.
• We get tons of real-time information on our devices and useful historical information and logs.
• Kiosk and Single App mode is great for single purpose tablets.

Incentivized

• Resetting passwords remotely..
• Locking or wiping a device.
• Pushing new apps out to all or one iPad.
• Controlling what apps are installed on the iPads.

• Inventory - LANSweeper scans the network for devices - anything with an SNMP trap or using AD or local credentials. We can get an in-depth look at devices.
• Reporting - LANSweeper can generate just about any report you can imagine. We can check RAM in groups and determine where upgrades are needed. We can find local printers (which aren't allowed on our network) and address that issue with the user. We can check CPU type to help determine end of life without our network.
• Printers - It's nice to have a quick look at printer statuses. Toner levels, out of paper, and service errors are all reported via LANSweeper.

Incentivized

• Limited ability for "command line" functions. For example, we had a laptop that was stolen and showed to be online, but we could not wipe it. We were able to access a command prompt, but it would not accept DISKPART or FORMAT commands to try and make the PC unusable.
• The GPS location is not terribly accurate and frequently it "guesses" location based off of an IP address rather than actually activating the GPS on the device. This makes tracking lost/stolen devices very difficult.
• Difficulty getting devices to correctly show their status in the dashboard. For example, I can have a PC that is online and connected to the Internet, but shows to be offline in the dashboard. Only after refreshing many times would it indicate that the PC was actually online, thus allowing me to administer it.

Incentivized

• I would like to see some more advanced functions for the iOS supervised mode. Maybe pushing iOS updates? Right now we can only see if it requires an update, but can't schedule an update time, etc.
• I would like to see Jamf Now work with Apple to allow apps with in-app purchases that can be used with Jamf Now. Right now some apps don't have two versions available in the app store (a full version, and a free version with in-app purchases), so the single version free app with in-app purchases can't be used across our enterprise environment. :(
• They could do with a better lost device activation lock. Currently, you can only lock a device from being erased and re-setup if you associate an icloud account with it and turn it on to find the lost device.

Incentivized

• Can only scan what it sees. Doesn't show every item on the machine. Patches are also absent.
• Software Recognition is OK with Microsoft. It is dire within our network of multiple products. Recognition is at about 35% with constant manual work needed to baseline for each manufacturer in each network
• Datacenter compliance is a manual project. We used Excel extensively.
• License optimization is limited to installations v surplus licenses. We need to know who's using what and how.

Incentivized

Superb tool

It has is easy to use overall and is very powerful. The learning curve for the system is very small and I have found it easy to train members of our team to use it. It can fit any size organization and the support is excellent. The ROI is well worth it. If you have a multiplatform ecosystem, this tool is near perfect.

Incentivized

Working in an environment with just macOS devices, Jamf Now is a great option. With Jamf Now, you get details with configurations that get down to the fine details of each device. Without Jamf Now, it would be a much bigger headache managing our Apple devices. Overall, this application makes our jobs much easier.

Incentivized

The tool is a web gui, and is mostly easy to navigate, but certain areas are more unclear than others. Identifying what im filtering for, or what menu option has what impact can be less straightforward than I'd like. Overall though, this tool will provide me with information other tools in my box just don't.

Incentivized

We have found that Cisco Meraki has always had very good customer support. In the rare case, when we have needed assistance they have always been quick to respond and solve the issue.

Incentivized

No body is perfect and occasionally, but rare, it take a little bit to get a reply on the chat, but overall as compared to other chat sessions it is pretty responsive and fairly quick. They allow you to upload a screen shot if that helps and to reply with solutions via email so I have it as a reference in writing for future problems.

Lots of info online there are tons of SQL Reports you can copy from the web as Lansweeper and users post many of them. They also send out alerts that pop up on Lansweeper, letting you know of an update that you need for certain software and provide an SQL report so you can scan your system to see what PCs need this update.

Incentivized

The only product I have used that is similar is Apple Configurator. While a powerful solution, it requires physical access to the devices which is not always possible, especially on a large site. Meraki is able to achieve many of the same functions as the Apple configurator but without ever needing to physically access the device, other than initial setup and registration.

Incentivized

Ease of use, price point, support, features - are all the reasons why we chose Jamf Now.

Incentivized

In short it has more features and its a more robust solution and it works well with those solutions. I am sure it will keep track with Ai and action recommendations in the future as I didnt see any of it on the platform (at least the one we use) I thin that is the only thing that is missing in the current product

Incentivized

It’s scalable up to a point and will scale well from small to a medium business, however, as a business grows and policies get more mature or detailed, you might have to later upgrade to a more appropriate enterprise solution such as MaaS360 or AirWatch. This solution however, will last quite a long tome for a growing business.

Incentivized

• Our immediate take away has been a savings of thousands a year in MDM fees. We were paying around $3.00 a device with our previous MDM and our average with Meraki is about $1.88 per device. That while providing far more functionality than our previous provider.

Incentivized

• Low Cost: 2-3 dollars a device for a month was cheaper than the time spent repairing the Mac server.

Incentivized

• It had a positive impact on solutions expense cause several teams we're using different solutions with different costs that used several servers and DB resources. Now, we've been able to simply that a lot with Lansweeper.
• With my previous point, people had to train and learn about each of their solutions. Now we can put a team in charge and so the other teams can focus on other tasks.
• Last year Lansweeper changed their licencing prices a lot so it slashed our budget.

Incentivized