Cisco offers Meraki Systems Manager (SM), an enterprise mobility management platform supporting the monitoring, provisioning and securing of mobile devices across an enterprise network.
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Kandji
Score 7.8 out of 10
Mid-Size Companies (51-1,000 employees)
Kandji is an Apple device management software solution for macOS, iOS, iPadOS, and tvOS, from the company of the same name in San Diego.
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.
We switched to Kandji for SOC2 compliance and, specifically, to help prevent laptop password issues. However, the opposite happened. There were so many "password sync issues" and people getting locked out of their laptops altogether. We had to factory reset several devices because Kandji just couldn't fix what was going on. It was absolutely ridiculous in my opinion.
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.
Problem after problem after problem with employees getting locked out of their laptops, (which was the whole reason we switched to Kandji - to prevent that from happening), employees ultimately having to factory reset their laptops to get back in, pop-ups that never go away, and continuous password sync issues.
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.
Switching from our old MDM to Kandji: "We'll set you right up with an integration specialist" and it'll be "so easy." Greatly incorrect. The change took months and was a disaster at best. So many things I had to figure out that they never mentioned, or I had to keep going back to them to get more information. "Oh, we forgot to mention that!" - said about a dozen times. Also, I had to go to our former MDM to ask them how to do it because "Kandji can only help on the Kandji side of things - not the other MDM side." Well yes, but then don't make it sound like you can and will do that part in the first place!
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.
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.
Both MDMs have issues with employee's laptop passwords and being able to reset those password. We switched to Kandji because laptop PWs were connected to Gmail PWs. However, there were continous "password sync" errors that it ended up being a huge headache for everyone
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.
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.
They promised us we could add devices as needed. I even had that written in an email. However, they rescinded that promise and required us to add devices in buckets of 50. That means, since we had 55 users, we had to pay for 100 licenses.
Password issues were made much worse by using Kandji instead of our old MDM (Hexnode).
Overall, Kandji created major headaches with laptop instead of improving.
