Cisco Meraki vMX vs. SonicWall VPN Clients

We are a heavily invested Meraki environment, from our corporate locations to APs. Using a vMX as apposed another solution is a no brainer. It integrates well, has the same benefits as the rest of the Meraki stack, and you can leverage your favorite cloud platform

Incentivized

If your organization has a full-time IT department or support staff, SonicWall VPN Clients might be a good fit. Configuration can be challenging if you're a small business office manager who HAPPENS to take care of IT (as in my case). Still, once the SonicWall VPN Clients is configured, it works pretty well and at minimal ongoing cost. We opted for extended support from the manufacturer just in case we run into issues that we can't address internally.

Incentivized

• Works well with physical Meraki MX devices
• Site-to-Site VPNs are easy to set up with other Meraki devices
• Cisco Meraki vMX provides a great solution for a virtual environment, like Azure

Incentivized

• Exceptional security
• Relatively easy configuration

Incentivized

• Client VPN: Cisco Meraki vMX in general needs to implement multiple VPN profiles/ group policies for client VPN
• Alerts: Cisco Meraki vMX in general should be more consistent in sending alerts. We should receive alarms instantly.
• Event logs: More in-depth event logs for all Meraki products, such as system crashes, etc.

Incentivized

• Connections could be more stable
• Difficult to use for tech-challenged end-users

Incentivized

Phone support has been very reliable and useful, but there have been times when better support documentation would have made that call unnecessary. I like to tackle problems internally if I can, as it tends to save time and usually money. The SonicWall VPN Clients system seems to be pretty locked down as far as being accessible to self-manage.

Incentivized

I've used the FortiGate VM appliance many times and this was much better to use, it was a full feature set and had no setbacks ever. But people use Meraki for different reasons likely so it's not 100% apples to apples. As an SR engineer, I demand deep feature sets, etc, while some users strive for simplistic networks that are very visually appealing.

Incentivized

We started the process of vetting Norton VPN, but since it wasn't available from our preferred vendor, we ended up going with SonicWall VPN Clients by default.

Incentivized

We have over 350 locations and growing. We chose Cisco Meraki vMX because of ease of use and how it scales.

Incentivized

• vMX is cheaper than Azure VPN gateway
• there is no native support for HA, so you need to deploy second instance

Incentivized

• ROI is difficult to determine because of the minimal initial cost; that said, now that we've experienced the benefits of having secure VPN access, we couldn't imagine not having it.
• Users have much greater flexibility now that specific legacy systems are accessible from places other than the office.

Incentivized