Cisco 4000 Series Integrated Services Routers (ISR 4000) Reviews and Ratings

Rating: 8.7 out of 10

Score

8.7 out of 10

Community insights

TrustRadius Insights for Cisco 4000 Series Integrated Services Routers (ISR 4000) are summaries of user sentiment data from TrustRadius reviews and, when necessary, third party data sources.

Pros

Scalability: Users have praised the Cisco ISR models for their impressive scalability, allowing enterprises to expand backbone bandwidth as needed. This feature has been highlighted by multiple reviewers as a key factor in meeting evolving business requirements.

Consolidation: The space-saving design of the single converged device has garnered positive feedback from users, who appreciate its ability to streamline various functions such as provisioning, management, and troubleshooting. This consolidation contributes to an enhanced Total Cost of Ownership and operational efficiency.

Reliability: In addition to efficient connectivity and consistent uptime, users value the high reliability of ISR models for their robust performance under various conditions. The devices' stability, minimal downtime after upgrades, and strong build quality contribute to a positive user experience.

Reviews

73 Reviews

Videos

Cisco 4000 Series Integrated Services Routers (ISR 4000) - Great for a Tight Budget

Rating: 8 out of 10

Incentivized

March 6, 2026

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

We have 10-12 buildings that are up to 5 miles apart. We are running quite a few subsidiary businesses, like a Credit Union, a Technology Center, a Golf Course, Two K-12 schools and more. Because of the variation of business models and their specific needs, the Cisco 4000 Series Integrated Services Routers (ISR 4000) helps keep WAN robust for our K-12 schools cloud-based O365 applications. The two schools are constantly needing new cloud-based tools and educational tools that require reliable WAN performance for testing and teaching to remote students in South America.

Pros

Reduces operating expenses for a controlled K-12 school budgets.
Our Cloud Apps run with great WAN speed efficiency
Provides a robust network management between 2 K-12 schools

Cons

Need a simpler CLI
A better way to summarize errors (Boot errors specifically)
Need more right now metrics when multiple performance issues arise

Likelihood to Recommend

Based on my experience, the Cisco 4000 Series Integrated Services Routers (ISR 4000) are good choices when budget is the most imporatnt factor in choosing this device. With two k-12 schools, it is important to stay under the allotted budget. The Cisco 4000 Series Integrated Services Routers (ISR 4000) is a great choice for budget conscious entities. This appliance helps network administrators prioritize Internet for the K-12 school O365 cloud applications.

Verified User

Team Lead in Information Technology (201-500 employees)

Vetted Review

10 years of experience

ISR4000

Rating: 8 out of 10

Incentivized

February 26, 2026

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

In our organization, we primarily use Cisco ISR 4000 routers to connect remote sites. These routers allow us to consolidate multiple network functions such as routing, security, VPN, and WAN services into a single device, reducing operating costs and simplifying infrastructure management.

Pros

optimize bandwidth usage and improve application performance over the WAN
maintains high performance even with multiple services enabled
routers are modular

Cons

setting up can be complex and time consuming
the onboard flash storage is relatively limited
They can be noisy and consume a lot of energy.

Likelihood to Recommend

They are appropriate if you are going to set up a more complex configuration where you will need to create tunnels or SD_WAN, or if your organization's requirements need to support many users with VoIP and data traffic. But if your needs are basic and it is a small branch office, there are better and less complex options available.

Verified User

Engineer in Information Technology (10,001+ employees)

Vetted Review

5 years of experience

Great product

Rating: 9 out of 10

Incentivized

August 6, 2024

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

We use Cisco 4000 Series Integrated Services Routers for 2 purposes.

First, we use them to serve as gateway router for our sites, configuring VPNs for internal resources connectivity and static routes towards specific destinations.

Second, we use them as voice gateways at some locations. Depending on the needs, we might use smaller ISR models, but we have Cisco 4000 Series Integrated Services Routers also in place.

Pros

Routing
VPN
Voice services

Cons

Likelihood to Recommend

This is a great piece of hardware. It will suit for sites with large number of users, when you need to do routing, VPN tunnels, redundant gateway protocols, voice and security services. For small/medium sites you might want to look at smaller models, like ISR series 1000, which will be very good.

Daniel Iniguez

Network engineer in Information Technology at PPG (10,001+ employees)

Vetted Review

3 years of experience

Cisco 4000 Series Integrated Services Routers product review

Rating: 9 out of 10

Incentivized

April 1, 2024

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

Cisco 4000 Series Integrated Services Routers is extremely versatile and enterprise class device supporting varied models depending on business requirements. It is based on IOS XE, which support various API and integrated with various monitoring systems. It support netflow based monitoring for all class of systems. Build in network capabilities address the growing requirement for application aware in distributed environment. Various models support various backbone speeds for enterprise networks. Available in 2U sleek models requires minimal power consumption compared to its predecessors 3900 series routers. It can be used for converged branch networks as it can run multiple services including encryption, monitoring traffic management and WAN optimization. It supports enterprise licensing model, which makes is future ready. It also supports SDWAN, DNAC which makes it easy to provision, manage, monitor and troubleshoot. The pricing model is flexible, which allows it to increase the backbone bandwidth as per our requirement, so we pay as you grow.

Pros

Pay as you grow - Increase the backbone bandwidth as per your enterprise requirement. So single box can support multiple variants of offices.
Space consolidation and improved TCO - Total cost of ownership as single converged device able to support branch and enterprise platform, simple to provision, manage, maintain, troubleshoot and monitor. support encryption, UC, WAN optimization and performance management tools.
Business continuity and resilience - ISR models support dual integrated power supplies, with ability to support PoE power to endpoint. Modular network interface. Supports Cisco Unified survivable remote site telephony (SRST), which serves as resiliency to Cisco UC Collaboration solution.
Lower WAN expenses - integrated and embedded SDWAN solution for enabling low cost internet solutions.

Cons

There are different variants of licenses to boost performance. Boost and performance licenses. Perf license is cheaper than boost. And different for varying bandwidth requirements. This does create confusion at times, explaining to management. This is a room to simplify here.
User interface GUI capable would be a great asset for this product along with command line capability.
Cost of devices can be made more competitive. Currently this is priced on higher side compared to 8xxx series routers.

Likelihood to Recommend

- Well suited for branch networks

- All in one integrated device for small offices as supports WAN modules and PoE so can be used for SDWAN

- Good choice in front of firewalls as NAT devices

- well suited for Internet connectivity

- Support encryption and WAN optimization for VPN based networks

- Chosen one for Cisco UC SRST required to build resilient unified comms for Cisco collaboration services

Mahesh Doshi

IT in Information Technology at Trafigura (5001-10,000 employees)

Vetted Review

2 years of experience

Cisco 4000 Series Integrated Services Routers (ISR 4000) Review

Rating: 10 out of 10

Incentivized

December 11, 2023

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

SWe use this product in my organization like we do OSPF routing between office location and we do BGP routing to pair between ISP.

Pros

It's working well in routing as long as we know the performance, we know the neighbor, we know how many routing table we need to do. It's working well. We don't have to touch anything. Yes, it stays there. If we don't do anything, it stays there for so long.

Cons

Actually it's good already, but sometimes users ask me why this product doesn't have an interface that other products have. But in term of technical, they don't care. They're just doing command line, and yes it's working well, but if they come both for interface and command line in the sandbox, don't need to integrate with other appliance

Likelihood to Recommend

Actually if we place it into the internet gateway, we do nothing in front of the firewall. Yes, it's working well also, if we put into the routing, it works well. But we should not use it instead of switch. Because some people tend to use the router instead of layer three suite. So yes, I try to use it.

KAGNROATH Uk

Head of Technical Enterprise in Information Technology at Positron Multiverse Co., LTD (51-200 employees)

Vetted Review

10 years of experience

Cisco 4000 Series Integrated Services Routers (ISR 4000) Review

Rating: 10 out of 10

Incentivized

December 7, 2023

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

We use them for our wide area network because we have two redundant wide area networks. We have a hundred meg link coming off the sites, terminated our data centers. We use this product for that kind of connectivity between the regional sites and also the data center. At the regional sites, we have the Cisco 4300 series and at the data center, we have the Cisco 4000 series. That's why we use our end-to-end connectivity using those devices.

Pros

First of all, I would say that they're very efficient in terms of having end-to-end connectivity and also uptime. It's all time. We never had any issues dropping links and things like that. So provided you have a good bandwidth and a good backend, this device just works. We never touch them. It's brilliant. And the routing we use as well, the PBI OSP or BGP works really nicely with the underlying iOS version as well. So I think from the reliability perspective that's why we trust the brand. It works really well.

Cons

I would say that it's for the reason we are migrating now, that every product you have to replace every three to five years. You have to have a roadmap to move in. The reason is business is changing so the product you had seven years ago may not align with cybersecurity or could be with scalability and also redundancy and other stuff. But if I can focus on this particular brand, the problem we have is bandwidth. It can only support after a hundred meg. The one we have for 300 and now we are going into a one-gig backbone. So that's why we are trying to move into a new technology and also some enhancements from cybersecurity as well. So those are the key reasons from a performance perspective as well as from the cybersecurity perspective we would like to move as well. And we're also changing dynamically from the business side of it, we need to meet their requirements as well from all the cyber stuff. So those are the key points I would say mainly from a bandwidth perspective and from cybersecurity as well.

Likelihood to Recommend

We just moved into a new office now. We used to work in the valley, which is on Ham Street and now we moved into Dan. So when we moved we had a lot of this product in stock and we just brought it from our IT store and then deployed it in level 13 within a few minutes, everything up and running. So it's brilliant. So from that of fast deployment, it's quite a good technology. And also from reliability at the time we were looking to get at least a hundred megabit per second from a bandwidth perspective. And then we went to attack and then we said hey, can we actually upgrade this one into whatever capacity they have? Within a second we got a new license, we applied the new license and then we can get a good bandwidth on that as well. So it's a seamless kind of experience from a customer perspective, I think it's really good that you can deploy it in very quick and fast kind of scenarios.

Verified User

Employee in Information Technology (201-500 employees)

Vetted Review

8 years of experience

Cisco Review

Rating: 8 out of 10

Incentivized

August 26, 2023

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

We mainly use it not for data, but mainly for voice. It's our platform for Cisco call manager, voice over ip.

Pros

Easy to program.

Cons

There's just a limitation on the amount of modules that we could put on. And then if you want to put a little more, then you have to pay a lot of money just to get a bigger chassis. I mean, the price, I think that's the main issue is the price jump from like a smaller bay to a bigger bay is like a huge amount of money on that.

Likelihood to Recommend

It's well suited if it's like if you have a good decent size amount of employees at a site that's worth the investment so that you could or the phone can register to it, but it's not worth it if you have a small site to spend that amount of money just to give them a couple of, you know, phones or something.

Verified User

Employee in Information Technology (10,001+ employees)

Vetted Review

5 years of experience

Cisco Review

Rating: 10 out of 10

Incentivized

August 26, 2023

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

It takes care of providing the WAN connections for our network. So it's the WAN connectivity.

Pros

One of the things I like is because I'm in operations, I deal with software upgrades. So some of the other products take a while after you reboot them or upgrade them to come back up. What I like about these ISRs, is that they reboot really quickly, come up, and are back providing that connectivity quickly. So our downtime is minimal, which I appreciate.

Cons

I was just trying to think of any room for improvement. It's hard. It does a lot. It does what we need. It does the operations, I can't think of anything for improvement actually

Likelihood to Recommend

A beefy router, so it wants to be handling a lot of routes. So probably an environment where you're, you're handling multiple circuits or maybe multiple routes. Maybe in a smaller enterprise, you would use something different or something smaller or at a branch. But this typical model is meant for an enterprise data center.

Anthony Jorgensen

Network Operations Manager in Information Technology at AAA (1001-5000 employees)

Vetted Review

4 years of experience

Good router, although the addons can get very expensive.

Rating: 10 out of 10

Incentivized

August 18, 2023

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

I use these to enable communications from field sites on the corporate network via Internet, Cell, Satellite, MPLS.

Pros

These are great for IKE V2 VPNs with serial console access

Cons

The upgradability of the routers is great, but very expensive
The need for increased memory/flash for current features

Likelihood to Recommend

It is perfect for scenarios where T1/E1 connectivity is needed.

It is ideal for voice and SRST implementations.

It is expensive if modular connectivity is not required.

It is not recommended if POE is needed.

It is not recommended if advanced SD-WAN features are needed.

It is not recommended for high bandwidth sites.

Kirk Reid

Network Architect in Information Technology at TC Energy Corporation (5001-10,000 employees)

Vetted Review

10 years of experience

View profile

CISCO ISR4000, awesome platform

Rating: 10 out of 10

Incentivized

May 1, 2023

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

As a membre of the network team in the Cloud Business Unit of Orange Business, we are using those router at our customer premises for remote console access and they are doing the job perfectly.

Other uses cases, where we use them for routing purpose.

The only faced problem, is the high lead time to get them.

Pros

easy to isntall
simple to manage
fit our need

Cons

more built in ethernet port ( for 4221)

Likelihood to Recommend

A console access to our devices for the last resort.

Routing / Natting on some specific customer Platforms

imad Tarabichi

Network Engineer in Engineering at orange business Services (5001-10,000 employees)

Vetted Review

Reseller

5 years of experience

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Reviews and Ratings

Cisco 4000 Series Integrated Services Routers product review

Rating: 9 out of 10

Incentivized

April 1, 2024

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

Pros

Pay as you grow - Increase the backbone bandwidth as per your enterprise requirement. So single box can support multiple variants of offices.
Space consolidation and improved TCO - Total cost of ownership as single converged device able to support branch and enterprise platform, simple to provision, manage, maintain, troubleshoot and monitor. support encryption, UC, WAN optimization and performance management tools.
Business continuity and resilience - ISR models support dual integrated power supplies, with ability to support PoE power to endpoint. Modular network interface. Supports Cisco Unified survivable remote site telephony (SRST), which serves as resiliency to Cisco UC Collaboration solution.
Lower WAN expenses - integrated and embedded SDWAN solution for enabling low cost internet solutions.

Cons

There are different variants of licenses to boost performance. Boost and performance licenses. Perf license is cheaper than boost. And different for varying bandwidth requirements. This does create confusion at times, explaining to management. This is a room to simplify here.
User interface GUI capable would be a great asset for this product along with command line capability.
Cost of devices can be made more competitive. Currently this is priced on higher side compared to 8xxx series routers.

Likelihood to Recommend

- Well suited for branch networks

- All in one integrated device for small offices as supports WAN modules and PoE so can be used for SDWAN

- Good choice in front of firewalls as NAT devices

- well suited for Internet connectivity

- Support encryption and WAN optimization for VPN based networks

- Chosen one for Cisco UC SRST required to build resilient unified comms for Cisco collaboration services

Mahesh Doshi

IT in Information Technology at Trafigura (5001-10,000 employees)

Vetted Review

2 years of experience