Cisco Meraki MX

Both are great products but Cisco Meraki MX is simpler and quicker to get up and in production with multiple FW’s given Auto VPN.

Cisco Meraki does everything the competitors do but in a simpler method allowing more time to focus on the requirements of the company. FortiGate is more granular and offers more choice but for our needs, we decided to move forward with Meraki which can encompass Meraki Wifi so it can also be managed via the portal.

We felt the Cisco Meraki MX was superior to Ubiquiti when we were doing our initial evaluations. We felt that Meraki was far beyond enterprise-grade than UniFi and we felt that we were getting a lot more features and scalability opportunities for the value. We also noticed that the Meraki support was far better than any of its competitors.

Cisco Meraki MXfelt like a more powerful option - the level of customisation and expansion was greater, and the full cloud-based management seemed a lot easier to understand and work with.

I have deployed the Ubiquiti Networks Dream Machine Pro, and I have to say that the only reason I would ever choose that platform over Meraki is the price of the Meraki licensing. Ubiquiti does not have ongoing license fees, and their devices are seriously less expensive than Meraki, so when the budget is tight, you go with Unifi. The Meraki system is 99.999999% uptime. The Unifi is probably 95% comparatively - so you can understand why I would always choose Meraki!

It has a very similar look and feel.

We continued using Cisco Meraki MX after taking over the client since they are familiar with it and enjoy the reporting it provides. We use pfSense for most new deployments as the controls it gives us are slightly better than the Cisco Meraki MX controls. That isn't to say Cisco Meraki MX is bad; it just isn't suitable for many of our clients that are multi-tenant, which is one of the weaker offerings from Meraki. For our clients that were already using Cisco Meraki MX when we adopted them, there was no reason to change, it does the job, and it does it well.

Cisco Meraki MX is ideal for organizations with several sites requiring interconnectivity.

We compared VeloCloud. The product seemed fine. Outside circumstances made us not use VeloCloud. We are currently evaluating FortiGate and FortiAP for specific and unique locations along with Sophos SG Firewall and AP. Although we plan to add a competitor we are not planning on removing Meraki's.

Meraki MX is really the easiest to configure, it is a very complete device that is at the level of a business network

The Cisco Meraki MX device has a user interface or GUI that beats the pants off of the Cisco ASA. Needless to say, the ASA was clunky and just hard to navigate. It was ok had you had some experience doing so, but the Meraki GUI is different. It feels like it was designed for a much less technical person without reducing any of the capabilities needed to make a very secure environment.

While Ubiquiti is cheaper and has products that will work at faster speeds, the fact that devices can fall off a network with no questions is an issue. I've never had this issue with [Cisco] Meraki [MX].

In the market, there are several manufacturers, but the great differentiators of the Meraki MX solution are its robustness, the support, the support of Cisco worldwide, and a management dashboard in the cloud. Simple, with a large number of tools for administration, monitoring, troubleshooting through which the communications staff can carry out all their activities from anywhere in the world.

The Meraki may have slightly fewer features, but it does have all the core features and executes them with flying colors.

We have deployed several firewalls over the years and found Cisco Meraki MX to be a great contender. Datto has high recurring monthly fees for devices with limited configuration options. Ubiquiti works great for our entry-level clients that need a starting point but have a limited budget. Cisco Meraki MX eliminates the monthly recurring cost while providing a vast set of configuration options for the device.

Cisco Meraki MX is much more simple to configure, deploy and manage. It's very intuitive and it has a lot of options as a firewall, also it has a SD WAN feature as a very important added value. The performance of the Cisco Meraki MX is very good and for these all reasons Meraki MX is better than FortiGate devices.

Cisco Meraki beat Fortinet FortiGate because both are UTM but Meraki MX with the intuitive dashboard let anyone with IT Knowledge configure and secure any networks with no worries about if the policies are correct. With MX you don't have to be an expert in security, you do exactly the same thing that you can find and any UTM product in the market but the great difference is the intuitive dashboard and advance options that Meraki carries inside that let you secure your LAN like a pro.

When comparing the Cisco Meraki line to other products it became nearly an incomparable argument. While Fortinet and SonicWall were very comparable to the Meraki MX series, there were just too many tangible and intangible factors that led to us choosing Meraki. The biggest deciding factor was the cloud management of Cisco products that was that much more reliable compared to the other products. A negative against Meraki though is its yearly licensing costs which are significantly higher than its counterparts.

I have primarily used Palo Altos (from the small PA220s to the bigger PA3000s) and while the PAs have a greater learning curve I believe them to be the superior firewall. They are more of a compromise of features/advanced options to ease-of-use, with Meraki leaning more heavily toward the ease-of-use side of the house. I also find that Palo Alto has a better security suite.

open apis and general look of management system

light and day, there is a bit more of a cost but well worth the time and cost savings to deploy

We choose Cisco Meraki MX because of its cloud control panel, its faster deployment, and its solid and integrated portfolio of solutions that cover almost all our network needs. All of these features are managed from one central location with a really complete set of reports. This makes Cisco Meraki MX a dream for any network administrator.

Depends on the use case. Meraki shines in the area of ease of management and ease of deployment. This is typically retail customers with many locations or customers with lean IT staff. Meraki MX seems not to do well in complex environments with heavy IT staff requirements. There are also loyal Cisco fans that only want Cisco branded products.