Meraki MX: Ease of setup and management
Updated March 12, 2021

Meraki MX: Ease of setup and management

Victor Lau | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review

Modules Used

  • MX67

Overall Satisfaction with Cisco Meraki MX

As an SD-WAN appliance at the Branch location. Using VPN to tunnel to the head office. head office includes access to the internet and filtering for content. The MX solution allows the replacement of an MPLS network, allows easy administration of all branch locations. The head office utilizes redundant MXs for uptime availability.
  • Ease of administration
  • Bundle security package
  • Ease of setting up VPN
  • Ease of support
  • More threat features.
  • More robust remote client VPN.
  • Better integration with third party products.
  • Ease of management, less IT staff required to administer.
  • Ease of installation, less cost to set up.
  • Cost of the licenses tend to be higher than competition.
Agreed, Meraki MX is easier to administer and manage. The dashboard is easy to use and allows a faster learning curve for new IT members. The deployment is also easier, using the GUI allows faster and easier deployments, this reduces costs for hiring professional service engineers to configure and provide any ongoing changes to the system.
Integrating to other Meraki MR or MS product lines are quite easy. The integration with Cisco Catalyst can sometimes be a challenge, there are some features that need some additional setup to make both ends work properly. Seems that there is a lot of documentation for integrating to Meraki but fewer with Cisco and even less with other manufacturers.
Can easily add HA redundancy with adding another hardware appliance and then configuration. Adding license terms is also very easy, simply add the new license into the dashboard and claim it against the appliance. Some of our MXs are quite dated but still work and are still supported with the current firmware. There are new features that are added to the Meraki license, which are nice to see.
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.
Great for using on sites where IT is new to networking solutions. Eases the administration for newer users to networking products, no need to use CLI, or understand programming protocols.

Not great for a heavy network-centric organization, the features are a subset of a Cisco branded product and since there is no CLI, there is no way to unlock certain features if they are not listed on the dashboard. The support response tends to be slower than that of Cisco. There are fewer use cases of integration.

Cisco Meraki MX Feature Ratings

Identification Technologies
7
Visualization Tools
8
Content Inspection
8
Policy-based Controls
8
Active Directory and LDAP
8
Firewall Management Console
9
Reporting and Logging
8
VPN
5
High Availability
9
Stateful Inspection
8
Proxy Server
7