Cisco Meraki Wireless LAN Reviews

We are resellers and our customers are generally medium to enterprise size organizations. I'm the senior manager and we are partners with Cisco. 

The dashboard is a great feature that is architecturally based and I like the fact that the solution is accessible from anywhere. As an administrator, it is very useful to have access to the dashboard from anywhere through my mobile Meraki app. I can see if there are any issues and can get alerts over my emails. The basic value of the product is the ease of use and ease of access from anywhere. The product is very easy to manage, easy to configure, and easy for our customers to understand. It's the ease of use that sells Meraki. When it's used as a whole stack, Meraki is one of the very good and easy to manage products.

There are a lot of improvements that could be made, especially from the feature point of view. If you compare the Meraki firewall to UTM, Meraki has close to 90% of all the features that UTM offers but there are some that are lacking and that need to be rectified. For example, UTM has a feature that enables you to block videos inside Facebook or block particular applications inside another application. In Meraki, you can only block the entire app or the entire URL. For example, you can block the category video, but not any applications that are inside apps. When it comes to switching, Meraki lacks categories of features, like the traditional Cisco, Aruba, or Ruckus app, and I think they need to increase the number of modules and categories of switches.

I've been using this solution for almost six years. 

 The product is stable and I have not seen any issues over the past couple of years.

The solution is scalable, the only problem we had earlier was the Meraki firewall did not support more than two ISC links, but I think the hardware has matured and can now support more than two ISC links. Some years ago now, Meraki used to lose many customers because it didn't support more than two ISC links.

It's very easy to get support from Meraki, because everything is there in the dashboard. You just need to open a case through the dashboard and you get good support. 

The pricing is a little higher than other similar architecture products such as Ruckus or Aruba. Meraki has a premium pack added to it so it's costly.

If you're a medium enterprise type of organization, I'd recommend something like Meraki, at least from the wireless point of view, because I think it has a very, very simple and easy-to-use dashboard. As mentioned, it's easy to configure and very easy to manage. Wherever there are very low resources to manage a network, Meraki is the one. If a company isn't managing many people and there aren't too many network administrators, it's a very good solution. 

I rate the solution seven out of 10. 

We use it for Wi-Fi.

It is cloud-based. You can manage it remotely from anywhere in the world, and you don't have to be on-site, which is a very big advantage.

It is super expensive for what you get. I just wish it was less expensive.

I have been using this solution for 20 years.

It is stable and very reliable.

You just buy more. In terms of the number of users, it is used by everyone in the organization. It is Wi-Fi, so you hook your phone or laptop. Everybody uses it.

Their technical support is very good. I would rate them a ten out of ten.

I've used Ubiquiti. The reason I use them is that they're very inexpensive, but they're not cloud-based. You have to be on-premises in order to manage them.

It is really easy.

It is super expensive for what you get. You also have to buy a license every year. Otherwise, it stops working.

If you can afford it, you should go for it.

I would rate Cisco Meraki Wireless LAN a six out of ten. The biggest downside is the yearly fee and the initial price, but it is very reliable.

We use Cisco Meraki Wireless LAN for offices, small retail stores, and restaurants. Most of our clients are medium-sized businesses.

Most of our clients have around 200 employees. There are around 50 access point users.

Only one person is required for maintenance.

The captive portal feature is my favorite. It allows us to keep track of how many people are entering our client's businesses. 

Also, the security and content filtering that's included on the cloud is great.

The signal coverage radius could be extended. I would also like to have a planner for designs. 

I have been using Cisco Meraki Wireless LAN for roughly eight years.

Stability-wise, it's very good. The problem is the coverage.

Scalability-wise, it's excellent. You can integrate with other products like MX, the firewall and router of Meraki, and you can also integrate with Umbrella which is cloud security from Cisco. You can also add more access points very easily.

Cisco's technical support is excellent. Still, sometimes it takes a while for them to respond. There is also a lot of information on their web page for support.

We used to use Aruba and Cisco Access Point. Cloud management was the main difference between these solutions. We have more flexibility with Cisco Meraki Wireless LAN.

The initial setup is easy but it's important to have training.

Configuration takes around one hour. It's the same for any access point but the installation depends on the physical installation — overall, it takes around three hours.

Meraki is a very good solution, but the price is quite high for small markets. We are based in Mexico and within Latin America, most of our customers think that this is an expensive solution compared to other brands. Overall, we think that the price is too high.

For example, the cheapest license subscription is around $600. It's around $1,200 for one access point. This is really expensive for one customer. Other brands charge the same amount for around five access points.

I'd recommend this solution because it's easy to use and secure — the security is integrated. Apps can also be integrated very easily and it's very scalable. 

Overall, on a scale from one to ten, I would give Cisco Meraki Wireless LAN a rating of eight. 

We resell it to our customers for networking, wifi, and security.

For some of our larger clients, it has enabled them to not need to grow staff in order to retain a large 13 access point network has needed a lot of reconfiguration because of the nature of our business. We are able to maintain that and the responses even after hours because we can usually make changes rapidly.

Its ability to be cloud-managed is the most valuable feature so if there's a reconfiguration or an issue, we have excellent visibility into the network and we can usually resolve the problem online without having to go onsite.

The logging sometimes doesn't give us the granularity needed. Some of the rules are a bit more complicated. The switch ports on the routers are not individually addressable, in the sense that with a switch you can tell what MAC address is on what port but with the security appliances, you can't, which would be beneficial for troubleshooting.

I would like to see more information on what is plugged into each MX switch port. I would also like to be able to see that the templates would be able to be used because we're in MSP, so if I create a template, I have to recreate the template with each of our clients. I'd prefer to create one template and then personalize it for each client which is a little extra work that way. 

The dashboard security is not as good as it could be in terms of provision users. If I provision the user at the high level, I'd like to give them rights to our customers so if I have a new technician, I have to go and touch each customer and add that technician which is kind of silly. 

It's quite stable. There are relatively few issues we've had with the product. Compared to others, it's more stable than most.

It scales well up to the larger midsize enterprise. The MX appliances are less scalable than the wifi or the switches. They're a little underpowered and so that's the point where you'd move to a different solution if you needed more scalability if you had more bandwidth requirements. We currently have 150 users. 

Their technical support is good. It's really easy to get someone and they try to help and work to resolve the issue. I'm pleased with their support.

We've also used D-Link, Netgear, and other similar solutions and Cisco small business solutions as well. We found Meraki is easier to deploy and easier to maintain.

We also evaluated WatchGuard, SonicWall, and Ubiquiti but we found Meraki to be superior. 

The initial setup. The deployment was very quick. It takes under half an hour to fully deploy on site.

We've definitely had a good ROI. It helps our support resources as well as gives the customer a good product.

Meraki is certainly not the cheapest solution. The coterminous licensing that they do is a challenge with some of the sites where there's corporate and franchise sites. If a franchise is buying in and they want to put them on the same dashboard, it means that their license is going to expire earlier than it should. The fact that if you don't license it, it just stops working has been a challenge. It's not as friendly as would be ideal, where other solutions will not allow you to do any changes but it will keep working. If some of our clients are less organized at renewals this is a little bit adverse. MX appliances are a little overpriced for their power.

I would rate this solution an eight out of ten. 

The most important feature is flexibility.

I believe it is user-friendly. The techie guys don't care for it, but in my opinion, essentially, it has a very simple interface. Most other vendors are now including those in their dashboard features and interfaces as well.

The only concern is when the license has expired and it will no longer function, the entire network goes down, without any notification, or warning.

The price could be reduced.

I have been working with Cisco Meraki Wireless LAN for four or five years.

The first implementation we did was with the MR32. MR32, MR42, and MR62

Cisco Meraki Wireless LAN is stable.

Cisco Meraki Wireless LAN is easy to scale.

Technical support is very good.

I used to work for VS Information Systems, and I'm currently looking after the Cisco Meraki Wireless LAN and the data center infrastructure.

The initial setup is straightforward.

We use a couple of guys for the more physical aspects of the implementation, such as access point mounting.

Because they are cloud-based, we are only using one person for maintenance.

Previously, I did the majority of the configuration by myself. Now, another person has been assigned to the configuration part.

When compared to other vendors, Cisco's pricing is higher.

We did some research and found that we already had the HP solution in-house. Because of the features and feasibility, flexibility, and everything else, as well as the cost, we like the Cisco Meraki Wireless LAN.

We haven't received any requests for additional features at the moment. Previously, any request for additional features was made on the other Cisco dashboard, and the majority of them were already implemented on this one.

We have a partnership with Cisco.

For my experience, I would rate Cisco Meraki Wireless LAN a nine out of ten.

I haven't personally recommended the product to my company's customers. Many of my company's customers use Cisco Meraki Wireless LAN at corporate levels where wireless LANs are needed.

I am not a big fan of Cisco Meraki Wireless LAN. Based on my company's customers' opinions, I feel that the best feature of the product stems from the fact that it serves as an actual cloud management platform and the ease of deployment it offers.

The thing that concerns me the most about the product is that, with a lot of our other customers, the platform's behavior once its licensing runs out. The product doesn't effectively do its job anymore since some issues crop up in it once you run out of your subscription licensing. Once customers run out of subscriptions, they could end up with a non-functional environment, an area of concern.

Overall, Cisco Meraki Wireless LAN is an easy platform to use. I think it would be good if the tool provided a perpetual licensing option, even if it has a limited set of features. If you went back to a basic set of features or something available on a perpetual basis, it would probably be the single biggest improvement in the solution.

Improvements are needed in the licensing part of the tool. The predominant reason why I don't recommend the tool to others is because it puts a large onus on the customer in terms of the tool's operational expenditure year on year. A lot of the customers my company works with want some flexibility and want to stop a product's use after the fourth or fifth year. If customers plan to implement a tool today, they are forecast to replace it in the upcoming four or five years. Having a tool that doesn't lock customers into subscriptions during a time when they want to switch to other products would be great.

I have been using Cisco Meraki Wireless LAN for four to five years. My company is a reseller of Cisco Meraki.

From a scalability perspective, I think the tool is incredibly scalable. I assisted one of our company's customers, which is a global supermarket chain, in an evaluation, which included Cisco Meraki and the wireless component, during which, for the first time, I was exposed to the true scalability feature of the platform. Scalability-wise, I rate the solution a ten out of ten.

Compared to Cisco Meraki Wireless LAN, I recommend products like RUCKUS and HPE Aruba Networking. Considering customers who largely use Fortinet infrastructure, I would also recommend switches and firewalls from Fortinet.

Apart from the advantages offered by the product other than Cisco Meraki in areas like licensing model, from Fortinet's perspective, I like the product's ability to offer a single pane of glass, so it has a single vendor. RUCKUS and HPE are normally deployed due to the RF capabilities it offers. My company did quite a detailed RF study four or five years ago, and HPE and RUCKUS stood out quite well. RUCKUS has adaptive antenna technology. What holds back RUCKUS is that it has been acquired multiple times over the last six or seven years. CommScope is rebranding a lot of the switches under RUCKUS, which is something my company is interested in seeing and observing how that pans out over the next few years.

The cloud management aspect of Cisco Meraki has improved our company's customer's administrative efficiency in some cases, while in some other cases, it hasn't. Depending upon whether or not the tool integrates the switching and SASE aspects as well, I had a few customers whom I had to split apart due to some of the tool's features not being visible once you opt for the product's unified infrastructure model.

With Cisco products and third-party products, integration of Cisco Meraki Wireless LAN is good. The tool doesn't have a lot of integrations that are necessarily native. I think that a lot of the larger infrastructure providers offer the same integration features as Cisco Meraki Wireless LAN since such a solution brings on additional products through acquisition, and true integration processes take time.

Speaking about how the tool's specific security features strengthened our company's customer network defense, I would say that I am not a fan of the product as a security platform. MS Switch Access Policies (802.1X) and NAC are good areas in the product, especially if you integrate with Cisco's platform. I won't usually use the product as a layer 3 boundary.

With the current models offered by the product, it is not a solution that my company recommends to others. If our company's customer already has a large Meraki deployment in place, we recommend it for continuity's sake. The product is not normally something our company would encourage others to use, but if there are additional facilities, we recommend it.

I rate the product a six out of ten.

My company deals with Cisco Meraki Wireless LAN since it provides better visibility, from my point of view, making it easier to manage. With Cisco Meraki Wireless LAN, you don't need to create something else to create controllers. You can just enter in your internet browser to deploy and manage it from there. L7 firewall is also a very good sync option available with Cisco Meraki Wireless LAN.

The most valuable feature of the solution is the simplicity of operating it, which is its biggest asset. The product also has similar, if not better, capabilities than traditional wireless access points.

As a daily user of the solution, I haven't found anything that needs improvement. The solution's mobile application and management of dashboards are areas with shortcomings that need improvement.

Though there are a few features that I would like to see in future releases of the product, they cannot be made possible.

I have been using Cisco Meraki Wireless LAN for a year. I am an integrator and not an end-user of the solution. I don't remember the product version I use.

It is a very stable solution. Besides a few outages from my power supply, I had no problems with the solution.

It is a scalable solution, though I never tried to use its scalability option. I don't even know how many devices you can add to the product.

I have, unfortunately, never interacted with the technical support team of the product. Based on the opinions of others, I came to know that the product's technical support team is very good.

I don't have any experience with other solutions at a business level. I work with Huawei and TP-Link at home, though I find Cisco Meraki Wireless LAN comparatively superior. Huawei and TP-Link's costs are very low, while Cisco Meraki Wireless LAN is more reliable from both hardware and security point of view.

The initial setup of Cisco Meraki Wireless LAN was very easy.

Though, I don't remember the steps involved in the deployment process of the solution since it was done a year ago. The deployment process was very simple because I only had to make a few clicks to create an account on the device to complete the deployment process. In the last stage of the deployment process, you need to put your license into the product and configure your SSID.

Cisco Meraki Wireless LAN is not a reasonably priced product for home use. Cisco Meraki Wireless LAN is a reasonably priced product for enterprise-sized businesses.

Apart from the firmware upgrades, no other processes are followed to maintain the solution.

I wouldn't recommend the product to those planning to use it at their home. I recommend the product to those planning to use it commercially in a certain industry or market.

I rate the overall product an eight out of ten.

We are a solution integrator and this is one of the products that we provide to our customers.

I develop, market, and strategize products.

We have customers in all sorts of market segments including large businesses, government, SMEs, retail, hospitals, hotels, and others. We have a lot of clients who use this product.

Well since we are reselling the Meraki as Partner product, the aim was to choose the vendor for the organization as revenue-generating and enhance customer experience product, Meraki happened to be the best fit in this regard. We marketed this product according to regional market trends, and it generated potential sales leads for the company. 

One of the best features of this solution is that it has enough in-depth visibility for the people who connect to their wireless technology.

This solution is quite flexible and compatible with other devices.

The most amazing part is that their access points have the ability to connect to multiple conference devices at different times, and it shows you the very in-depth Wi-Fi analytics through their dashboard.

This solution is simple and easy to use.

These products are more suitable for SMB rather than an enterprise for one of the listed Access Points like MR-20, Whereas MR-33 and above models covers and target the Enterprise customers.

We would like to see Wi-Fi 6 support for devices sold in the Middle East, however, Meraki has introduced WiFi-6 where we would strategize our GTM plans for WiFi 6, where we would offer WiFi 6 to specific customers with extensive needs of high WiFi availability in KSA.

It's a very stable solution, the stability of wireless networks depends upon a lot of factor like how much and complex the requirement is for the customer, its not always necessary to have bulk Access Point installed on customer site, in case of Meraki as of different model option and feature like high-density broadcasting, few access points would be enough to cover WiFi coverage, The solution itself is stable. As its cloud-based Access Points, The stability in Meraki networks is autonomous. 

This solution is scalable.

The service with them has been amazing. I would rate their technical support a nine out of ten.

We did competitive and comparative analysis while we were in the ideation phase for the company, having said that, after reaching conclusion to our ideation study, we found Meraki as a market leader in WiFi technology from a commercial perspective as well as features and benefits to end customers. Thus we choose to go with Meraki as our Strategic Partner for our standard WiFi product. 

The initial setup of this solution is plug and play and very straightforward.

We never used vendor teams to install or configure rather we have our own certified people working to install the configure the Meraki network at customer premises. In fact, we have our own business processes which the organization follows. 

The setup cost varies from Service Provider to others, how they want to build the cost model. The licensing part for Meraki is extensible, it depends on which model you would choose to offer to the market as SP. Mostly pricing models are yearly contractual fees, but normally you would pay as one time cost as SP. In our case, we followed the international pricing trend for WiFi where you Bundle connectivity Per Access Point on a flat-rate monthly fee, and the customer doesn't want to pay extra charges and want easy to install plug and play solutions. In that specific case, you transfer the ownership of the hardware to the customer, while you charge only for Monitoring and Management which are minimal fees. 

We did look into other options, there are pros and cons, but since the company strategy was to focus on SME's, we found Meraki was the most suitable option. The option that we were looking for the Field Operations for Site Survey, Meraki Access Point had features like Site Survey Mode where Access Point would detect the signal strength and adjust its broadcasting range to premises where it was installed. In other vendors, we did not find that feature. This was important for us to make an easier job for our Field Operations teams who would visit the customer site to install the WiFi Solution, it saved time and efforts and especially the Site Survey cost which was Plus in reducing the Operations Opex for WiFi.

The implementation and suitability of this product depend on the client and the want they want to achieve.

When it comes to Wi-Fi wireless technology, you also have to consider 5G. The 5G is already here and it's the fastest, ever, wireless network. There is going to be a conflict between Wi-Fi and 5G when it comes to what enterprises are using. Wi-Fi 6 will help to keep the technology in the market.

I would rate this solution a ten out of ten.