No more typing reviews! Try our Samantha, our new voice AI agent.

Cisco Catalyst SD-WAN vs IBM Tivoli NetCool comparison

Why PeerSpot?
 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Jan 2, 2025

Review summaries and opinions

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:
 

Categories and Ranking

Cisco Catalyst SD-WAN
Ranking in Network Management Applications
6th
Average Rating
8.0
Reviews Sentiment
6.5
Number of Reviews
108
Ranking in other categories
Software Defined WAN (SD-WAN) Solutions (1st), WAN Edge (2nd)
IBM Tivoli NetCool
Ranking in Network Management Applications
14th
Average Rating
7.6
Reviews Sentiment
6.8
Number of Reviews
13
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
 

Mindshare comparison

As of November 2026, in the Network Management Applications category, the mindshare of Cisco Catalyst SD-WAN is 2.3%, down from 2.7% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of IBM Tivoli NetCool is 3.9%, up from 2.3% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Network Management Applications Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
Cisco Catalyst SD-WAN2.3%
IBM Tivoli NetCool3.9%
Other93.8%
Network Management Applications
 

Featured Reviews

Ashwani-Tyagi - PeerSpot reviewer
Regional Manager at Orange
Centralized control has simplified cloud access and has improved operational visibility
If they can have better firewall features as their competitors have, such as Fortinet and Versa, that would help to place this solution better so that we can address security related things. If they can have all the IPS, IDS, everything built on all the edge devices, whether physical or virtual, that could be one improvement. Actually, if customers are existing Cisco customers, if Cisco can be more flexible to leverage the existing investment, that could be another important aspect to save on cost and be more competitive from a pricing perspective. Overall, the pricing or the segment that Cisco deals with is a bit premium, which they charge a bit premium against the competition on the licensing, hardware, and services. The implementation is not straightforward. You need a specialized partner or specialized people who can implement this. It can be simplified a bit from that perspective as well. Mostly the way we implement the policies for a big environment requires a lot of things that we need to take care of. If that can somehow be improved, because they have different components, like they have vManage, they have vSmart, and vBond and all these components have to work with a certain flow that they need to follow.
Petar Ganev - PeerSpot reviewer
Senior Enterprise Monitoring Engineer at Commerzbank
Reliable for enterprise monitoring but no longer actively developed
There are problems with the latest security requirements because many things have changed in recent years, and now the security audits are very strict. And we need to switch to something else. We need to patch it constantly. Moreover, it is a very old tool and a little bit difficult to support. Otherwise, they work okay.

Quotes from Members

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:
 

Pros

"You can easily scale the product."
"SD-WAN is 100 percent stable."
"Cisco SD-WAN is a scalable solution."
"It's a scalable solution."
"Cisco provides the best support among all the vendors."
"The best feature of this technology that is available to us is the ability to do better load-balancing."
"Load balancing is a feature that allows us to take the best of our links and distribute the load intelligently, always with an eye on the end-customer experience."
"This solution can scale from SMB to the enterprise level. It is very impressive."
"NetCool has a huge database that can collect and process about one million alarms a day."
"The tool is much easier to manage than running scripts and figuring out how many endpoints have been exceeded."
"The solution is very fast, there's no lag or delay between the IBM solution and the other solutions like Huawei and Nokia."
"The feature I have found most valuable with NetCool is how it collaborates all the alarms, and then it does a predictive analysis, providing a consolidated alarm view and management."
"The solution is a complete package; it has various useful elements including inventory management and incident management packaged inside it, and anything is possible with Tivoli since it is quite a robust system that offers a lot of useful integration capabilities."
"It improves customer satisfaction, deploy-ability, adaptability, flexibility, scalability, and reduces cost of operation."
"Support is one of the best aspects of this solution. NetCool is a good product that has good flexibility. There are a lot of documents available online which is one of the best features of IBM Tivoli Suite. Whenever an issue happens, rather than going to technical support, if you find the exact issue in Google, you can get tech notes for that particular issue."
"The Netcool solution is great, and it's very easy to use."
 

Cons

"SD-WAN itself is vendor locked in."
"The initial setup is not straightforward or simple. It's very complex."
"I would like them to add some more SD-WAN ports. We have seen one implementation where there were four ISPs. Currently, we have a maximum of two ports for ISP in this device. Therefore, we cannot connect directly, and we need other switches. There should be some option to have more than two ports for SD-WAN."
"Cisco Catalyst SD-WAN is good, but from a cost perspective, they need to think through and see how they can materialize and reduce costs, especially the hardware."
"The Cisco way of thinking is to create umbrella-like solutions. I would prefer it if this solution was separate from the entire monstrous Cisco portfolio."
"The process of onboarding the vSmart, vBond, and vManage should be improved to make it easier to manage in general."
"The integration of Cisco SD-WAN with cloud solutions could improve. For example, if any of the applications are hosted in the Amazon AWS cloud we can use a virtual transit gateway for integrating Cisco SD-WAN."
"Compression deduplication should be added."
"IBM's technical support takes a long time to do root cause analysis, and we have to go through several levels of help before getting a solution."
"Tivoli NetCool's has medium scalability - there are some problems with its replications not being mature."
"Tivoli NetCool is based on a Linux platform, it would be beneficial if they moved it to Windows because not everyone is acquainted with Linux."
"I think the UI should be updated and made more presentable and eye-catching. Compared to NCE in Huawei, NSN in Nokia, the UiPath and Ubiquiti, it feels very old legacy."
"The solution does not have any AI capabilities."
"From a customer perspective, it is quite an expensive solution to initially implement and then support."
"The solution is too expensive."
"The product is pretty costly. It's definitely not the least expensive option."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"You can get subscriptions for three or five years."
"The price of the solution is the only negative factor, it is much more expensive compared with the Cisco Meraki SD-WAN solution."
"The initial cost is quite significant, but the investment is worthwhile."
"The pricing is fair, and it's on par with the market vendors. But based on the competition, Cisco could work on the pricing, go deep on discounts and provide more commercially viable solutions to customers."
"On a scale of one to five, I would rate Cisco's pricing as a three."
"It is much cheaper than other solutions. Most of our clients are the top 500 companies, and they all have a corporate contract."
"It is going to be on a yearly basis. There are no additional costs."
"I give the price a seven out of ten."
"Licensing fees are paid on a yearly basis."
"The price of the product is too expensive."
"It costs around 100k for every ten servers, which is lower than similar products from other vendors."
"Customers are required to pay a licensing fee."
report
Use our free recommendation engine to learn which Network Management Applications solutions are best for your needs.
920,769 professionals have used our research since 2012.
 

Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Outsourcing Company
11%
Financial Services Firm
10%
Manufacturing Company
8%
Construction Company
8%
Outsourcing Company
15%
Financial Services Firm
13%
Comms Service Provider
10%
Manufacturing Company
8%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business52
Midsize Enterprise15
Large Enterprise52
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business6
Midsize Enterprise3
Large Enterprise5
 

Questions from the Community

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Cisco SD-WAN?
The pricing for Cisco Catalyst SD-WAN is something I don't know as the tender is not in my department or at my level, but I know it is very expensive.
What needs improvement with Cisco SD-WAN?
I cannot speak to programming-side improvements since that is not my area of expertise. On a base level, improvements could include a better interface, more AI capabilities, better pricing, and bet...
What is your primary use case for Cisco SD-WAN?
The primary use case is for network management and routers we have for WAN connectivity.
What is the best network monitoring software for large enterprises?
I have worked from 1973 with all kind of systems in large enterprises across the world. And have experience with all kind of software in monitoring from infra to end to end, it depends on the funct...
 

Also Known As

Cisco SD-WAN
Tivoli NetCool
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Doyle Research, Ashton Metzler & Associates
Claranet, Consolidated Communications, Telus, €sterreichische Bundesbahnen (€BB), Telekom Srbija, Bendigo Community Telco, Capgemini, Schweizerische Bundesbahnen (SBB)
Find out what your peers are saying about Cisco Catalyst SD-WAN vs. IBM Tivoli NetCool and other solutions. Updated: November 2026.
920,769 professionals have used our research since 2012.