NETGEAR Switches Reviews

This is a pure fiber solution. We use it for both SMBs and big organizations. We use it as a switch. 

It has the same features as many other brands. 

I like the way they work with customers.

The features are stable, and it deploys easily. It's very simple to implement in general.

The user interface is very good. 

The solution is scalable.

It is stable and reliable. 

Technical support is helpful and quick to respond. 

They currently don't have any stock. It's hard to get the devices. 

There's a lack of chips and, consequently, a lack of deliveries. They're out of stock at their European warehouse.

They also used to offer quite cheap routers, and now there is nothing under 150 euros. It's getting expensive. Many customers don't want to spend more than 60 or 70 euros on something like that. 

The scalability is limited to some extent. It's meant for smaller users. 

I'm working with home routers, and the Wi-Fi at the moment is Wi-Fi 6. With Wi-Fi 5 routers, there was a feature that was called device prioritization. This feature is missing with Wi-Fi 6 routers. I don't know why. Maybe the CPUs are not so strong or powerful, or maybe they believe that this feature is pointless since the devices are so powerful. That said, from my point of view, it is very important as a customer to have this feature.

I've been dealing with the solution for 12 years. 

There are no bugs or glitches, and it doesn't crash or freeze. It's quite stable and reliable. 

The solution can scale quite well. However, it doesn't scale quite as well as Huawei, which can get much larger. 

I have found that technical support replies quickly, and they close their tickets once they've completed their tasks. They are great. 

I'm also familiar with Huawei. The difference is this product is more for SMBs. The user interface is great for non-technical people, and everything works smoothly. Huawei can be more complex for some users. 

I've also used Aruba as well. 

The solution deploys easily. It's a straightforward setup. It's not a complex endeavor, even for a home user. In the past, I had to explain to my manager who wanted to buy some Wi-Fi extenders. I showed her how to set up the device. She said, "Okay, it sounds easy. I will do this by myself." The next day, she said, "Yeah, it is several clicks, and everything works fine." It's so very simple. YOu only need one person to handle the deployment.  

We can implement the solution for people. Some of our partners are so small they may need assistance as they are non-technical.  

The product is more expensive than, for example, TP-Link; however, it is cheaper than Aruba, Cisco, or Huawei. All of these are more enterprise-level switches, which is why the cost is a bit more. NETGEAR is better for smaller businesses. That said, while it is not a cheap brand, it offers good value. 

I haven't really evaluated other solutions. I'm quite overloaded as it is. 

I'd recommend the solution as it is very simple and stable. However, it is important to choose the right partner to help implement the solution. It will help everything go smoothly during implementation. 

It's also pretty plug-and-play. If you do need help, you can always reach out to NETGEAR. They are pretty responsive. 

I'd rate the solution eight out of ten. 

We use this product for the entire IT network and for CCTV. We have many integrators and are resellers of NETGEAR Switches, and I design solutions for our customers. Our company is based in India, I'm an information technology professional and we are end users of this product. 

NETGEAR has most of the good security features that other switches have and it's cost-effective. 

I'd like to see a more robust solution. They need to focus on sustainability and security at the port level with more visibility and controllability of the switch. I'd like to see a warranty similar to that provided by other solutions. 

I've been using this solution for 10 years. 

The solution is pretty stable. 

The solution is scalable. 

The customer support is good. They are responsive, fast, and they're knowledgeable about the product. 

The initial setup is not complex in any way. There's no maintenance required once the solution is deployed. 

NETGEAR is competitive and cost-effective in comparison to Aruba and other solutions. It's not the most expensive, but it's not cheap. You're getting what you pay for. 

Compared to NETGEAR, Cisco has lots of other features within the switch where you can include lots of securities. The switches are very sustainable and can run for  years and years if the environment is okay. There are a few securities that we use to build a firewall or some other level where we can put lots of security on the port, as far as the loop and hacking goes. If anything happens in the network, there are lots of things that can be controlled at switch level. NETGEAR has less of these kinds of options. 

My recommendation of NETGEAR to a customer would be dependent on the kind of solution they have, their budget, network size and the length of time they expect it to work. The product is more suitable for medium size organizations. Enterprise organizations generally look for other solutions in that sphere. 

I rate the solution six out of 10. 

NETGEAR is our distribution switch for our local area network. We have about 80 data hosts connected to our network. They go through another set of switches into this distribution switch. From there they connect to our gateway and to our servers.

The switches are on our premise and there's no special software other than that it's just a network switch.

It has improved my organization because now the entire network is quicker. A lot of users tell me that things seem faster but they can't really elaborate. My guess is everything is just a fraction of a second quicker going through the network and that adds up at the end of the day.

SFP, speed, and 10-Gigabit are the most valuable aspects of this solution. We're an architecture firm and we sometimes deal with large files. Anything we can do to eke out even a fraction of a second less time to get something done over the course of a year adds up. If I can get 10-Gigabit running in my server room, which I am right now, even though we're only gigabit to the desktop, due to the client computers we have, I can get more performance from everybody. I'm ready to start bringing in 10-Gigabit Ethernet to the desktop once I get the hardware to do that.

It's easy to use once you actually read the instructions. There is some searching you have to do on the documentation to find exactly what you're looking to get done but it's all there. NETGEAR's forums were very helpful because people actually pointed me in the right direction when I had problems setting it up.

We use it for IT switching. It is the distribution switch for our network and then I have access switches that feed into this switch that are also 10-Gigabit. IT switching is very nice. I run my backups much more quickly. It works out to about as fast as I thought it would be. I'm quite pleased. It's definitely worth it for what you're getting; a lot of switches, a lot of networks. I looked at a lot of different possible models and products before I bought these and I settled on NETGEAR because I thought there was a good balance of price, performance, and features. And so far, it has worked out.

I have POE switches going into this switch, but I don't use this switch particularly to distribute power. The model I have is not a POE switch. It's just the data switch.

We have server aggregation. Our main file server is aggregated through two SRP interfaces on the switch.

We also have wireless access in our network, but it doesn't talk to this switch directly. It goes through one of our access switches.

The feature to change settings on the switch needs improvement. I understand why it's there, I can change the settings on the switch and I have to actually hit save to lock them in, otherwise, on a reboot, the changes revert to the earlier settings. I've forgotten to hit save a couple of times. It should have more of a big red obvious "You need to hit save" button to lock your changes in; that would have been helpful. There were a couple of times where things suddenly stopped working and I realized it was because I rebooted it and undid what I just fixed.

The web interface has been a little sketchy on occasion. Sometimes I have to reload the page to get things to show up properly, but the switch itself seems fine. The web user interface is a little wonky at times.

I have been using NETGEAR Switches for three months. 

So far stability has been good. Now that we've gone live with them, I have not had to restart or shut them down at all.

If I had to do it again, I might've gotten a bigger switch with more ports on it because I'm using up more of them than I originally thought I would. But that's really not a scalability issue with the switch, that's just me not planning properly.

Only I am responsible for the maintenance of the switches. I'm an IT manager. 

In terms of size, we have about 70 employees, all of whom have ethernet connections through access switches to this switch. This is the core of our network.

I don't plan to increase usage much, if at all. This is what it's going to be for the next few years.

I have not used technical support. 

NETGEAR replaced some Nortel switches that were about 11 years old. They were end of life and they were not as fast. I had gigabit and 100 megabits switches. I am hoping to have these for another 10 years. I'm going to get 10-Gigabit and gigabit for my network speeds.

The initial setup was straightforward once I figured out what I was doing. It was fine once I acquainted myself with the switch and with some of the features. I was not pressured to get this done quickly. When the pandemic hit, we all went home so I had an empty server room in which to work so I could try to see if they worked and if they didn't, I could try it a different way. I did not have to risk taking down the whole network with people there. That was just a fortunate happenstance.

My implementation plan was to set up this switch along with my new access switches, which were also NETGEAR. I set them up disconnected from our live network. I put everything together, including the SFP uploads, in test client and test phones, and set everything up the way it was going to be. About a month and a half ago, I went in, unplugged the old switches, put in the new ones, and turned it on. It was very quick and easy but it took about a day and a half because we have a lot of cables.

In actual time, it took about a month and a half to deploy. But in actual work hours, it probably took about four days because we were doing it in fits and starts because we were trying to move out of the office when COVID hit.

There's a learning curve, but it's not as difficult as I thought it would be.

ROI is a soft benefit. It's hard to know. I don't know if the old switches would've died this morning. 

We have them for two purposes. One, to speed up our network. Two, to refresh with new hardware that isn't a decade old. So it's hard to determine.

Technology keeps changing so you don't need to buy something that's going to last 100 years. Buy something that you know you're going to have to replace in five or 10 years and price it accordingly. We were told that the Nortel switches we had bought would last for 10 to 20 years and that we would never have to replace it. Networking got faster in the years between and frankly, those switches got filled with gunk, they physically start wearing out, and fans die. As long as you know that it has a five to 10-year window, why would you pay 20 grand a piece for a switch? I just don't understand that.

There are no additional costs. We pay for licensing, hardware, and cables. That is it.

The pricing was definitely reasonable, I don't know if I'd say low. I think all networking equipment is more expensive than it should be. But NETGEAR had the price point that least annoyed me.

We evaluated Cisco, Juniper, Dell, and HP but they were all nearly twice the price of NETGEAR. I also had some hesitation to some. There seems to be some hesitation by some IT professionals to use NETGEAR for their enterprise and business networking, but so far, I'm happy.

We also considered Ubiquiti. We have a couple of Ubiquiti wireless access points. So I said, "Well, I'll just look at them." Ubiquiti was a possibility, but a lot of what this came down to was that there seems to be some hesitation in the IT world about using NETGEAR for enterprise and for business use. They do have a pretty large in-home user market. 

I have a couple of older NETGEAR switches that are at least as old as the Nortel ones that I just replaced. They have been on for 15 years and have never been down. I thought that if they're still going, they can't be that bad. I'll try it.

The primary reasons we chose NETGEAR over Ubiquiti, Cisco, and other products are because NETGEAR seemed stable and it frankly seems easier to set up, especially more than something like Cisco.

My advice would be: Don't rush it. Give yourself time between getting the switch and putting it in. That helped me do this properly. Have patience. Read the documentation. Be organized.

NETGEAR has the ability to label the interfaces and you can label different things on the switch in the web interface, while our old switches didn't have this feature. That helps me keep track of what's where. Being organized is really the key to all of this. When I am home I can dial into our VPN, look at the user interface of the switch, and I can tell you what's in every port on that switch.

I would rate NETGEAR Switches a nine out of ten. The only thing that would take away a point would be the user interface. The web interface sometimes needs refreshing and doesn't keep up with what I'm trying to do.

My company uses NETGEAR Switches for internal networking purposes.

The most valuable feature of the solution is that it is easy to use.

The product's stability has certain shortcomings that need improvement.

I have been using NETGEAR Switches for more than twenty-five years. I don't remember the version of the solution.

It is a scalable solution.

More than 200 employees in our company use NETGEAR Switches.

I have contacted NETGEAR's technical support for help with routers and not switches. I like NETGEAR's technical support.

The solution is deployed on an on-premises model.

A team of three people formed from those who work as managers, admins, engineers, or developers in our company help with the deployment and maintenance of the solution.

Our company's IT department carried out the product's installation phase in-house.

I have seen my company experience a return on investment from the use of NETGEAR Switches.

It is a slightly expensive product.

My company needs to purchase no licenses to use the product.

I use D-Link Switches and Wi-Fi routers from NETGEAR.

If the solution can be made available at a better price, then I would recommend the product to others who plan to use it.

I rate the overall solution a seven out of ten.

We use Netgear switches in a flat network. All the computers are plugged into the same switch. We also have some Power over Ethernet switches from Netgear.

Netgear switches are highly reliable. We haven't done anything particularly sophisticated with them.

Netgear switches could be cheaper. 

I have used Netgear switches for about five years. 

I rate Netgear switches 10 out of 10 for reliability. 

I used different vendors in the past, including 3com and HP. 

Setting up a Netgear switch was incredibly straightforward in our case because we aren't doing anything complicated. We rack everything and plug it in. It can be done in minutes.

I rate Netgear switches nine out of 10. 

As an engineering company who pioneered network-based AV solutions, we strongly rely on our in-house network backbone. It is fundamental for all required AV protocols, as well as for all of the standard network purposes which our company uses.

In our case, SDVoE, Dante (professional audio), office traffic, etc. flow on different VLANs which are incorporated into one single physical network infrastructure. Divided over two racks, three switches from the 4300 series are running in stacked mode and provide 10GbE connections to the SDVoE encoders and decoders from ZeeVee, as well as to all our other gear, including Dante devices, computers, access points, and phones.

With the NETGEAR 4300 series switches, we have been able to test, demonstrate, and provide training on the ZeeVee 10GbE SDVoE gear, which we distribute.

Thanks to the availability of 10GbE, we have been able to show the difference between compressed 4K video streaming over 1GbE and uncompressed 4K video streaming with the use of the SDVoE protocol and 10GbE.

However, 10GbE is Ethernet in another speed. We had to learn how to handle it. This knowledge will be useful in future projects. For example, one of our upcoming projects will have 24 encoders and 11 decoders with two M4300-96X NETGEAR switches.

• The stacking feature
• The web interface, which makes it easy to use and set up.
• The support for SDVoE
• The 10GbE port speed

It provides the ability to stack switches together, and this is a huge time saver! Having one interface to configure the complete system, especially when it comes to VLANs, helps a lot. This administration is something that is time consuming when all switches need to be configured individually. Thanks to stacking, you have VLANs available on all switches, and you can just select what you want.

Since it has a web interface, it is easy to set up. You don't have to take three years of training somewhere for a lot of money.

NETGEAR's web interface describes settings with names and sentences which are different from other switch manufacturers. Therefore, you must figure out what each one does before you can use it. If you compare it to Cisco, for example, their web interface is a bit more intuitive.

The web interface could also be improved when it comes to multicast settings. Especially, that IGMP is spread to “Switching” and “Routing“ is confusing. At first, it is unclear what needs to be setup where.

Support for IGMPv3 querier would be appreciated. Currently, only a version 2 querier can be sent by the switches, which is a bit outdated, since version 3 has been on the market for a few years now. Cisco does support querier version 3 in their small business switches.

The ‘how-to’ guides could do with some improvements. We got in trouble following the stacking and Dante set-up guides. If these would have been accurate, we would not have lost three days.

We have been using this solution for three years now.

It has been very stable, since the initial stacking issues were solved. It simply runs, which is the best. You can plug it in, set it up, and you can forget about it. Surely, there will be maintenance tasks in the future, like firmware upgrades, which can be done in-house.

You can combine up to eight units in a stack. For its price, it scales well. To get optimum performance for SDVoE, the uplink bandwidth between the switches needs to be designed carefully. We haven't seen any type of switch-related bottleneck issues, so far.

Our issues are immediately escalated to Tier 3 support, which has been very good. However, there are some issues that have not yet been resolved.

We were using and selling the Cisco Small Business 300 and 500 Series. But, a lot of different new firmware was being released for these switches, and with every firmware update came a different problem. The last thing you want is to have is a switch which behaves strange in your backbone, or on a project site. We just got fed up with it.

Seeing this, and the fact that Cisco does not have 10GbE hardware for a reasonable price, convinced us to switch to NETGEAR. Thanks to the increase in bandwidth, we were finally able to truly demonstrate the 10GbE solutions that we distribute.

Other than that, the change from Cisco to NETGEAR has not changed anything in our organization. Day-to-day things didn't change a lot and our office runs as always.

At first, we stacked all switches together, then we started to configure the different VLANs. Just when we wanted to swap over to production, we recognized that there was a problem with the stacking configuration that we did.

The priorities of the switches must be set in a different way than we had assumed, so backup units can overtake management in case the main unit is down. If you don't set them properly, you somehow get the effect of the management switch changing from one to the other switch frequently.

Once this was resolved, we could switch over on the fly to production without any visible downtime and work normally.

Deploying Dante devices was also a bit problematic, since the stacked mode ‘how-to’ guides for Dante are not quite accurate, e.g., the setup of QoS resulted in a support case.

After configuring the VLAN (according to the manufacturer’s manual), we just plug in the SDVoE gear. This worked.

We implemented the 4300 series at the end of January. Altogether, our deployment took four days. Three days were lost on implementing Dante due to the weak ‘how-to’ guides.

We did the deployment ourselves. There is no need to be an IT expert if you are deploying standalone. The web interface is common and easy to understand. You just need to know how to set up a switch. Only when it comes to the stacked mode, then you need to have IT knowledge. The rest of our team had no noticeable breaks during the transition.

We have saved time since we switched from Cisco to NETGEAR. With Cisco, firmware updates and troubleshooting afterwards were costing us hours. With NETGEAR, we update, and it all works as before.

The pricing is very good for 10GbE switches and you get a lot of throughput. It is about 60 percent of the costs of other switches from competitive manufacturers, which is really good.

Since we were looking to go to 10GbE, our choices were either Cisco or NETGEAR. 

Ubiquiti wasn't a consideration. When I have worked with them in the past, there have been many issues. Therefore, I would not consider using them as reliable backbone.

To have unlimited, uncompressed, 4K transmission, you cannot go with 1GbE, you need 10GbE. The 4300 Series is the way to go. 

We run two different High-Bandwidth AV over IP systems simultaneously and haven't seen any limitations yet.

NETGEAR Switches is great because it comes preconfigured and designed specifically for AV and that suits our needs. NETGEAR offers multiple port options, is simple to configure, easy to handle, reliable and stable. The most valuable feature for us is the reasonable price. 

I expect we’ll continue to see an improvement in the configuration which could be simplified further. I would also like to see switches with more ports that provide room for new protocols of communications. It would be great to have more bandwidth.

Our primary use case of Switches is for work with a data protocol for audio or AVB protocol for audio. We also use the AVoIP, Dante, and Control.

NETGEAR is a preferred partner for our company which has offices nationwide and offshore. I work as a project engineer for an audio video integrator company.

The solution is stable and scalable. You can link multiple switches and create a bigger network.

We recently used Araknis and sometimes also use Cisco or Extreme Networks. Araknis is about the same price or even cheaper than NETGEAR, but they do not offer as many options as NETGEAR.

Licensing cost depends on the model and number of ports, whether it’s POE, POE Plus or POE Plus Plus. There are certain Cisco switches that are about the same price. 

AVB licensing is required to purchase separately on NETGEAR and Extreme Network.

I rate this product nine out of 10. 

We provide solutions for our customers who use this product for a variety of reasons but the main use case is for network connectivity. We are system integrators based in India and I'm the founder and managing director of the company. 

The company provides a lifetime warranty which is the main advantage for us. It's also easy to configure. 

This solution doesn't have a CLI interface. Cisco, for example, has this feature. If I don't want to use a web-based interface and I have to configure using CLI, it's lacking in NETGEAR. 

I've been using this solution for almost 12 years. 

This is a stable product. 

The scalability is good. 

The technical support is good, they are responsive. 

The initial setup is relatively easy. 

The cost is based on a per unit model. I believe it works out to be the Rupee equivalent of around $350 per unit. It's comparable to what Cisco or Ubiquiti charge. 

We evaluated Cisco which has more features than NETGEAR. As a brand name, Cisco carries added value and more brand awareness than NETGEAR. Cisco doesn't offer the lifetime warranty we get from NETGEAR. The choice between the two is really about an organization's requirements. If you're dealing with audio and video products, then Cisco is definitely the way to go. But if you're dealing with data and camera networks, then NETGEAR comes out on top. 

I rate this solution eight out of 10.