The Pros of Ubiquiti
- Affordable APs
- Can be used indoors and outdoors
- Simple administration
If your organization is searching for firewalls, you have probably already heard about Ubiquiti and Cisco products. The question remains: which one is better for your needs? We have consolidated real customer reviews in this blog to give a quick overview of both products.
Quick Reference
During a customer survey, users were asked to rate each product in different categories. The chart below is an overview of which product rated higher in each category.
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| VPN |  |
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| Firewall Management Console | |
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| Active Directory and LDAP | |
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| Policy-Based Controls | |
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| Simplicity | |
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| Stateful Inspection | |
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The Pros of Ubiquiti and Meraki
“Unifi is our go-to WiFi solution for our office and all of our client sites. It provides reliable, simple to configure and use, centrally managed WiFi with a variety of access points to suit many different needs, as well as switches, gateways, and IP camera systems.”
The Pros of Meraki
- Appliances are easy to use
- Intuitive menus and dashboard
- Great support with well-written guides
- Easy to scale with seamless transitions
“We use Cisco Meraki MX firewalls at all of our sites that form our SD-WAN. We get fantastic visibility of our network, the clients, settings and how much data is being used, and by who. We have extended our WAN to include home offices (using Teleworkers) and also added in Wi-Fi Access points. Essentially our complete network is managed in a single dashboard. The ability to create policies based on device is fantastic. We can quickly isolate who is using all the data, or any rogue devices. We have a mix of devices depending upon the office size. MX65 at large offices, MX64 at smaller ones, and Z3 devices where the office is only 1 or 2 people. We can configure and manage everything, such as speed tests, DHCP, Group Policies, VPN endpoints and Wi-Fi. Alerts and reporting is so easy to setup and use. The Meraki suite of devices is invaluable in our company.” – Manager, IT
The Cons of Ubiquiti and Meraki
The Cons of Ubiquiti
- Poorly rated technical support
- No battery means you need an external power source or you must be onsite to power it off before updating
- Cloud keys need to be stabilized
“In the past few months we purchased thousands of dollars in brand new networking equipment from Ubiquiti. IT DOES NOT WORK CORRECTLY. We bought 2 sets of hardware. 1 for home office and 1 for work. They both have the same issue (internet stops working). We have emailed literally dozens of times with customer service and they have not been able to resolve the issue. We have requested escalation to more trained technicians and have asked them to log into our system to assess. None of this has happened and our internet continues to intermittently work.” – C-Level Executive, Education
The Cons of Meraki
- Some network features are not enabled out of the box
- Training is often required for user interfaces
- Cloud licensing can be confusing
- Minor limitations for VPNv
“There are a few minor limitations for VPNs, site to site with other brands can be a problem. It doesn’t have the ability to handle a few of the esoteric protocols. I, at the moment, can’t remember which protocol we had a problem with, but we were able to work around the issue with Meraki’s help. The reporting isn’t all it could be, but it has come a long way and they continue to improve it.” – Server Architect, Services Industry
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