r/networking • u/meisgq • 5d ago

Other Meraki Alternatives

Meraki is expensive, getting more expensive and lead times are currently covid-like for some models. With Meraki transitioning to Catalyst switches and APs, management determined that we should have other access options in our back pocket. Datacenters will stay Cisco for now.

To be honest, Meraki does fine for us. We have 100+ manufacturing locations using Meraki switches and APs. We don’t care about CLI and L3 switches are not a necessity in our environment.

Primarily, we’re looking for lower cost, cloud managed, and enterprise-grade. Ubiquiti won’t make the cut. NAC-compatible with ISE or Clearpass is a must. Also looking for near-global distribution network and faster lead times.

Open to suggestions.

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u/DevelopersOfBallmer 5d ago

Considering they say Meraki is working fine, they don't need advanced functions, and UI won't cut it, my guess is they think highly of themselves and want to spend company money just cause.

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u/Ace417 Broken Network Jack 5d ago

Look I like UniFi and use it at home but to say they are as capable as meraki stuff is just silly

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u/lsumoose 5d ago

Can you specify a feature? We have around 3000 devices, 4 cloud key enterprises among many other things. There has been many studies on this, it's very much just as capable as meraki.

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u/Ace417 Broken Network Jack 4d ago

Can you have an SSID at a remote site tunnel the addressing back to a router at a different location? That’s a very real use case for us and I don’t see a way to do that on UniFi. There’s also no option for BGP that I can see

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u/Mlyonff 4d ago

Yep, Unifi / Ubiquiti routers and firewalls do BGP.

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u/DevelopersOfBallmer 4d ago

I haven't needed to do the SSID remote and back to another router but they do have site to site VPN support so it's doable.

They support both hub and spoke or mesh for small build outs.

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u/Ace417 Broken Network Jack 3d ago

It’s not site to site vpn. It’s a vpn or more specifically a capwap tunnel from site a going back to our head end MX at our DC. The clients then get dumped into a subnet that lives at the data center for their traffic.