Catchpoint vs. Cisco Catalyst Center

Overview
ProductRatingMost Used ByProduct SummaryStarting Price
Catchpoint
Score 9.2 out of 10
N/A
Catchpoint is an Internet Resilience solution offering services for retailers, Global2000, CDNs, cloud service providers, and xSPs that help increase their resilience by catching any issues in the Intenet Stack before they impact their business.N/A
Cisco Catalyst Center
Score 8.6 out of 10
N/A
Cisco Catalyst Center provides an intent-based platform for managing enterprise networks across campus, branch, and edge environments. It combines automation, analytics, and assurance to streamline IT operations, improve security posture, and reduce manual tasks. With integratedAI/ML-driven insights, policy-based controls, and end-to-end visibility across wired and wireless infrastructures, Catalyst Center empowers IT teams toproactively detect issues, enforce compliance, and accelerate…N/A
Pricing
CatchpointCisco Catalyst Center
Editions & Modules
No answers on this topic
No answers on this topic
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
CatchpointCisco Catalyst Center
Free Trial
YesNo
Free/Freemium Version
NoNo
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
NoNo
Entry-level Setup FeeNo setup feeNo setup fee
Additional Details- White glove migration services - Annual subscription - Professional Services - Competitive Benchmarking
More Pricing Information
Community Pulse
CatchpointCisco Catalyst Center
Considered Both Products
Catchpoint
Chose Catchpoint
We see limited options while adding tests on mentioned compared to CP.
Chose Catchpoint
Compare Catchpoint with the side score, Catchpoint gives us some more feasibility regarding monetary as point provides both agent based and agent less monitoring, but side to provide us some agent with monetary, so that’s the major difference between both these tools. Also …
Chose Catchpoint
Catchpoint doesn't have a feature set that is as full but can provide many similar features for much less.
Chose Catchpoint
I have not used any other product similar to Catchpoint, or we can say I never felt the need to check out other products.
Chose Catchpoint
Lightweight and efficient for Production environment monitoring
Chose Catchpoint
Datadog, Prometheus, Kibana and OpenTelemetry
Chose Catchpoint
More specialties and locations.
Chose Catchpoint
Catchpoint is great for Synthetic monitoring, alerting, general internet reporting, and fully understanding all types of data around edge services. They don't do a lot of internal tracing or application monitoring right now, but we have leveraged their Enterprise servers within …
Chose Catchpoint
Smart Bear Foglight Dynatrace CEM Catchpoint: I have used many synthetic monitoring products. Honestly, there are no big differences in features among all the products listed above or that I have used before. Probably, price and support might play big roles in selecting the …
Chose Catchpoint
In my opinion Catchpoint has not lost focus on synthetics like Dynatrace has. Catchpoint is increasing investment in its core monitoring network, while Dynatrace has shut down its backbone monitoring network.
Chose Catchpoint
Mainly was the extremely high availability across the whole world. Especially China.
Chose Catchpoint
Catchpoint as a product provides comprehensive tools to help orchestrate real-world synthetic monitoring capabilities. Coding & payload development language easy to use and manage. The user management features could use some additional features to help make managing user & …
Chose Catchpoint
Both products are similar and have similar challenges but the Dynatrace pricing model is not as competitive as Catchpoint.
Chose Catchpoint
Catchpoint offers similar capabilities with better pricing.
Chose Catchpoint
Catchpoint is the trusted solution for monitoring our application. It provides an intuitive UI create monitoring screens for all of our rest endpoints and web UI. The email alerts send out by Catchpoint are so detailed and visually clear. We were able to figure out the time of …
Chose Catchpoint
Catchpoint's node deployment, especially on the LM and mobile locations is one of the best I have seen. It helps us to debug better.
Chose Catchpoint
Primary reason was the numbers of Pops available.
Chose Catchpoint
Catchpoint offers a complete platform. You get different options of synthetic monitoring in one place, kinda what we were going after. Web Transaction, Network Tests, Mobile Tests, HTML Code, API Tests, DNS Tests, SMTP Tests, IMAP, BGP, etc. The list goes on and on. This …
Chose Catchpoint
Catchpoint meets the needs of their business better than Azure Monitor. We also got the free trial version which we didn't get in Azure network protector hence it helped us try and use the Catchpoint system and help us decide to ahead with the Catchpoint solution. Catchpoint is …
Cisco Catalyst Center
Chose Cisco Catalyst Center
It provide a consistency on the configuration. and you can push configure to all switches. before we managed the switch independently and use prime to push config and we always miss the devices and end up the switch is not have the standard configuration. and Cat Center can …
Chose Cisco Catalyst Center
We are still deploying to Meraki. The dashboard does have many similar features but not a 1:1
Chose Cisco Catalyst Center
I think in many ways they are very similar. Cisco Catalyst Center seems more like an evolution of Prime which was already a great solution. Main difference being that Catalyst center is significantly more powerful, with that power though comes complexity and so by extension …
Chose Cisco Catalyst Center
My manager always wants to go with Cisco. He is a die hard Cisco fan and will not look for anything else. I will say that Cisco is revolutionary in the sense that I have not seen Cisco Catalyst Center with any other vendor, so it is unique. It is perfect for us.
Chose Cisco Catalyst Center
Cisco Meraki Dashboard
Chose Cisco Catalyst Center
We love Cisco ISE. Cisco's new controllers, 9800 controllers. They are awesome. Completely different than the old 5520 and 5508. So new product with Cisco is bringing like 9, 9 93, 3, 600 gig port switches. They're awesome.
Chose Cisco Catalyst Center
Cisco Catalyst Center is great
Chose Cisco Catalyst Center
Cisco Firepower 9300 Series, Cisco Catalyst Switches and Cisco Nexus Series Switches
Chose Cisco Catalyst Center
Cisco Secure Firewall, Cisco Catalyst 9100 Access Points and Cisco Catalyst 9800 Series Wireless Controllers
Chose Cisco Catalyst Center
SolarWinds Network Configuration Manager (NCM)
Chose Cisco Catalyst Center
Cisco Embedded Wireless Controller and Cisco Catalyst Switches
Chose Cisco Catalyst Center
SolarWinds Network Configuration Manager (NCM)
Chose Cisco Catalyst Center
Webex App, Cisco Firepower 1000 Series and Cisco Meraki MX
Chose Cisco Catalyst Center
It gave the missing visibility and speed up the troubleshooting. Centralized management toll to management LAN switches and wireless devices.
Chose Cisco Catalyst Center
Having the capability to have all devices under one umbrella is a great option; routers, switches, firewalls, Cisco Catalyst center, etc. Cisco catalyst center is a great option to optimize all of these, manage and analyze.
Chose Cisco Catalyst Center
Catalyst Center is less intuitive
Chose Cisco Catalyst Center
Cisco ThousandEyes, Cisco Meraki MX and Cisco ASA 5500-X with FirePOWER Services
Chose Cisco Catalyst Center
Cisco Catalyst 9800 Series Wireless Controllers and Cisco Catalyst Switches
Chose Cisco Catalyst Center
Cisco Identity Services Engine (ISE)
Best Alternatives
CatchpointCisco Catalyst Center
Small Businesses
SolarWinds Pingdom
SolarWinds Pingdom
Score 9.7 out of 10
NinjaOne
NinjaOne
Score 9.0 out of 10
Medium-sized Companies
Cisco ThousandEyes
Cisco ThousandEyes
Score 8.9 out of 10
Intermapper
Intermapper
Score 8.4 out of 10
Enterprises
Nexthink
Nexthink
Score 7.0 out of 10
Cisco Meraki Dashboard
Cisco Meraki Dashboard
Score 9.3 out of 10
All AlternativesView all alternativesView all alternatives
User Ratings
CatchpointCisco Catalyst Center
Likelihood to Recommend
9.2
(0 ratings)
8.5
(0 ratings)
Likelihood to Renew
8.2
(0 ratings)
9.0
(0 ratings)
Usability
8.1
(0 ratings)
7.9
(0 ratings)
Support Rating
9.7
(0 ratings)
8.7
(0 ratings)
Implementation Rating
8.2
(0 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
User Testimonials
CatchpointCisco Catalyst Center
Likelihood to Recommend
Proactive Website and API performance testing, Synthetic monitoring, and third-party integration are where Catchpoint is best suited. Catchpoint is less appropriate in Deep Application Performance monitoring, debugging complex user journeys in real-time, Small businesses, and Mobile app performance monitoring. These are the scenarios where I find Catchpoint is well-suited and scenarios where it is less appropriate.
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Security with identity-based access control and segmentation via integration with Cisco ISE, supporting zero-trust architectures. Centralized Management for a large campus environment with centralized management of wired and wireless equipment. Automation of tasks like: provisioning, configuration, and software upgrade, reducing manual effort of those tasks. It could be improved to Multi-Vendor Support.
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Pros
  • Catchpoint Synthetics: We create our synthetic monitoring using catchpoint. Creating the synthetics monitors are easy and requires basic knowledge on selenium and javascript. It allows you to run the test from external(backbone) and internal enterprise nodes. The screenshot and filmstrip feature is an add-on along with various customisations. Once created, It provides a detailed insight of each request that is involved in the application flow which helps us in addressing the issue at the request level.
  • Catchpoint API Test: This is another kind of test which we have explored in our organisation. This has helped us to maintain the health check of our APIs and also we have utilised it for a variety of our use cases.
  • Catchpoint Dashboard: This is our one-stop shop for all our monitors. It has multiple widgets that displays various application performance metrics. We use this feature immensely and it is of great value to the business.
  • Catchpoint UI: It is very user friendly and with basic introduction anyone can just get started with it.
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  • I really like the assurance. I like that I can go through and find problems on the network that could be a mismatch VLAN between two interfaces, port errors, like physical errors that we otherwise probably would need to wait for a customer to complain or we have that we can see that ahead of time and be proactive and say, Hey, I'm noticing that this port is having some errors on it. We might want to check that out ahead of time before it becomes an issue. So that's really useful. And then also being able to configure the network. I think that the programmability part of it, I think I have, I've been having some struggle with that initially, just having to apply. So I have my script, my template that I want to deploy, but in order to deploy it, I have to apply it to a template or a profile and then I have to assign that profile to a group of switches that I want to program. I think it gets a little bit messy and a little bit convoluted, but other than that, I mean it's really helpful. It does automate right now, I think it seems a little convoluted with the process.
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Cons
  • The ability to monitor the Catchpoint nodes with the ability to setup a take a recovery action based on specific criteria
  • The ability to tell us when we are at X% capacity so that we better plan or budget for increasing the "capacity" of the Catchpoint nodes before we get to an overloaded state. The capacity utilization graph is not a reliable indicator for this metric. How can the capacity utilization rate get above 100%, it does not make sense
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  • The one thing that we had to get used to was really breaking down our wireless. We integrated our 9800 controllers into it, and the breakdown of our tags being floor specific and not just being campus specific was a challenge for us. And so we had to create all new tags and it wasn't necessarily a problem, it just required a little bit redesign on our wireless. And so it would've been nice for us to be able to assign a tag to an entire campus versus a floor, but that's a small complaint.
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Likelihood to Renew
we are heavily dependent catchpoint system for the following functions * Detect end-user availability/performance-related problems * Ensures
service level objectives (SLO) are met, that prevents service level
agreement (SLA) breaches * Identify and understand the cause of any
network connectivity or application level issue * Improves the
availability and response time service levels
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I think new products are often "half-baked" or over hyped when they release, as was the case with DNAC. We were well ahead of the curve in acquiring it. But as it has matured it is now a fantastic addition to our infrastructure. I think we are easing into a stage where it is hard to envision a large organization NOT having Catalyst Center in place. If for nothing outside of the mapping and troubleshooting aspects; using it as a "source of truth".
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Usability
It's hard to find the functionalities that I am looking for in the application. Even if I did something in the past, after a time I have to re-learn again where the functionalities are. This is a powerful tool, but not user-friendly. Texts in the buttons and menus are not always meaningful or easily comprehensible.
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Cisco DNA Center is going to help us in security, simplicity and ease of administration. Cisco DNA Center is complete management and control platform that simplifies and streamlines network operations. Cisco DNA Center offers a single dashboard for every core function in your network. With this platform, IT can become more nimble and respond to changes and challenges faster and more intelligently.
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Support Rating
The customer support is fantastic as they keep you updated and follow up even though we may not even follow up. Make sure they send a communication so that we remain updated. They value engineers who will get on a call with you to understand any requirement we have on any test, and they bring in the best developers on call.
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El soporte de CISCO DNA Center es muy bueno, responden a mis dudas pero no he tenido oportunidad de reportar un incidente o determinar un tiempo de respuesta critico. The support of CISCO DNA Center is very good, they answer my questions, but I have not had the opportunity to report an incident or determine a critical response time.
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Online Training
No answers on this topic
It was informative, but the labs were not available long enough for us to get intimately familiar with CCNA before it was closed. The course instructor was well informed and got us as close to ready as she could.
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Implementation Rating
very easy to implement as the product is user-friendly
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No answers on this topic
Alternatives Considered
Datadog is good, but more expensive. New Relic is good but does not provide the same features as Catchpoint does. Checkly is good, but Catchpoint offers different frameworks to create synthetic tests, which is preferable to my engineering team.
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We went with Cisco Catalyst Center, we evaluated, I think it was called Rainbow from Altel, Lucent Enterprise because we were an Alcatel-Lucent Enterprise customer. But since we seeded with Cisco DNA Center and SD Access back in 2019, we haven't been out to evaluate anything which is a direct competitor. There are tools which we are looking to purchase and implement to provide functionality which Cisco Catalyst Center can't, but they're more value add tools, not to necessarily directly drive the capability of our infrastructure.
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Return on Investment
  • Catchpoint points based licensing for public hosted nodes is complicated and unpredictable in points required.
  • Catchpoint lacks AI powered anomaly detection and automated remediation. This gap means more manual triage and slower MTTR during incidents.
  • The advanced 360 degree blackbox monitoring is enabling us to monitor the APIs, UI and proactively gain insights into the application behavior and performance before customer is impacted.
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  • I have used it for upgrading devices, and it's does a great job at that, however out operations team for whatever reason has not adopted the feature.
  • Overall it feels like Cisco Catalyst Center has been huge waste of time. I feel like my time would be better spent on other projects and looking at other products and tools
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ScreenShots

Cisco Catalyst Center Screenshots

Screenshot of AIOpsScreenshot of BaselinesScreenshot of PoliciesScreenshot of HealthScreenshot of Network HierarchyScreenshot of PoE