Cisco Meraki Dashboard vs. SolarWinds Engineer's Toolset

Cisco Meraki Dashboard

Cisco Meraki Dashboard

26 Reviews and Ratings

SolarWinds Engineer's Toolset

SolarWinds Engineer's Toolset

57 Reviews and Ratings

Overview
Product	Rating	Most Used By	Product Summary	Starting Price
Cisco Meraki Dashboard	Score 9.3 out of 10	N/A	As a cloud-managed network management solution, the Cisco Meraki Dashboard enables users to provision, configure, and troubleshoot global networking and IoT deployments.	N/A
SolarWinds Engineer's Toolset	Score 9.4 out of 10	N/A	SolarWinds® Engineer’s Toolset (ETS) helps users monitor and troubleshoot a network with over 60 tools for network management. ETS allows users to monitor and receive alerts in real time on network availability and health, and perform network diagnostics for faster troubleshooting and resolution of complex network issues. With ETS users can deploy an array of network discovery tools including Port Scanner, Switch Port Mapper or advanced Subnet Calculator, manage Cisco® devices with specialized…	$1,585 Per Instance

Pricing

Cisco Meraki Dashboard

SolarWinds Engineer's Toolset

Editions & Modules

No answers on this topic

One Time Price: $1,585
Per Instance

Offerings

Pricing Offerings
Cisco Meraki Dashboard	SolarWinds Engineer's Toolset
Free Trial
Yes	Yes
Free/Freemium Version
No	No
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
No	No

Entry-level Setup Fee

No setup fee

No setup fee

Additional Details

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More Pricing Information

Community Pulse
	Cisco Meraki Dashboard	SolarWinds Engineer's Toolset
Considered Both Products	Cisco Meraki Dashboard Verified User Anonymous Chose Cisco Meraki Dashboard Meraki Dashboard is a better product but has limits due to being cloud managed. Missing full CLI and config backups Incentivized Helpful? Verified User Anonymous Chose Cisco Meraki Dashboard Because I have full visibility and monitoring of the full network stack Incentivized Helpful? Verified User Anonymous Chose Cisco Meraki Dashboard Closest thing would be Cisco Catalyst Center and we use that for our switch infrastructure. It's mainly configuration backup and firmware updater at this point, like keeping everything provisioned and up to date. We haven't really started pushing configs through there yet, but … Incentivized Helpful? Verified User Anonymous Chose Cisco Meraki Dashboard Cisco Meraki Dashboard is less complex and has all product managed on the dashboard Incentivized Helpful? MR Martial Robert Senior Director Technology and Innovation Chose Cisco Meraki Dashboard SonicWall NSA Series Incentivized Helpful? Verified User Anonymous Chose Cisco Meraki Dashboard The cloud version makes it easy for network administrators. Incentivized Helpful? Verified User Anonymous Chose Cisco Meraki Dashboard Cisco Meraki Dashboard is more familiar actually and user friendly UI and giving comfortable CX. Incentivized Helpful? ER Edwin Ruano Director Chose Cisco Meraki Dashboard Easy to manage Cisco Meraki Dashboard, unlike Umbrella. Incentivized Helpful? Verified User Anonymous Chose Cisco Meraki Dashboard Fortimanager has deeper insight and is better for more technical, complex deployments. Incentivized Helpful? Verified User Anonymous Chose Cisco Meraki Dashboard Cisco 4000 Series Integrated Services Routers (ISR 4000) Incentivized Helpful? RE Robert Eubanks Networking Practice Manager Chose Cisco Meraki Dashboard Cisco Catalyst Center Incentivized Helpful? Verified User Anonymous Chose Cisco Meraki Dashboard Point is more difficult to manage requires a lot more technical expertise. Incentivized Helpful? Verified User Anonymous Chose Cisco Meraki Dashboard Auvik Incentivized Helpful? Verified User Anonymous Chose Cisco Meraki Dashboard CitizenOne by Portage Incentivized Helpful? Verified User Anonymous Chose Cisco Meraki Dashboard Cisco Meraki Dashboard is better Incentivized Helpful? Verified User Anonymous Chose Cisco Meraki Dashboard The API is so much better on Cisco Meraki Dashboard Incentivized Helpful? Verified User Anonymous Chose Cisco Meraki Dashboard Juniper Mist AI, Juniper Mist Premium Analytics, Juniper Mist WAN Assurance, Juniper Mist Wi-Fi Assurance and Juniper Mist Wired Assurance Incentivized Helpful? Verified User Anonymous Chose Cisco Meraki Dashboard Cisco Catalyst Center Incentivized Helpful? AS Andrae Stinson Tech Ops Manager - Networks Chose Cisco Meraki Dashboard Cisco Nexus 9000 Series Switches Incentivized Helpful? Adam Paradise Manager Of Field Technology Chose Cisco Meraki Dashboard More centralized and visual easier to follow vs Sonicwall. Incentivized Helpful? Verified User Anonymous Chose Cisco Meraki Dashboard Juniper was a good alternative to Cisco, but in our company we already have all Cisco Products so was more easy the migration to Meraki. We have done also one POC for try Juniper but the only one difference was the AI assistance but Meraki implemented this recently so was no … Incentivized Helpful? Verified User Anonymous Chose Cisco Meraki Dashboard Cisco Spaces, SolarWinds Network Topology Mapper, Grafana, Cisco Catalyst 9100 Access Points, Cisco Catalyst 9800 Series Wireless Controllers, Cisco Catalyst SD-WAN, Cisco IOS and Cisco ThousandEyes Incentivized Helpful? CS Cody Spencer Tech Support Analyst Chose Cisco Meraki Dashboard A number of networks we've taken over were using Ubiquiti Unifi, which is an okay solution, but a lot more cumbersome to manage. We've found the Cisco Meraki Dashboard system much more intuitive and way less time-intensive. Simple things like setting up dedicated DHCP entries … Incentivized Helpful? Verified User Anonymous Chose Cisco Meraki Dashboard WatchGuard AuthPoint and SonicWall Analytics Incentivized Helpful? Verified User Anonymous Chose Cisco Meraki Dashboard Cisco Meraki MS and Cisco Duo Incentivized Helpful?	SolarWinds Engineer's Toolset Jacob Garrett Senior System Engineer Chose SolarWinds Engineer's Toolset [Wireshark is just] not the same. It feels like in incomplete product. [SolarWinds Engineer's Toolset] is complete, not buggy and is supported[.] Incentivized Helpful? TO Thomas Osborne Network System Administrator Chose SolarWinds Engineer's Toolset I haven't compared any tools similar to SolarWinds Engineer's Toolset. This might be because I'm pretty biased when it comes to monitoring, and reporting solutions. I've found that SolarWinds provides the biggest bang for the buck in my opinion. I'm sure there are other … Incentivized Helpful? Steven Tom Public Safety Systems Engineer Chose SolarWinds Engineer's Toolset We honestly didn't look at much beyond this because of all of the tools this toolset had in it. We found a use for a good chunk of them right away, and are finding more every month it seems like. We really wanted to make use of the majority of the tools included so we could … Incentivized Helpful? Verified User Anonymous Chose SolarWinds Engineer's Toolset To be honest, I'm not aware of any other toolset from a competitor that is remotely comparable. All other monitoring systems/vendors tend to use standard browser viewable monitoring systems and the option to use a locally installed software, to obtain the same results is not … Incentivized Helpful? Nikhil Kumar Sharma Associate Consultant Chose SolarWinds Engineer's Toolset We have used LogicMonitor, PRTG and WhatsUp Gold previously which are similar to SolarWinds Engineer's Toolset capability. However SolarWinds Engineer's Toolset is completely unique with features like - Realtime monitoring, diagnostics on the fly, network discovery, easy … Incentivized Helpful? Verified User Anonymous Chose SolarWinds Engineer's Toolset The suite of tools included is better than any other offering that I have found. Incentivized Helpful? Verified User Anonymous Chose SolarWinds Engineer's Toolset These tools complement the Engineer's Toolset. They are excellent at detecting most issues and at keeping the network monitored and protected. However, when it comes time to dig into an issue, especially a hard to fix intermittent issue, these products lack the granularity of … Incentivized Helpful? ES Eric Stephenson Manager IS Chose SolarWinds Engineer's Toolset I love the NPM package, but if you are doing one-off monitoring to diagnose, SolarWinds Engineer's Toolset is more than adequate. The main drawback with SolarWinds Engineer's Toolset is the monitoring is only valid as long as you have the laptop on (obviously). NPM provides for … Incentivized Helpful? Verified User Anonymous Chose SolarWinds Engineer's Toolset Because it's a great tool. Very useful, convenient and reliant, We use it to monitor out production servers and it works just great. I use it pretty much every day, and it is very good monitoring system, that allows proactively troubleshoot certain areas, because you can see … Incentivized Helpful? Verified User Anonymous Chose SolarWinds Engineer's Toolset SolarWinds by far exceeds the abilities of other products, and is more easily tuned to the environments. Incentivized Helpful? Verified User Anonymous Chose SolarWinds Engineer's Toolset SolarWinds NPM and NCM use a lot of the tools available in the toolset. This is a nice combo of the two with a little bit of IPAM thrown in. I would say the toolset is geared more toward the field engineer, that will be doing work that may sever communications to the rest of … Incentivized Helpful?

Best Alternatives
	Cisco Meraki Dashboard	SolarWinds Engineer's Toolset
Small Businesses	NinjaOne Score 9.0 out of 10	NinjaOne Score 9.0 out of 10
Medium-sized Companies	Intermapper Score 8.4 out of 10	Intermapper Score 8.4 out of 10
Enterprises	Cisco Prime LAN Management (discontinued) Score 8.4 out of 10	Cisco Meraki Dashboard Score 9.3 out of 10
All Alternatives	View all alternatives	View all alternatives

User Ratings
	Cisco Meraki Dashboard	SolarWinds Engineer's Toolset
Likelihood to Recommend	9.0 (0 ratings)	8.6 (0 ratings)
Usability	10.0 (0 ratings)	8.2 (0 ratings)
Support Rating	- (0 ratings)	8.2 (0 ratings)

User Testimonials
	Cisco Meraki Dashboard	SolarWinds Engineer's Toolset
Likelihood to Recommend	Cisco Meraki Dashboard is great for NOC teams with little network experience at helping give them all the tools they need to do the job and become more efficient with networks. From easy RMA processes to metric gathering the Cisco Meraki Dashboard does it all very well. The licenses are a problem for a lot of companies since there are no guarantees the product stays online and certain integrations like ThousandEyes are overlooked due to the additional cost despite it being a great product. Incentivized Verified User Anonymous Read full review	[SolarWinds Engineer's Toolset is] a great tool for monitoring database servers, highly recommended. The very good thing is that it keeps the history for two weeks, and you can see the time slice for all the server activities. Helps a lot to identify the memory and CPU bottlenecks, research blocking issues and kill the sessions, if necessary. Incentivized Verified User Anonymous Read full review
Pros	The ability to monitor any port and get accurate information on its activity. The ability to port cycle and reboot remotely. This is best for off-hour reboots. Being able to search for devices through the client page with an IP address or MAC address saves time on device searches. It is an easy process to add and remove devices to different organizations. Incentivized Verified User Anonymous Read full review	Debugging Tools Saves Time for basic checks Ping, Telnet, SSH right from the console and hence easy user management from console itself Incentivized Nikhil Kumar Sharma Associate Consultant Read full review
Cons	More granular controls over devices. It definitely feels like, especially when you come from a CLI environment and you're working in a command line interface and then going into the dashboard, you can feel restricted sometimes because if they don't have the button you can't press it. So more buttons. Incentivized Verified User Anonymous Read full review	The unifying component that is intended to be the initial interface to the tools seems clunky. I prefer to start the tools individually rather than using it. The port scanner could use some improvements to make it easier to use. Incentivized Verified User Anonymous Read full review
Usability	At the time of writing this, it appears that Cisco Meraki Dashboard has finally integrated a Cisco IOS XE output window into the dashboard. This is a massive step in the right direction and something that it was dearly missing. At the moment, we do not have this integration and so a lot of the times, we have to navigate via several tools menus to get the info we need instead of being able to run a quick command. Incentivized Verified User Anonymous Read full review	Very easy to use and intuitive. Just be careful with the WAN Killer...it does what it says. Incentivized Verified User Anonymous Read full review
Support Rating	No answers on this topic	Our organization uses it regularly. It is reliable, and we keep finding new uses for it Incentivized Verified User Anonymous Read full review
Alternatives Considered	A number of networks we've taken over were using Ubiquiti Unifi, which is an okay solution, but a lot more cumbersome to manage. We've found the Cisco Meraki Dashboard system much more intuitive and way less time-intensive. Simple things like setting up dedicated DHCP entries or poking holes in VLAN firewalls are way easier in Cisco Meraki Dashboard. Incentivized CS Cody Spencer Tech Support Analyst Read full review	These tools complement the Engineer's Toolset. They are excellent at detecting most issues and at keeping the network monitored and protected. However, when it comes time to dig into an issue, especially a hard to fix intermittent issue, these products lack the granularity of monitoring needed for these types of issues. Having said that the toolset is not made to do full time enterprise level monitoring. With these tools and the toolset I am able to have a more complete view of the network and deliver higher levels of service and quicker responses to issues. Incentivized Verified User Anonymous Read full review
Return on Investment	When there's an issue with communication to the cloud. EX: unable to fetch configs. This due to like new device being installed or if you have to factory reset the device. This has been a negative impact. Incorrect status. Sometimes the status of the device or network is not reflected as it should be. This has had a negative impact in the past. However, for the most part, the Status is fairly accurate. Incident response has been very good. Anytime an issue has been reported to Cisco regarding Cisco Meraki Dashboard, the issue is quickly investigated and doesn't take long to resolve. Customer support and Cisco's technical team has been very helpful and responsive. Incentivized Verified User Anonymous Read full review	Spend less time downloading free buggy tools All the tools in one spot, so you don't have to look around for tools Get to the solution sooner Incentivized Jacob Garrett Senior System Engineer Read full review
ScreenShots	Cisco Meraki Dashboard Screenshots	SolarWinds Engineer's Toolset Screenshots