Cisco Meraki vs ManageEngine Mobile Device Manager Plus Comparison

Meraki Systems Manager is a cloud based management system that grants you the ability to manage devices within your network. You can see a lot of information about device use, manufacturer and connectivity. You can apply user policies and utilize Meraki’s built in Mobile Device Management. You can manage PC, Mac, Chromebook, iOS, Android and more!

System Manager is a great tool and has great customer service, however Meraki licensing is pricey compared to other tools available.

Initially free, it implemented everything we needed for mobile device management for Apple devices.

With the free programs ended, Meraki became one of the most expensive options, which made its other flaws less tolerable. Commands to devices often fail with cryptic messages that require lots of manual retries.

This system provides admins the means to keep track of their assets within their control and push (some) stuff out to them through the client.

Many times, pushing stuff out to devices and device syncs to the manager did not work. I think there are probably better solutions out there than Meraki in 2019.

Integration with Meraki Dashboard, free for up to 100 devices which makes it ideal for smaller businesses. Also the ability to remotely end tasks, remote command line, RDP web client, screenshots and useful statistics make this a valuable solution when managing desktops, servers and mobile devices.

Nothing really, sometimes devices take a few minutes to update in the dashboard but I don't have any complaints about the product. It is updated regularly like most Meraki products and gets better the longer you use it.

Meraki Systems Manager is designed to be easy to use. From setup time to adding endpoints, everything is easy and quick. It easily helps to track and, if necessary, remotely wipe lost devices. I also like the geofence feature as it sends notifications whenever a device leaves the geofenced region.

Though there has been some improvement in recent years, the system still contains some bugs. The mobile apps really need to be updated, especially the iOS app.

We can manage all the mobile connected to the network. You can disconnect any device which you want, allocate a set of bandwidth and control basically all the devices in your network.Also, it's a cloud-based service which is more amazing.

The pricing of the software is a bit on the higher side but since you have the control of the network, you tend to ignore that for network security.

Combined a useable web interface with the power and reliability of Cisco hardware. It had an API that can be integrated for both inventory purposes and for monitoring, and for configuration. Mobile device management was straightforward, but still provided lots of options

Not really a network guy, so some of the more advanced stuff can be daunting.

-Aggregation of MDM policies across iOS, macOS, Android, and Windows platforms make it really easy to deploy the same setting, such as screen lock, to multiple platforms without drilling the per-platform settings -Supports all iOS MDM settings and is quick to implement new ones as Apple introduces them -Tagging system is incredibly useful to identify and organize different devices - this is unique to Meraki -Although we don't have Meraki networking products - they can all be managed from the same dashboard -Just like most MDM platforms, it offers easy web-based device registration, and syncs with Apple VPP and School Manager

-Web management dashboard has a steep learning curve and is not very intuitive - a task like deploying a new app to devices involves three or four different management pages -Pricing is comparable, if not a bit more expensive than other iOS MDMs, but its cross-platform support makes up for this

The day I deployed 40 iPads to field management all the iPads booted for the first time. Through Meraki every field manager turned on the iPad it went through a custom setup I had created with only the apps they needed at the time and a sweet background that went with the theme of the event. Management was very impressed.

Connecting the software to Apple's Device Enrollment program can be a bit tricky.

One of the most powerful thing for Meraki is their visibility, you have a lot ! I mean, you can see what is happening in your network in real time, clients with or without policy. Security Notification for each user and so on. Auto-VPN its another pretty good feature to configure without difficult for any kind of network engineers IPsec tunnels easily and remote access as well.

Support really sucks, they have access to every single device in their cloud but unfortunately is not a responsive team.

Easy to implement and easy to use. They are constantly updating with new features and upgrades.

If you have office 365 you won't be able to stop users from connecting to office365 with JUST the systems manager MDM solution.

Recently the company that i work for upgraded from an old 10/100 network to a brand new gigabyte network witch includes every network device meraki offers, MX Routers, MS Switches and wifi6 MR Radios, all of them have the great functionality meraki offers and this is all can be easly managed from one single meraki console, the configurations are seamlessly pushed into the devices almost in real time, no delay at all, meraki offers all the cisco strength and adds a very ease to use console full of options that i need to say, if you wish to have the whole functions package you will need to have and advance license wich will cost a little bit more..

the licensing costs are quite high, but this is just the way it is, if you want to easly manage any device no matter where the device is, no matter where you are, then meraki is the way to go. it will cost yes, but youll get what you pay for.

Used to work with Fortinets/SonicWalls/ASA, but Meraki has made a much simpler cloud based solutions for firewalls.

Really haven't come into any major issues, I know at one point the device failed but was quickly RMA'd and replaced.

I didn't have to use CLI to make any configurations. The GUI is very intuitive and easy to navigate. The built-in net flow allowed me to catch a ransomware attack by providing me the data usage and source/destination information. Quickly isolated the offending device and got it unplugged.

Price. You purchase the hardware, then also have to license each device. This makes for a pretty expensive network appliance over time.

Setup of an enterprise MDM was made easy with Meraki SM. The web administration portal was easy to use, and offered us all of the functionality we needed initially, as well as has provided us the opportunity to increase our use over time. The platform is well designed, simple to use, and responsive. The app management solutions provided through SM are excellent, as well as the user/device options for license assignment and updating.

We have found the location mapping to be unreliable in Meraki SM, despite having our mobile devices all GPS enabled and configured to make location information available to the SM app. The location tracking tends to use cellular location based on IP addressing and tower locations rather than GPS coordinates provided by the device. Policy pushing over the air is hit or miss, and it can take multiple attempts to get a client device to receive the revised policies. The greatest restrictions of the Meraki MDM seem to lie with Apple not making as many centralized management options available as they should, since enterprise use of iOS doesn't seem to be on their list of priorities.

In the company we have several of this Meraki Access Points, to add them to the account was easy and manage them were ok, it has a ton of options including Air Marshal to remove non authorized networks on your company.

Adding whitelisted devices could be simpler sometimes I get confused and add the device twice since there was not feedback of the device being added, it just shows up once is connected to the network, that way you cannot see if it was added successfully, Is expensive compare to solutions from Fortinet, some companies went with them and have a great experience but paying less money.

The tracking of devices worked well always was able to tell where devices were located at based on the IP of the device.

The updating of apps and controlling apps was difficult and did not find it very intuitive.

Management of multiple device on a single network with different OS Simple and scalability and Artificial Intelligence and analytics feature Claude bass services with central dashboard for management .

only few models have Wifi6 and those devices are to expensive. Clean Air Advanced features only available with Cisco APs. license procedure/methods is complicated.

This checks off a bunch of boxes for us in that it provides network solutions and MDM in a single interface. Having one each at two sites made setting up a point-to-point VPN easy.

The 100 free MDM device limit was a deal breaker for us when we went over this many devices in our org. It was more cost effective to switch MDM to another provider.

The cloud interface allows you to customize your network to your settings. Remotely update APs, mobile devices, and desktops

When remoting into devices it uses java.

This is a beautiful MDM solution that supports all platforms which is great. There are some features not found elsewhere that make it easy to integrate security functionality with Meraki’s networking stack. Want WPA2 enterprise with TLS? Systems manager makes this seamless.

Feature set prioritizes integration with Meraki stack. Features introduced by Apple or Microsoft at the OS level can take months if not years to finally be implemented. This can cause quite a lag as your user base upgrades. No real features to manage the patch level of devices aside from manually pushing updates each time. Licensing cost fluctuates frequently (it’s free, it’s paid, it’s mostly free but sometimes paid).

Ease of deployment, best ROI in its class. One config can be applied to all devices in any site. site to site VPN is just few clicks. wifi handling is great, very low hardware failures.

Cannot integrate with Azure AD or ther AD providers for device auth. Limited protocol support for site to site vpn. client vpn connection setup is not clean , powershell required with admin access, else the anyconnect client with a license fee,

the ease of use is great. Deployment is straight forward for Meraki devices. MDM management is not extremely intuitive, but in fairness this is our first MDM product. Consoles are easy to navigate. For the price it is an effective product.

Licensing is a bit confusing, Menu in the management console could use a little improvement, more streamlined, reporting is very lacking.

I really like the level of control that Cisco grants me over my mobile devices and desktop machines. With meraki I can remotely restart, audit, and administrate my machine inventory.

The lack of integration with cloud services, and the lack of brand customization.

The easiest way manage to Network Device from the cloud and control the user with Group policies. One of my favorite feature is Group policies that is controlled the specific user with specific firewall rule, traffic shaping and security policies (like URL filtering, YouTube restriction level).

If you have multiple public IP addresses, it is not possible to separate the outbound PAT configuration for each user network.

Easy to use Many options to deploy and enroll devices Location History

Having to factory reset Apple devices to make the most of the software

Hello Corey. Greetings from ManageEngine! It is Apple whose workflow mandates factory resetting the device. MDM simply follows the workflow defined by Apple. In case of any future queries, you can write to us at mdmcloud-support@manageengine.com