 When it comes to choosing tech products, there are so many choices out there. Today we're gonna talk specifically about Wi-Fi choices and this is a common question that comes up. Now, Meraki, the big juggernaut in the market, the Cisco company. Everyone knows Cisco. They're the current version of IBM where IBM's slogan used to be, nobody got fired for buying IBM and kind of that same mentality has applied to Cisco and Meraki. Not saying they don't make a good product, but we're just gonna talk about a comparison of the products that Meraki offers in terms of Wi-Fi deployment and the products that Unify offers. And you may already know I'm biased towards Unify. So my goal here is not to add my bias to this, but just to present some of the facts and talk about some of the features of these devices and what the differences are. Now, I did some testing the other day and I reviewed the MR33. The MR33, my opinion of it is I think it's a good product. I don't think there's anything I found really wrong with it. I did a head to head comparison with the MR33 and a Unify UAP HD just doing some general speed testing and things like that. I find them both to work quite well. Now there are some differences between them, I understand. The UAP HD is a higher end model and technically if you're gonna use a UAP HD comparing it to a Cisco Meraki, I should be comparing it to something like their MR52 which has a four by four MIMO versus the two by two MIMO in the MR33, but I don't have one of those handy. But most of the main differences between these other devices as you go up has a lot to do with density and how many devices can be attached to them. And I don't have any easy way at the moment, but I'm working on ideas to test connecting a 50 devices at a time, 20 devices at a time and doing some comparative testing but that is where some of these vary greatly. Now the Unify is claiming 500 plus users on the UAP HD. Now the reason why is because it has dual 2.4 and dual five gigahertz antennas. This allows a lot more users to connect and it's the four by four MIMO so you get a higher aggregate speed. Plus it has the dual network interfaces that can be lagged together in order to bond more bandwidth through at the network interface level. And the same thing with Meraki, the MR33 doesn't support it, you gotta go down to the MR52 which once again, once you start getting the four by four MIMO and more antennas you end up with the ability with the two times gigabit network interfaces so you can aggregate that bandwidth which of course makes a lot more sense to do that. Cause once you have a lot of high density clients connected that need high speed the limitation starts to become the network interface. Now where the huge difference between Cisco versus Meraki come in is first pricing. Now price is not everything. We're gonna go over here to the Meraki cost calculator here and we'll talk about a 10 access point deployment. So if I choose the MR53E which is right here or maybe we just want the MR53, I'm not sure the difference between them, recommended for high density, okay, high density versus focus coverage. So MR53, we'll say high density here, 10 of them is gonna be 1849 including a one year license. Now after that, each one of these, so 10 devices times 150, $1,500 a year annual and license to keep these units turned on. It's not like you're not getting anything for that $150 license fee that they have and I know the license fee goes down as you scale, you have to contact Meraki sales. So also apparently your pricing isn't as easy to figure out, you have to either contact a dealer, a sales rep, get a quote to contact them and, you know, talk to a salesperson, fill everything out, you go through the usual corporate rigmarore so pricing doesn't become as easy as it is with Unify where you just buy the product and get the software but that dashboard does have a lot of features. Layer seven filtering, I covered a lot of the features in my MR33 review which I'll leave a link below so you get a great dashboard with a ton of wonderful features but you're always paying for it and you're subject and beholden to Meraki and their business model. So if Meraki says we're raising prices, you're paying more because the consequence of not paying Meraki's continual dashboard fee is a unit that does not work anymore. These units don't have any type of management at all. They are designed to go and talk to Meraki and you are subject to how Meraki wants to do their business. So if Meraki makes any decisions that change the way they do things, you are then subject to those changes. No options. Now, Unify does things a little bit different and Unify has a software controller that you can either A, buy one of the Unify devices to run the software controller on or B, if you have any servers at all in your network environment or you even wanna run it on a small server, a virtual server with only two gigs of RAM, it's a pretty lightweight controller that will manage hundreds of these Unify APHGs. Matter of fact, they'll even manage them across sites so they're not just the one site. We host the controller and it's got the ability to host multi sites. The controller dashboard is really nice. No, it doesn't have layer seven amazing filtering built into the Wi-Fi, but technically the Meraki is not built into the Wi-Fi. It's using the device's functions controlled by the cloud controller to communicate all those functions to it. So it's a different type of business model but it also gets very expensive. And I bring this up because we are working with more than one place right now to remove Meraki or proposals to do so when we work with one client that has moved over from it because they were realizing that their license fees were getting kinda high and they're sitting there going, that just seems like a lot. Now the former CFO, he's being counter so he sees these costs and put pressure on them but they were being justified but we get support and they're like, when was the last time you called support? They're like, we have never called support. They're like, well, that's cool and because people complain go, oh no, Unify doesn't have super fast support but I gotta admit, and I granted I'm the Unify guy who does a lot of videos on it so I'm very knowledgeable about the product but a lot of these Wi-Fis, once you have them configured and deployed, done. So this 24 seven support's cool that they offer but honestly, when you have a deployment that works it's great to have support but it's also how much support do you need? How often are you messing with your Wi-Fis? So weigh that out. Do you need that support? Once these are generally deployed in an office and unless you have any complicated unusual environments there's not a ton of things that need to be done differently on them. So weigh that out there, weigh out if you need the Layer 7 application filtering or do you just have a firewall that does it? And I'll mention that because we deal with that with the schools and the schools have firewalls that manage all of the other features for them so the Maraki features are not even using so that's what the reasons are looking at it. The other problem you run into is as you gain in density the price keeps going at the same rate so you're like, wow, this gets expensive very quickly. Now the base price alone for these if you look at this MR53, we'll put a quantity of one, 1849 is once you're including the license, one. We have a client with 270 units, 270 units 270 units and if they go Maraki they would be looking at and let's just say because someone told me and I don't quote me on this because you have to get a quote from them to find out that if you get that level of them that Maraki will lower the licensing fees to about $100 a month. Okay, $27,000 a year to keep these access points running with a guest network on them. That's pretty much what this is. It's a large deployment across several campuses that just need a private network and a guest network. It's a pretty simple setup and we're updating them to newer version. They actually have unifies now when they're looking at a newer unifies deployment but of course they're doing due diligence and someone in the meeting says, hey, why not those Marakis? And people look at them and go because it's $27,000 a year, we got to find out subjectively what the price is to get an exact quote but if you calculated it at 270 devices times 150 let's figure that out. There would be about $40,500 a year at the full 150 price. I'll assume Maraki is a discount but what if Maraki's saying just their mind? What if Maraki goes, you know what? Next year we're charging $170 a license. Well, then your price goes up again. And before someone screens, Maraki wouldn't do that. We've already seen Maraki modify the agreement and cut channel partners out and there's an entire discussion on Reddit about this, other people chiming in and I've already seen comments on my MR33 review for people saying the same thing. Oh yeah, they screwed over us channel partners. I've had people message me about it and what Maraki decided to do was normally if I sold you the Maraki, I get a cut of those fees because that's how Maraki built their business is they sell you the license fees with an annual cost and then the person that sold to you they get a cut of that annual cost then when you decided it's too much money you want a discount. Maraki's answer for a discount was, well just cut out those IT people. What do they do anyways? They just sold our product and put it in there. So that comes on a reputation of the company. You don't know, you're beholden to the way they do things. This is the downside of when you subject yourself to something that is completely outside of your control. So like I said, I don't think it's a bad physical product but I question a lot when you start looking at the way and methodology that that works and other companies have some of the same policies. This isn't just Maraki, this isn't unique to them. My business model that I prefer that I'm more comfortable with is where you maybe buy a product and there's a extra service that you can pay for but if you don't pay for the service you may lose that feature. For example, if you need certain updated rules like with Snort and Sericata or some of your intrusion detection system rules you pay a fee to get those rules. When you don't pay the fee your firewall doesn't turn off. The firewall simply doesn't get the rules anymore. That's fine, your trading value. You understand that it takes people and manpower to put those rules together and keep that information up to date and for your system to get access those rules comes at a fee. Completely a sensical business model but for the Unify devices that's no problem. You just, you know, you get the Unify controller software if something or Unify decided later to charge it you still have the current version and you can make a decision further out and I can't imagine at all Unify would do that and what if the horrific happened? Something happens to Unify where they decide not to be a company anymore and making Wi-Fi devices. Your devices don't turn off. They keep working because you have the controller. You're in control of these units. Also you can, you know, there are third party firmwares people have loaded on these so they're hackable and I know so are some of the Cisco Marocchis too. So there's other options but those are really crazy options. They're not the same as being able to come in here and go, hey, let's, you know, have total control of our network. And one of the network things that we were looking at a client is very cloud adverse because of our government contractor they don't like the idea of everything going to some mystical cloud controller as the guy put it. They want to keep everything in house. Well, not an option with the Cisco Marocchi. If you want to keep it all in house, well Unify works so you can have the controller in house and you can keep it locked down so nothing leaves your network that you didn't want to. So there's no external controller. So you've now brought that all in house and you manage it internally without some external potential issues. And that was their concern. I not saying Marocchi is not trustworthy. They seem to be very trustworthy company in terms of security. Cisco does have a good reputation but that is a genuine concern that's going to be had there because all the data goes up to Marocchi for the filtering for everything else goes through their dashboard. I guess I didn't show it just for you but you know, there is one more aspect and for government contractors they're trying to control all aspects as best as possible, or at least the ones that care are. There's plenty of them that are in the news that clearly we're not thinking that way. That's a whole different topic. So those are my general thoughts on Cisco versus Marocchi. I don't think the Marocchi's are bad product but I do like the Unify much better. I think they just have a better product lineup. I have been really happy with the deployments and so have many other people. You can check on the forums and see this is not news. Unify versus Marocchi is a constant debate. I'm leaning towards the Unify but we do have systems we've seen with Marocchi and it's working well and like the school system uses it and they like it. They don't have any problems with it. They have a budget for it so they keep using it. I think there's probably some school discount I don't do their billing. We're outside contracted IT for certain aspects of the school. We don't handle their wifi. They have a pretty big deployment across three campuses. They think it's pretty trouble free but oddly they're also not using all the features of it because they have their own filtering that they get through the school district itself and another tool they're using. So it works, they're happy and that's not bad. So those are my thoughts. Thanks, hopefully this was helpful at least gave you a little bit more information go on when you're trying to make these decisions. Thanks for watching. If you liked this video, go ahead and click the thumbs up. Leave us some feedback below to let us know any details what you like and didn't like as well because we love hearing the feedback or if you just wanna say thanks, leave a comment. If you wanted to be notified of new videos as they come out, go ahead and hit the subscribe and the bell icon that lets YouTube know that you're interested in notifications. 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