Ubiquity vs. Meraki: Which Network Solution Fits Your Business?
Hi, Max Clark. I'm going to wade right into it with this one and share a conversation I had the other day. And the crux of it was Ubiquiti versus Meraki and why. And I'll kind of expand a little bit, you know, just give you the rest of stuff like Ubiquiti, Meraki, Aruba, Juniper, Fortinet, Palo Alto, yada yada yada. And what we actually see in enterprises and what I would do, you know, in most of these situations for myself and what I have done for myself.
Speaker 1:You know, the first thing is, is is let's just talk about ubiquity. Ubiquity is enterprise ish, inexpensive network infrastructure for the majority of people. The trade in features and functionality between a ubiquity box and something else is not going to be noticeable. And this is the reality and the secret with ubiquity. There are specific things that it doesn't do that other people do better.
Speaker 1:Ruckus has better antenna design. It's going to have higher density devices per access point. Absolutely. You're going to see better roaming and device handoff with basically Meraki and, you know, and Aruba and ubiquity and Juniper Mist on all these different plot. You're going to get better access point performance.
Speaker 1:You're going to get better roaming. You're going to get better handoff of devices moving across inside of your environment. You're going to have better control over your switch stack. You know, what do you need to do with VLANs and routing and routing between VLANs? And do you have a lot of network interfaces where you have to have, you know, some sort of campus with a core and leaf and spline kind of architecture?
Speaker 1:We can't you're not gonna see that with, like, the ubiquities of the world. You're gonna see that with other manufacturers that are actually producing the big iron of switches performance through the switches, of course, it's gonna be different. You know, you're gonna see different things, firewalls, ubiquity doesn't have high availability on their firewalls. I mean, hopefully, by the time you're watching this recording, they do, it would be amazing. But in today, 2024, there's still not an ability to do high availability on their firewalls.
Speaker 1:If you need high availability, the Ubiquiti firewall doesn't do it for you. Like it just you can't go there. If you are a do it yourself or you're a small business. And in this case, I'll put a small business in the, you know, really in a small size, like, under a 100 people in a location. Ubiquiti is probably gonna be just fine for you.
Speaker 1:It's gonna be very inexpensive. It's a one time purchase. Maybe you're hosting the controller software and you're paying something for that, but it's gonna be very minimal to do that. And for the most part, it's gonna work probably just fine. And you users will be okay with it.
Speaker 1:Like, you know, 20 people in office go Ubiquiti. You're gonna need 1 AP, 1 switch, 1 firewall to be fine. 50 users, but in your footprint, probably still only 1 AP. 100 users, maybe your office is now big enough that you've got 2 or 3 APs. But even if you bought Ubiquiti and then decided you hated it and you wanted to replace it, the amount of money that you spent on it for whatever time that you're running it is not substantial.
Speaker 1:I guess now we call it network as a service. So any NAS vendors that are offering, you know, managed network infrastructure are going to use Meraki switches and access points. It's stable. It's available. They've got global distribution.
Speaker 1:They can warehouse it. They could get parts replacement for it they can manage it through a single service provider console the devices are designed so when they plug into a network they phone home automatically you don't have to tell it how to phone home Meraki is great switch and access point infrastructure it works It's expensive, you know, that's your trade, right? It's phenomenal. It's more money. And the rub with Meraki is that you are going to buy the hardware and you're going to pay a subscription license for it.
Speaker 1:You know, you are going to pay an annual fee. And if you don't, it's gonna turn off. I mean, effectively, you just can't use it anymore. You know, if you're an SMB, if you're a small SMB, if you're a small business, probably don't wanna go the Meraki route unless your service provider that you're using to manage your network infrastructure is deploying it because that's what they manage. Okay, great.
Speaker 1:Nothing wrong with it. You're not deficient by having Meraki Meraki firewalls are probably not what you want to run. Cisco is trying to unify and create a their version of Sassy on top of Meraki is embedding and overlaying the open DNS umbrella infrastructure with it. It's got a ways to go. I won't get into a Meraki bash.
Speaker 1:It is incredible when you actually start digging into enterprise networks and enterprise service provide, you know, real service providers supporting large enterprises. You're not gonna see a lot of Meraki MX firewalls. You'll see a lot of Meraki switches and access points, and then you're gonna see their Palo Alto firewalls or you're going to see Fortinet firewalls depending on what the service provider basically based on what the service provider gets the best deal on and has the most support infrastructure for and what their contract looks like. I mean, you know, if they negotiated a sweetheart deal with Fortinet, they're going to sell you a Fortinet firewall. They have a whatever with Palo, they're going to sell you a pallet firewall.
Speaker 1:You know, differences between Palo and Fortinet, you probably wouldn't even know. I'm not saying this in terms of a judgment of, like, one's better, one's worse. I'm just saying that, like, that selection process from our service providers is just like what they had a better contract and pricing for, and that's why they did one versus the other. Well, there's a little bit more to that. Fortinet will give you more SD SD WAN functionality natively into the firewall than Palo.
Speaker 1:Well, there's a plus for Fortinet and why service providers use them because they can replicate and give you reasonable SD WAN functionality in that Fortinet firewall. Or you can skip all this. You can just go to a real sassy environment. You can run Meraki switches and access points or ubiquity switches and access points, and you can select a sassy vendor that has an SD WAN and the secure web gateway and remote access CTNA, you know, CASB firewall as a service, and you can just run a really dumb network. And I don't wanna say this to, like, degrade ubiquity at all.
Speaker 1:But in most cases, if you're deploying ubiquity, you're probably thinking of your network as a dumb network to some degree. Right? Like, I had a client years ago describe his office environments to me as just fancy Starbucks is like there's nothing here. There's nothing running. It is a distribution layer to connect people to the Internet.
Speaker 1:They were using an SSC vendor for their security. So literally, they had an agent agents running on all the devices. He was just like, we just have a fancy Starbucks. You know, it's a very fast interconnection. There's no security on it.
Speaker 1:You know, it doesn't need security because there's nothing there. There's nothing in the office. We're not hosting stuff out of the office. We're not building policy based on a perimeter of the edge in the office. It's a fancy Starbucks.
Speaker 1:So Ubiquiti fits that bill. Fantastic. You know, if you want to have a very simplistic, very basic, good network, Ubiquiti fits the bill. By the way, I have a lot of Ubiquiti running tons of Ubiquiti running, and it works great. And it's there for a reason.
Speaker 1:And we're using it for reason. I have a lot of Meraki running. It works great. It's amazing. It's fantastic.
Speaker 1:I wish they hadn't crippled Meraki go for home users because, you know, it was cool. We have a lot of Meraki running. We have a lot of Fortinet. We have a lot of Palo Alto and we have a lot of SSC and we have a lot of sassy vendors. We have it all.
Speaker 1:These things are, you know, if you're trying to make a decision and you're looking at this and you're saying, well, should I go with, you know, Ruckus? If you go with Ruckus, you're gonna get a great access point, but you're gonna have to use different vendors for your switching and firewall infrastructure. You know, I mean, CommScope sells you will sell you a switch. You can make a determination whether or not you want that switch or not probably not if you go with HP Aruba you can buy the Aruba switches and you can also get the HP enterprise switches with HP enterprise buying Juniper I have no idea what's gonna happen with HP enterprise switching with the Aruba switches and access points, and with the Juniper switches and the Juniper access points and Juniper Mist. I don't know if this is just an acquisition for consolidation or if this was an acquisition where they wanted to integrate technology.
Speaker 1:And we'll see. We'll see in a couple of years. Has to get approved, and then they have to figure out what they're doing. And Game of Thrones has to go on with these product lines. The crux of my advice that I gave in this conversation between, you know, should we use ubiquity or should we, you know, do something else?
Speaker 1:You know, ubiquity versus Meraki. But Meraki was so expensive. It was basically the question. My answer was was used to ubiquity. Like, if you're at a point where you're price sensitive to that, and you're actually considering this, like, I can't spend the money on Meraki by ubiquity, you are not the use case, it should be in the Meraki world.
Speaker 1:If you've got a large enterprise, and you've got large environments, and you've got a lot of users, and you've got to layer in service providers to help you manage it, and you need to be able to hire an onboard staff efficiently, and you need to and you need to and you need to, you're gonna be buying Meraki, and it's gonna be perfect for you. So don't sweat it. Like, don't spend any time on it and just do it and just move forward and focus on other things. You got plenty other problems you gotta be, you know, dealing with. You got plenty other demands within the business.
Speaker 1:And that's where you should be spending your time, not on this other part. You know, if you're struggling with a ubiquity versus a Meraki purchase, just buy Ubiquiti. And if you got Ubiquiti or Meraki, buy an SD WAN, don't use their internal SD WAN functions because they're garbage and they don't work. Get an SD WAN and put it outside those boxes. Boxes.
Speaker 1:If you, you know, wanna take a step into the future and stop investing in antiquated, you know, security and firewalls, you know, if you've got firewalls in place or SD WAN in place already, go and get an s s e vendor. And if you've got the opportunity for the whole thing out, go and get a true sassy vendor and use them at end to end and be happy and rejoice. I mean, for lack of a better word, you know, this stuff is like you don't have to build networks like we did in 2005, 20 years later. And there's a lot of really cool easy stuff, great things on the market today, and they were great, and they'll make your life better, and they'll solve lots of problems. I'm Max Clark.
Speaker 1:I hope this helps. If you have any questions, comment below, send me an email, and I'll get back to you. Feeling.
