UniFi v. Meraki

[Pharaoh Man]

I have a client who I currently have setup with a UniFi system. USG-Pro, 2 US-48-500W Switches, 9 UAP-AC-PRO's and a Cloud Key. The system is working awesome with no complaints. They employ a separate company for cabling and that company is now in their ear claiming that UniFi is garbage and trying to sell them on swapping it all out for a full Meraki system. While I have nothing against the Meraki equipment I don't feel that it makes sense to "upgrade" form a system with no issues to a system that is 5 times more expensive with yearly license fees that run nearly as much as fully replacing all of the UniFi gear on a yearly basis.

In my opinion the other company is just trying to do a cash grab and take advantage. I'm in the middle trying to look out for the best interests of the client while at the same time essentially defending my expertise while another company plays the "you get what you pay for" card and claiming I don't know what I'm talking about behind my back.

That being said, researching this question for supporting data I can present to the client is a mess of he said, she said. For every person who swears by UniFi there is another who swears by Meraki. It seems like the general consensus is if money is no object go with Meraki, otherwise UniFi is right up there.

Is there a general rule of thumb for when Meraki is warranted over UniFi? Is it really so superior that it's worth 5 times the cost plus huge yearly license fees?

 

[trevm999]

Here are some arguments for you. http://www.smbitjournal.com/2017/07/the-risks-of-licensing/

Advise them that they need to think about this in the same way they think about anything in their business, what value will this investment bring to their business?

And if in doubt, they should hire a 3rd party IT consultant that does not make any money other than the consulting fee. Not a salesperson 'consultant'

NTG is one example https://ntg.co/

 

[fencepost]

"There are some situations where the Meraki gear is better. The only one that could possibly apply to you is that Meraki's UTM options are stronger than what's available with your current equipment. If you were stretching the capabilities of what you're on right now I'd be all for putting in a different solution, but you're not - you just have a big enough setup that Company X figures you won't notice a 100% profit margin on thousands of dollars in equipment, plus annual license fees that will be higher than the cost of your entire current setup - and if you stop paying that license fee, everything stops working after 30 days. I regard that as a kind of extortion, particularly if it's not being made very clear to you going in."

Edit: Basically, find out the strong points of the Meraki equipment (e.g. manageability when you have hundreds or thousands of switches in a large corporate office), and see if your client is using or would benefit from any of those features. Be up-front with the client as well - "I spent some time looking into this because I'm concerned about Company X trying to take you over as a client, but I'm also trying to look out for your interests and I just don't see the value to your company of the added cost."

Also, @Pharaoh Man, a few line breaks might have helped with readability.

 

[trevm999]

In my experience with the licence they give you with the "free" gear offering, Meraki will give you an extra month before stopping your equipment - still kind of BS. Now I have an AP doing nothing because the UART device I ordered never arrived.

 

[timeshifter]

Is your client seriously considering this? I think they're both good systems, but the Meraki is really pricey. If it comes down to it wait for them to get a quote from that company. Then get your own quote. I know a Meraki dealer that gives me 30% off of hardware and licenses. It would be fun to offer them a quote of your costs plus labor. Then your client will see how this other guy is trying to soak them.

 

[Pharaoh Man]

Is your client seriously considering this? I think they're both good systems, but the Meraki is really pricey. If it comes down to it wait for them to get a quote from that company. Then get your own quote. I know a Meraki dealer that gives me 30% off of hardware and licenses. It would be fun to offer them a quote of your costs plus labor. Then your client will see how this other guy is trying to soak them.

Not yet. The issue just came up Friday when they called me and mentioned what "Company X" had said. I think ultimately they may entertain the quote, but honestly I don't think their point of contact at "Company X" even knows what those systems cost. I was going to suggest they go ahead and ask for a quote and let the sticker shock alone take a bite out of "Company X's" credibility.

I like your idea as well if they even remotely show any interest. Plus I can point out that we can buy a full duplicate UniFi setup for hot spares and STILL save them money over the Meraki setup.

 

[Pharaoh Man]

"There are some situations where the Meraki gear is better. The only one that could possibly apply to you is that Meraki's UTM options are stronger than what's available with your current equipment. If you were stretching the capabilities of what you're on right now I'd be all for putting in a different solution, but you're not - you just have a big enough setup that Company X figures you won't notice a 100% profit margin on thousands of dollars in equipment, plus annual license fees that will be higher than the cost of your entire current setup - and if you stop paying that license fee, everything stops working after 30 days. I regard that as a kind of extortion, particularly if it's not being made very clear to you going in."

Edit: Basically, find out the strong points of the Meraki equipment (e.g. manageability when you have hundreds or thousands of switches in a large corporate office), and see if your client is using or would benefit from any of those features. Be up-front with the client as well - "I spent some time looking into this because I'm concerned about Company X trying to take you over as a client, but I'm also trying to look out for your interests and I just don't see the value to your company of the added cost."

Also, @Pharaoh Man, a few line breaks might have helped with readability.

Great information, thanks! Point taken on the line breaks. I wrote the post in a hurry before heading off to an appointment. I edited it to make it more readable.

 

[CLC]

There is no way I would allow this if it was my customer, the subscriptions are ridiculous. Yes Meraki has a better warranty because you keep paying for the product. Think of what one Meraki access point plus the yearly sub is and think of how many unifi waps you can replace for that amount. Right now I have 20 unifi ap's out there all kinds and all ages and have yet to have on fail in the last 4 years. I don't even use a cloud key, I use a cloud controller installed on a ubutu vm on digital ocean that runs me like $7 a month. Eat that Meraki! So much of this crap is pay to play now days it's nice to buy once. I mean you can literally install a unifi system at the cost of just one years meraki licenses.

 

[Your PCMD]

I have been where you are. My biggest client (9 locations) is all Ubuquiti with a splash of TP-Link for a couple of 5 port switches. Before I gave them my quote, I stressed to them to get a couple of quotes from competitors, all of which are 80 miles away because frankly, I have no competitors here.

They did contact 3 companies but only one provided a quote because the others would not come up here. That quote was close to $60,000 for all locations but one, which was 100 miles away. Their equipment was also Cisco Meraki. My quote came in at $40k - ish for ALL locations including MSP at a yearly rate. In the end, they went with me because of the fact I was local and could get to all but one location within an hour if needed, not 2-3 days from the other company.

That was almost a year ago and they have had not one issue with their network. In fact, they rave to me how stable it is. In fact, I am their IT department because of it.

Not going to lie, but I love Ubuquiti. So much so that I have it in my own house. I only recommend and sell 2 networking companies, Ubuquiti first, then for the cheap clients, TP-Link. Never had an issue with either.

One thing you can mention to your client is don't think mainly on the cost of Meraki (and continued cost), but add to their quote from company X the LOSS of the money they spent with you in the beginning. Now that would be sticker shock.

 

[brandonkick]

Two easy points to put this to bed.

They have NEVER had an issue with this Ubiquiti setup? If not, then how can you improve upon perfection. It just works.

Second, is Company X a Cisco reseller/partner/whatever? If so, it's a bit of a conflict of interest I'd say given the fact that
what they are using now works very very well. What can Company X offer as far as a reason as to what makes Meraki better?
Other then the fact that they will make a lot of money off of the installation? I won't (and can't) argue that Meraki is a better
product... but if the solution they have meets their needs entirely and is rock solid stable for them, why change it?

I have only done two installs "professionally" and have Ubiquiti gear in my house as well.

The first install was a local sportsmans club that was constantly having issues with their wifi dropping, and needing to be rebooted. That poor $40 walmart junko just wasn't able to meet the needs of 50+ people connecting on a decently regular basis. I set them up with a Unifi Pro for under $100 and in the time since installation (It's been at least 2 years) they haven't had an issue or needed to reboot one time.

The second was for a local business office that had super crappy reception on their wifi. Whoever installed it had it broadcasting on 5G only, since the bigger number is better right? The people in the same room as the router got had great experiences with the wifi of course, and anyone else outside that room either had really bad or not connectivity. While working that out, I noticed it was a cheap linksys unit (that are rebranded as cisco) and suggested an upgrade to more professional level equipment since some workstations / laptops had no access to ethernet (and they weren't interested in running cable either). Did the same thing... dropped in a unifi access point and all was well in the world. Everyone had strong signals, followed up with them 6 months later to make sure they were happy with the gear or to see if they needed any more work, and haven't heard a peep since (over 1 year).

This past weekend I got some good laughs.. went to a local pool tournament that is held each year as a part of a league I play in. There can be 200-300 people there for the event at any one time. The event has been moved around from hotel to hotel, to a few other establishments as well. Always the same thing, the wifi can never keep up. We do all of our score keeping on an app now, that needs constant connectivity to the home servers for this app. If the wifi doesn't work, the tablet doesn't work and we can't keep score. The solution is always "Just use your data plan on your celluar, it doesn't use that much and NO WIFI SYSTEM CAN HANDLE THAT MANY CLIENTS".

I had to laugh... sure maybe THAT wifi system can't... but a proper setup sure can. 3 or 4 strategically placed UniFi AP's would handle that all day long no questions asked. Secondly, I don't want to use my cell phone when I can use my tablet that has twice the screen size.... why use a smaller screen and kill your cellphone battery when you can use a tablet? Well, because apparently 200 people on a wifi system just isn't possible

 

[YeOldeStonecat]

Meraki was about the subscription and support. Paying the high end Cisco price.

Ubiquiti came out with "Disruptively low pricing"...where in the early years they didn't have a sales team or a support department. They relied on techs that went to Ubiquiti school for training, and the strong support in their user forums.

They have since added "in app chat support" in the Unifi system, as well as email based support...for their tier-1 free support.

Ubiquiti also added a similar system to Meraki for support, called "Elite"...where you CAN have top notch immediate support and priority RMA process. Still comes out cheaper than Meraki. For those customers that need high SLA.

Ubiq hardware is so cheap I just sell clients that have a higher SLA need spare equip. When you're quoting a stack of switches, quote a spare one. For a bit wireless deployment, include a spare AP or two.

Performance wise...I find them similar. I have Meraki equip, have used it in my house. The "LR" model Unifi AP beat it distance wise..but not fair...the Unifi was an LR model, the Meraki was the standard model. However...I don't rely on LR models, as 1/2 of the thing about wireless is the range of the clients. What counts with wireless is how it's setup and installed...less so much the hardware itself. Most people don't put enough APs in and make the mistake of cranking TX power to high.

 

[Pharaoh Man]

Thanks for the information everyone! Long story short, the client said that since everything is working there was no need to get a quote just yet. I think once I showed them a quick quote from Meraki's site of a comparable system they realized there was no need to look further at this time. I also explained to them that I use Ubiquiti in my shop and have many other clients using it as well. Given our history and my experience the product, they were convinced. The bit about being able to have a spare of each device on hand and STILL come in much cheaper seemed to make an impression as well.

 

[Markverhyden]

Yeah, if it's not broke don't fix it. I tell that to customers all the time.

 

[Sky-Knight]

If you can keep the controller working, Unifi products are amazing. That cloud key thing they've got to me is a joke...

And there are others, my business partner Jim for example... that darned controller and he just do NOT get along. He has a magical ability to blow the thing up. Whereas for myself I cannot imagine using anything else. The thing just works, even if I have to SSH into a remote wap and manually inform it so I can adopt it from the other side of the world.

Warning, I've learned the hard way never to use the LR WAPs... users getting full signal and not being able to use it because their phone has a crappy radio aren't happy users.

 

[YeOldeStonecat]

The Unifi controller runs a VERY sensitive database engine called MongoDB. It is the most intolerant engine of rude shutdowns of any database I've ever encountered. When I say "rude shutdown"..I mean, like pulling the power cord out from behind a server.

Would you pull the power cord out from behind some server running MS Exchange or SQL Server? Well..on good servers like HP Proliants running quality RAID controllers with lots of battery back cache..you can do that a few dozen times in a row and that server will boot up just fine. But on regular computers with no RAID controller...and not a lot of RAM, much of that..well...doesn't get shut down properly. And if you have a very sensitive database engine...like Mongo..well..rude shutdowns = database corruption.

This happens on Cloud Keys, or..if you roll your own with a little raspberri Pi, or...if you have it on a Windows desktop, or a Windows server, or an Ubuntu server...local hardware...or up virtualized in some like in Azure or Amazon or Rackspace or Linode or (insert whatever cloud host you like). Mongo does not like shutdowns. Mongo can get testy with upgrades too!

Been there, done that, bought the tee shirt! I've had it blow up on cloud controllers, seen it blow up on local workstations, and...early on (before I learned and knew better)...I've had a few Cloud Keys blow up.

What I did learn...repair is quite easy. SSH into the host and there is a "--repair" command you can run against the mongo DB. 99% of the time that works. A quick reboot (graceful) and it's up and running quickly.

If it doesn't work..you turn to your backups. You did enable the automatic backups, right? On the CK...use that little SD memory card and turn on the backups, I do weekly. Log into the local Cloud Key host (not the Unifi controller, but the web GUI on the CK itself)...and...restore the last backup. Gracefully reboot the CK...voila..back up and running. Wonderfully quick and easy! Worse comes to worse (I've not had one of these happen yet but heard others who have)...if the local web GUI of the CK isn't available...have the reset button pushed in for factory restore of the CK..log in, run through the quick setup..and then run a restore.

What I did learn...power down that CK gracefully. I prep the whole setup in my office....in the early days I'd just pull the CK out, unpower everything...bag it up and go onsite. Now...I gracefully shut down the CK before unplugging it all. And have the POE switches on battery backups.

We have around 85 or so Cloud Keys out there in our unifi.ubnt portal. And I've moved about half of our clients that were on our cloud controller...over to CKs or local Unifi controllers bound to our unifi.ubnt portal..and down to around 45 client sites left on our cloud controller at Linode. I've done the cloud unifi controller since Unifi first went multi-tenant and allowed such a thing to happen...years before the Cloud Keys came out. But I prefer on-prem controllers now. Cloud controller is too many eggs in one basket (client sites all under 1 controller)

 

[Sky-Knight]

All of my controllers are on Hyper-V Guests, either 2012 or 2016 server, and I've simply never had one go down dirty because well... I protect my servers. But what you're describing probably covers why Jim has such a horrible time. The only thing I've had to do was disable automatic upgrades on Java on the servers in question, because a Java upgrade while the controller running doesn't end well.

 

[YeOldeStonecat]

Yeah on servers there shouldn't be any reason to go down "dirty"...although I've had at least one tank from a Unifi upgrade. Granted that was back in the early days, I have had a Unifi upgrade go south in a long time (probably just cursed myself there). But yeah a nice little Ubuntu LTS server nested in ESX for a larger client is perfect. And many people don't know you can tie/bind any on-prem Unifi controller to the free unifi.ubnt portal you have just like CK's...and access them all, we even tied in our cloud controller to that so we can jump from one portal to another without leaving. Can't wait til UNMS matures more so it'll be as functional! As we also have a TON of edge equipment out there...having that contract with a large ISP in the area handling LANs for their VoIP roll outs!

In the forums we've pushed UBNT staff pretty hard for having a watchdog features on the CK firmware to automate a "--repair" to kick in when the CK's suffer a rude shutdown. Would be nice to have that auto healing feature...sorta like Windows would do an automatic checkdisk from a bad shutdown.

 

[Sky-Knight]

Yeah I know you can cloud integrate, but I actively avoid doing that. If I wanted an online control panel to be able to hack all my stuff, I wouldn't be so hostile to Meraki. I VPN to networks and manage from there.

 

[RoadRunner]

CK gave me headaches a few weeks back. I always just pulled it as well ;-)
Now have a student hostel running on it with vouchers and even installed an SSL cert on it so you don't get the security warning.
It's certainly not plug and play. Sometimes I wonder why you have to SSL into every AP to set inform or do strange shell stuff to rebuild databases. How hard can it be to put a button in the gui to run the repair command. But overall I'm getting the hang of it. We only use them now for wifi. Small clients with a few APs in our cloud controller hosted in our office and others with a cloud key.

 

[Sky-Knight]

You don't have to set inform, you just need a DNS server that services the local LAN. Which is why one of my favorite pairings is Untangle with Unifi WAPs, one DNS entry in Untangle later and BOOM, all unifi gear knows where to go and the controller lights up.