Software Alternatives & Reviews

Cisco DNA Center VS RANCID

Compare Cisco DNA Center VS RANCID and see what are their differences

Cisco DNA Center logo Cisco DNA Center

Find and resolve network issues with Cisco DNA Center. Provides software-based network automation and assurance. Control and manage intent-based networks.

RANCID logo RANCID

RANCID - Really Awesome New Cisco confIg Differ.
  • Cisco DNA Center Landing page
    Landing page //
    2023-08-17
  • RANCID Landing page
    Landing page //
    2019-04-08

Cisco DNA Center videos

Overview of Cisco DNA Center

More videos:

  • Tutorial - How to use Cisco DNA Center Appliance for Assurance and SD-Access
  • Review - Overview of Cisco DNA Center Assurance

RANCID videos

Puppet Perspectives - Rancid "Troublemaker" Album Review (feat. Dan)

More videos:

  • Review - Rancid Life Won't Wait Album Review
  • Review - Review: Rancid “Trouble Maker”

Category Popularity

0-100% (relative to Cisco DNA Center and RANCID)
Monitoring Tools
100 100%
0% 0
Network Automation
0 0%
100% 100
Security
100 100%
0% 0
Configuration Auditing
0 0%
100% 100

User comments

Share your experience with using Cisco DNA Center and RANCID. For example, how are they different and which one is better?
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Social recommendations and mentions

Based on our record, RANCID seems to be more popular. It has been mentiond 9 times since March 2021. We are tracking product recommendations and mentions on various public social media platforms and blogs. They can help you identify which product is more popular and what people think of it.

Cisco DNA Center mentions (0)

We have not tracked any mentions of Cisco DNA Center yet. Tracking of Cisco DNA Center recommendations started around Mar 2021.

RANCID mentions (9)

  • Cisco switch backup/restore?
    A decade ago I worked for a shop that needed to routinely back up 100+ cisco switches and routers and refused to pay for solarwinds. I setup a light weight freebsd vm to run this open source software: https://shrubbery.net/rancid/ (Rancid: Really Awesome New Cisco config Differ) and set it to scrape all the equipment every 12 errors. Source: over 1 year ago
  • Version control for network configs
    Anyways Rancid does support cvs, svn, and git. Though I have only used it with cvs. Basically what it does, is checks out the configuration, downloads the configuration with other information about the state of the device, commits the configurations(which only changed ones will be in the latest check-ins, and then it can send an email of the changes. Source: almost 2 years ago
  • Management Software for Cisco Devices?
    RANCID - Really Awesome New Cisco confIg Differ monitors a router's (or more generally a device's) configuration, including software and hardware (cards, serial numbers, etc) and uses CVS (Concurrent Version System), Subversion or Git to maintain history of changes. Source: almost 2 years ago
  • What all are you doing with Ansible?
    If you want to use this as an opportunity to learn Ansible, or you don't want to add another tool to the stack, this is a fine use case. Otherwise, I would consider using either RANCID or Oxidized for configuration backup. Source: about 2 years ago
  • Starting with python at 30
    Before I knew about RANCiD (https://shrubbery.net/rancid), I wrote my own Perl application to telnet into a Foundry Networks switch and TFTP its configuration to my computer so I could back it up. At a future employer, I rewrote another coworkers Perl application that collected SNMP values from devices and did stuff with it (forget what all I did then). Source: about 2 years ago
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What are some alternatives?

When comparing Cisco DNA Center and RANCID, you can also consider the following products

SolarWinds Network Configuration Manager - SolarWinds is a leading provider of powerful and affordable IT infrastructure management software. Make IT look easy.

Unimus - Unimus is a Network Automation and Configuration management (NCM) solution designed for fast deployment network-wide and ease of use. Unimus does not require learning any abstraction or templating languages, and does not require any coding skills.

Nmap - Nmap Free Security Scanner, Port Scanner, & Network Exploration Tool. Download open source software for Linux, Windows, UNIX, FreeBSD, etc.

Oxidized - configuration backup software (IOS, JunOS) - silly attempt at rancid

Cisco Network Assistant - Cisco Network Assistant simplifies wired and wireless network management, and provides critical product information using Cisco Active Advisor.

GenieACS - A fast and lightweight TR-069 Auto Configuration Server (ACS)