Choosing between the Network Connect and the Junos Pulse clients

[Carlo.G]

We've just bought an Juniper SA4500.  We had seen the NC client in use by other companies, and bought the Juniper appliance intending to use NC.  But now we seem to have a choice of two different clients and no obvious criteria for choosing between them.   Each seems to have some functions that the other does not have, but so far none of those differences is really compelling for us.

Anybody know if Juniper intends to replace NC with Junos Pulse, or if the Pulse client is aimed mostly at handheld devices?

[muttbarker · Accepted solution]

Hey Carlo - 1st let me say I am just a little reseller - so I do not profess to speak for Juniper at all. Having said that I feel that Pulse is an absolute replacement for Network Connect.

It represents Juniper's universal client - running against all of Juniper's long term access solutions - UAC, SRX, SSL, WX. It is of course multi-platform with the release of the Apple IOS mobile, Android.... I think it is fair to say that it will make it's way to the OS/X platform sometime in 2011.

For a version 1 product is maps fairly well to Network Connect. There are some holes in tems of the current featue set vs NC (the Migration Guide has a good comparision chart) I would be confident that they will be addressed in future releases.

It also has pretty nice GUI from the user point of view. My customers find it quite cool and as they want to see the same user interface on their mobile device as on their PC I am getting a lot of push to get it up and running.

Short term, other than mobile devices I can't think of a single reason to migrate to it, other than it is bright and shiny. Long term I think it is the future user interface for all remote access - all platforms (alas excepting ScreenOS which is being left behind)...... Just my .02 cents.

[zanyterp]

As muttbarker said, they are similar at this time

Unfortunately, as you see, there is not much difference in the two clients. 

Pulse has benefits if you are wanting to have users connect all the time (launch); it can help with having VPN on or not (based on location); and there are others, as you know, that are different between the two.

If this is not important for what you are looking at then Network Connect can be used without an issue.

It really comes down to which is going to be best for your users; there is no "right way" for the two L3 clients