Calculator · WAN
3-year TCO for MPLS vs SD-WAN vs hybrid — circuits, hardware, licensing, services, ops. Get the per-site cost breakdown and break-even month.
SD-WAN business cases live or die on one number: the blended circuit cost per site. Most MPLS savings come from replacing one MPLS tail with two internet circuits and an SD-WAN box. This model gives you the real shape of the deal across 3 years.
Compare the 3 scenarios side by side. Break-even is when cumulative SD-WAN spend crosses below cumulative MPLS. In most mid-market deals, break-even happens in year 1 if broadband replaces MPLS; hybrid rarely beats pure MPLS on cost but wins on resilience and agility.
MPLS is priced by bandwidth, SD-WAN is priced by the edge box + a flat license. As sites scale up bandwidth (hello video and SaaS), MPLS cost climbs linearly while SD-WAN stays flat. The second lever is circuit diversity: SD-WAN lets you run two low-cost broadband circuits active/active, which is both cheaper and more resilient than one fat MPLS tail. Platform pricing varies — Meraki is simpler and includes the controller, Viptela is more granular but needs vManage infrastructure. Fortinet bundles FortiGate NGFW, which can offset a firewall refresh.
For most branches: 1x cable/fiber (200-500Mbps) + 1x LTE/5G or second fiber. Avoid two circuits from the same ISP — correlated outages defeat the point.
Often yes, as one leg of a hybrid core. Many designs keep MPLS for DC-to-DC and regional aggregation, with broadband SD-WAN at branches.
For <100 sites, usually yes. Above that, Viptela's per-site pricing and feature granularity tend to win.
MPLS baseline ~$2.7M/3yr. Full SD-WAN (dual broadband) ~$1.9M/3yr. Break-even month 14. Added resilience is the bonus.
Hybrid design preferred. SD-WAN cost within 5% of MPLS but with 2x bandwidth headroom and SaaS breakout for M365.