We performed a comparison between Cisco SD-WAN and Steelhead based on real PeerSpot user reviews.
Find out in this report how the two WAN Edge solutions compare in terms of features, pricing, service and support, easy of deployment, and ROI."The solution provides good consolidation, centralization, and manageability for edge routers."
"It is very simple to deploy. It's a point-and-click type of deployment, so it's fairly simple."
"Cisco SD-WAN is a stable solution."
"Installation is easy."
"Cisco SD-WAN is a highly stable solution."
"It's a complete solution with many security features."
"Cisco SD-WAN's best features are the development of network links, application control, and bandwidth monitoring."
"The most valuable feature is the ease of central management."
"Steelhead is stable, and it can even help you avoid service interruption in the event of a power outage. If your hardware fails, technical support will replace your device quickly."
"The compression of Riverbed is very powerful. It can also handle large quantities of traffic."
"Scalable data referencing is a great feature."
"TCP optimization... caches a particular TCP connection and the next time a user uses that connection he will reach the destination easily."
"The connectivity to speed is the valuable feature."
"SteelHead works from the application. I use it to optimize traffic from Amazon. It is mainly used for customers who need to increase the traffic to 33K. For other users, it has been more of an operation."
"I find the most valuable to be the compression and exchange replication."
"It is very easy to install the solution."
"Customers require features that are secure for endpoints, on-premises, and for the cloud."
"The installation is not easy. If you have experience and it is not your first time doing the installation, it can be easier."
"The solution is expensive and could be cheaper."
"The licensing model needs to be improved."
"The whole solution needs to be re-imagined. It's quite complex right now and really needs to be simplified to make it easier for those of us using it. It should offer more simplified management as well."
"The process of onboarding the vSmart, vBond, and vManage should be improved to make it easier to manage in general."
"Cisco SD-WAN is not as easy to deploy as the Meraki and FortiGate solutions. The zero-touch deployment could be a lot better. The deployment and initial setup are complicated and could be better."
"There should be more security features in the hybrid and on-premise deployments of Cisco SD-WAN. The cloud has most of the security features."
"If we load a primary firewall, the secondary firewall usually handles all the active connections, but in Riverbed, this isn't the case. We lose all the active connections at the moment of failure."
"One area for improvement is related to monitoring and visibility."
"The product should offer more integration capabilities."
"The application response time of the solution can be improved."
"Steelhead's handling of encrypted traffic could be improved because it requires some complex configuration to optimize encrypted traffic, especially when working with Microsoft protocols for mail servers and VPN services"
"They should include a network switch in a future release."
"The solution needs to have alert notifications."
"Application response time and network performance could be improved."
Cisco SD-WAN is ranked 2nd in WAN Edge with 86 reviews while Steelhead is ranked 15th in WAN Edge with 22 reviews. Cisco SD-WAN is rated 8.0, while Steelhead is rated 8.2. The top reviewer of Cisco SD-WAN writes "A solution for integrating services to enhance up-time, performance and lower costs". On the other hand, the top reviewer of Steelhead writes "Exceptionally stable and reliable but costly". Cisco SD-WAN is most compared with Fortinet FortiGate, Meraki SD-WAN, VMware SD-WAN, Juniper Session Smart Router and Versa Unified Secure Access Service Edge (SASE) Platform, whereas Steelhead is most compared with Fortinet FortiGate, Aruba EdgeConnect SD-WAN Platform, WAAS, Citrix SD-WAN and SteelConnect EX Enterprise SD-WAN. See our Cisco SD-WAN vs. Steelhead report.
See our list of best WAN Edge vendors.
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