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 is good to use and easy to handle and manage from the centralized location or from the cloud."
"The cloud environment, including cloud security integration, is very valuable because of the many API integrations with the SD-WAN."
"The first part that we like is that we can reuse certain hardware, which is a valuable asset. You can use hardware SKUs that already exist in the network. The second part that we like is the integration with the cloud and the measurement of the cloud's quality. These are the two values that this solution gives as compared to other implementations that we have seen."
"The most valuable features of Cisco SD-WAN are reliability and scalability."
"The most valuable features of Cisco SD-WAN include the DIA and its integration with Cisco Umbrella for DNS security."
"Encryption, which is native to the solution, is a valuable feature. Also, central management, onboarding of devices, QS, and routing applications are all okay."
"Customizing SD-WAN is very easy because you can define two colors. You can define two different operators. You can deploy a partial mesh, a full mesh, or hub-and-spoke totally differently. If you want to do this on a DMVPN solution, that's really hard."
"Cisco is an industry leader, so customers have a high level of trust with the brand more-so than with some newcomers that might have some more revolutionary solutions, but no name recognition."
"The most valuable feature of Steelhead is its optimization capabilities."
"The compression of Riverbed is very powerful. It can also handle large quantities of traffic."
"I find the most valuable to be the compression and exchange replication."
"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."
"It is very easy to install the solution."
"The connectivity to speed is the valuable feature."
"TCP optimization... caches a particular TCP connection and the next time a user uses that connection he will reach the destination easily."
"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."
"When it comes to adding more security features, you need to add more RAM."
"Better pricing and greater security would be nice to see."
"I would recommend better-integrated management."
"We have found that their SD-WAN has a lot of scope for improvement."
"What I find should be improved is the possibility of really separating the software layer from the hardware layer since today the current offer is not well adopted by the service providers"
"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."
"Since most user-data is going through the solution, we are concerned about security, as all the information is in the cloud and not on-premises. The user data authentification should be higher to better prevent malicious attacks."
"Compresson deduplication should be added."
"One area for improvement is related to monitoring and visibility."
"They should include a network switch in a future release."
"The solution needs to have alert notifications."
"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."
"I would like to see improvement in the solution’s configuration and protocol aspects. We have got some configurations that are not set. I would also like to simplify the call detection of some protocols."
"Application response time and network performance could be improved."
"The product should offer more integration capabilities."
"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"
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.
We monitor all WAN Edge reviews to prevent fraudulent reviews and keep review quality high. We do not post reviews by company employees or direct competitors. We validate each review for authenticity via cross-reference with LinkedIn, and personal follow-up with the reviewer when necessary.
