We performed a comparison between Prisma 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."Prisma SD-WAN is intuitive. We have a better idea of the different tools we can use and jump between the menus quickly."
"When it comes to supporting large, complex, network architectures, it's a very simple architecture. The main component is the fabric. It's very easy to troubleshoot if there is an issue happening in the underlying network."
"From the main controller, we can administer the customer's devices, QoS, network, and traffic. We can monitor it and we can change and create policies as well as upgrade the software. We can totally control a customer's network from one site, the Prisma SD-WAN portal."
"The gateway is available on the cloud which allows you access from anywhere and still connects to your home gateway."
"I like the link monitoring and analytics. These are the features that set Prisma apart from other products. Prisma works well with large, complex networks. One of my clients is a top bank in the United States, and Prisma has performed well for that customer."
"If the MPLS goes down, there is a really smooth transition for a branch site to take traffic over the Internet. It will advertise the routes of that site in a jiffy."
"Prisma supports all of the applications we're currently using."
"Prisma's analytics provide a lot of valuable data. I like the internet health chart that shows latency, dropped packets, MOS for data quality, etc. It also runs a continuous speed test in the background. I've used it multiple times to troubleshoot internet connections when the service provider has attempted to claim nothing is wrong with the circuit. It gives me data to send them showing we're not getting the speed we should, or there is constant packet loss."
"It is very easy to install the solution."
"The connectivity to speed is the valuable feature."
"I find the most valuable to be the compression and exchange replication."
"The most valuable feature of Steelhead is its optimization capabilities."
"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."
"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."
"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."
"Customer support is our biggest pain point. The quality of support has gone down a little since we initially deployed this product. I don't know if this is due to turnover at Palo Alto or a lack of training. It is now taking one or two days to get an initial response that says, "Hey, we've looked into this, can you pull this data for us?" In the past, we'd immediately get a response."
"I'd like to see them move more towards CASB."
"There are two parallel things that we want Palo Alto to work on. First, customers want a unified appliance that does the work of all firewalls in addition to SD-WAN. Second, the cloud presence should be completely automated. If I purchase the SASE architecture, I shouldn't worry about deployments in Prisma Access or on Prisma SD-WAN. It should be deployed in one go."
"Prisma could be a little cheaper."
"Prisma SD-WAN's technical support should be improved."
"The tool needs to work on price and complexity."
"Event correlation and analysis capabilities do not help minimize the number of alarms from a single event. That is the problem. We are getting a lot of incidents, and there is some issue with the correlation. That is still a drawback."
"We are incorporating their zone-based firewalls. Prisma SD-WAN has limited documentation on how it manipulates traffic, e.g., how it is interacting with TCP and UDP. We recently had some traffic that was black holing. We literally had to do packet captures to see that the new zone-based firewall, which runs on top of Prisma SD-WAN, was causing issues."
"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."
"They should include a network switch in a future release."
"Application response time and network performance could be improved."
"One area for improvement is related to monitoring and visibility."
"The solution needs to have alert notifications."
"The application response time of the solution can be improved."
"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."
"The product should offer more integration capabilities."
Prisma SD-WAN is ranked 7th in WAN Edge with 11 reviews while Steelhead is ranked 15th in WAN Edge with 22 reviews. Prisma SD-WAN is rated 8.6, while Steelhead is rated 8.2. The top reviewer of Prisma SD-WAN writes "A stable tool that offers a good uptime and ensures a return on investment". On the other hand, the top reviewer of Steelhead writes "Exceptionally stable and reliable but costly". Prisma SD-WAN is most compared with Prisma Access by Palo Alto Networks, Cisco SD-WAN, Meraki SD-WAN and Fortinet FortiGate, whereas Steelhead is most compared with Fortinet FortiGate, Aruba EdgeConnect SD-WAN Platform, WAAS, Citrix SD-WAN and Vcinity UltimateX RadicalX. See our Prisma SD-WAN vs. Steelhead report.
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