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."Huge companies use SD-WAN. It is largely scalable."
"Cisco products are rated to handle the heat and are very rugged, making them a good corporate standard."
"I like the feature that lets you transfer from old devices to new devices without changing the hardware and subscription."
"It's a complete solution with many security features."
"The solution can scale. We haven't had any issues doing so."
"The product helps to aggregate network links. The tool increases security and makes it possible for you to have remote workers."
"I have found the solution's main features are its ability to be customized, network traffic classification, and has a wide range of features that can be set."
"The technical support is very responsive."
"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."
"TCP optimization... caches a particular TCP connection and the next time a user uses that connection he will reach the destination easily."
"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."
"It is very easy to install the solution."
"Scalable data referencing is a great 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."
"Some configurations or procedures could be more user-friendly. Adding a bandwidth management feature would make Cisco SD-WAN more scalable and less resource-intensive."
"I would like them to add some more SD-WAN ports. We have seen one implementation where there were four ISPs. Currently, we have a maximum of two ports for ISP in this device. Therefore, we cannot connect directly, and we need other switches. There should be some option to have more than two ports for SD-WAN."
"It is the best solution that I ever had, but there might be something better than this in the future."
"The UI has room for improvement."
"The Cisco way of thinking is to create umbrella-like solutions. I would prefer it if this solution was separate from the entire monstrous Cisco portfolio."
"The security features could be improved."
"The solution could be a bit cheaper."
"It would be very helpful if we had better access to a knowledge base, or online documentation, to help both us and our customers learn to use this solution."
"The product should offer more integration capabilities."
"One area for improvement is related to monitoring and visibility."
"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"
"The solution needs to have alert notifications."
"They should include a network switch in a future release."
"Application response time and network performance could be improved."
"The application response time of the solution can be improved."
"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."
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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