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Cloudflare vs Steelhead comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive Summary

Review summaries and opinions

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:
 

ROI

Sentiment score
6.2
Cloudflare's services enhanced security and efficiency, resulting in significant ROI, cost savings, and improved WordPress performance for businesses.
Sentiment score
4.8
Steelhead optimized WAN usage, saving £50,000 in costs, improving bandwidth efficiency, and enhancing user experience without extra investments.
For the small project I was working on, using the basic tier provided a huge improvement at zero cost.
Security Specialist at a tech services company with 1,001-5,000 employees
In terms of return on investment with Cloudflare, it costs my time to set them up, but basically once they're set up, it's done.
Owner at Hga consulting
The return on investment for me is significant as time is the critical aspect.
Senior Network and Security Expert at a financial services firm with 201-500 employees
Without Steelhead, we would have spent much more on bandwidth costs.
Director, Head of Networks at MUFG, EMEA
 

Customer Service

Sentiment score
6.9
Cloudflare's support is responsive and knowledgeable, with varying experiences depending on the plan and need for faster escalation.
Sentiment score
7.0
Steelhead's customer service is efficient and knowledgeable, but local support and handling complex issues need improvement.
Cloudflare does not offer hands-on technical support to fix customer problems but rather a self-service model.
Senior Consultant CDN at a comms service provider with 10,001+ employees
I would rate the technical support with Cloudflare as excellent every time I've had to call them.
Owner at Hga consulting
We use other solutions where support is available through Slack channels and is more interactive, with someone responding within a couple of minutes or seconds.
General Manager at bKash Limited
Steelhead's support is generally good for typical issues yet can be time-consuming during complex problem-solving across teams, particularly for Active Directory integration.
Director, Head of Networks at MUFG, EMEA
I have no issues with technical support from Riverbed.
Senior manager at a tech services company with 201-500 employees
Riverbed's customer service and technical support would be rated an eight.
Commercial Manager at IT-Experience
 

Scalability Issues

Sentiment score
7.9
Cloudflare excels in scalability, supporting seamless transitions and performance during high-traffic periods, highly rated by users.
Sentiment score
6.9
Feedback on Steelhead scaling varies, with easy deployment praised, but licensing and bandwidth limitations noted by some users.
It is a SaaS tool, but the fact that they have workloads deployed across the world proves that it is a highly scalable tool.
Principal Cyber Prevent and Defense Engineer at a comms service provider with 1,001-5,000 employees
The tool offers very good performance, even during high-traffic periods.
Engineer at SITMEXICO
Cloudflare's scalability is quite good; it is very easy to scale whenever we want to include multiple domains.
Senior Network and Security Expert at a financial services firm with 201-500 employees
If a customer has 1 GB traffic, they will only be able to utilize 600 MB of traffic with Steelhead.
Senior manager at a tech services company with 201-500 employees
It allows us to maximize use from our MPLS providers by handling traffic efficiently across phased deployments.
Director, Head of Networks at MUFG, EMEA
 

Stability Issues

Sentiment score
7.5
Cloudflare is reliable with high stability ratings, minimal issues, improved network connectivity, and praised fast DNS services.
Sentiment score
8.6
Steelhead offers reliable network optimization with stability, smooth upgrades, and effective technical support for seamless traffic flow and high availability.
The service is very stable with no impacts during high-traffic periods.
Engineer at SITMEXICO
Cloudflare's reliability and uptime has met my expectations; it has been quite good in general.
Senior Network and Security Expert at a financial services firm with 201-500 employees
It's quite stable and provides all necessary alerts if something is wrong.
Director, Head of Networks at MUFG, EMEA
For instance, even if there is a power failure, Riverbed still works.
Senior manager at a tech services company with 201-500 employees
Steelhead helps significantly with large data transfers.
Commercial Manager at IT-Experience
 

Room For Improvement

Users suggest improvements in Cloudflare's features, pricing, support, analytics, documentation, and partner relations for better service experience.
Steelhead users desire improved traffic handling, integration, scalability, security features, intuitive setup, and comprehensive monitoring amid cost concerns.
Customers do not have options to modify any configuration parameters in Cloudflare, whereas other competitor solutions, such as F5 Distributed Cloud, allow customers to tune configurations according to their requirements.
General Manager at bKash Limited
What Cloudflare is doing internally is that it is stepping ahead in areas like detection and protection.
Principal Cyber Prevent and Defense Engineer at a comms service provider with 1,001-5,000 employees
Cloudflare could be improved by introducing a mid-tier pricing option.
Security Specialist at a tech services company with 1,001-5,000 employees
Steelhead is very expensive, and the vendor should work on handling Oracle type of traffic better.
Senior manager at a tech services company with 201-500 employees
It would help if Riverbed could prevent such drastic impacts during updates.
Director, Head of Networks at MUFG, EMEA
It could still be useful in places with satellite communications, such as the south of Chile, or in the mining industry.
Commercial Manager at IT-Experience
 

Setup Cost

Cloudflare provides cost-effective, feature-rich plans for varying traffic needs, offering significant value compared to competitors like Akamai.
Steelhead is costly but valued for performance and support, with complex licensing and varied pricing by usage.
I find it to be cheap.
Engineer at SITMEXICO
The tool is a premium product, so it is very expensive.
Principal Cyber Prevent and Defense Engineer at a comms service provider with 1,001-5,000 employees
However, the enterprise price for small projects is a bit high.
Security Specialist at a tech services company with 1,001-5,000 employees
Buying the hardware initially is costly, but yearly maintenance and licenses are not as expensive.
Director, Head of Networks at MUFG, EMEA
Steelhead is considered an expensive solution in our country.
Commercial Manager at IT-Experience
 

Valuable Features

Cloudflare offers superior caching, DNS management, and security, enhancing performance, global reach, and domain management with innovative features.
Steelhead enhances WAN efficiency with data compression, TCP optimization, and caching, benefiting performance, bandwidth, and cloud migration cost savings.
The solution has been able to compare it to the market, and I think the product has taken great strides in automating quite a bit of things, and they use a lot of AI.
Principal Cyber Prevent and Defense Engineer at a comms service provider with 1,001-5,000 employees
Most of our DNS records that are presented to the internet are proxied whenever possible, providing another layer of defense from our perspective.
Senior Security Engineer at ManpowerGroup
Cloudflare has positively impacted our organization by giving us flexibility to manage the DNS part, being quite fast, and allowing us to manage everything from a single dashboard.
Senior Network and Security Expert at a financial services firm with 201-500 employees
Functions like acting as an NTP server, DNS, DHCP, and auto-optimization mode enhance efficiency.
Director, Head of Networks at MUFG, EMEA
My actual traffic is around 2 GB, but I purchased a link from the ISP for only around 700 to 800 MB. All the prices that need to be paid monthly to the ISP are saved, which is a significant saving for my company after using Riverbed.
Senior manager at a tech services company with 201-500 employees
Steelhead's most valuable feature is its ability to hash and send only the important parts of the information, avoiding the resending of data.
Commercial Manager at IT-Experience
 

Categories and Ranking

Cloudflare
Ranking in WAN Optimization
4th
Average Rating
8.6
Reviews Sentiment
7.0
Number of Reviews
79
Ranking in other categories
CDN (1st), Web Application Firewall (WAF) (9th), Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) Protection (2nd), Managed DNS (1st), Domain Name System (DNS) Security (5th), Cloud Security Posture Management (CSPM) (15th)
Steelhead
Ranking in WAN Optimization
1st
Average Rating
8.2
Reviews Sentiment
7.0
Number of Reviews
26
Ranking in other categories
WAN Edge (13th)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of August 2026, in the WAN Optimization category, the mindshare of Cloudflare is 4.2%, up from 1.0% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Steelhead is 15.6%, up from 13.4% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
WAN Optimization Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
Steelhead15.6%
Cloudflare4.2%
Other80.2%
WAN Optimization
 

Featured Reviews

M.A. Faisal - PeerSpot reviewer
General Manager at bKash Limited
Advanced protection has secured critical web workloads and provides clear traffic visibility
From a security perspective, there remains a security loophole, as some browsers in the market can bypass the Turnstile solution, which requires approximately 40 seconds to do so. From a performance perspective, this is acceptable. We also tried Google reCAPTCHA, and that can also be bypassed. From a security perspective, I would say neither solution is completely secured. Regarding uptime, we have faced a couple of incidents due to Cloudflare in recent years, so I cannot say we receive 100% uptime for our region. We sometimes face challenges, including downtime and other issues. As a result, we are not receiving 100% uptime from Cloudflare's solution. Since most of our customers are in this region, we need alternatives. We need something more competitive than Cloudflare. Unfortunately, in Bangladesh, Cloudflare has three points of presence already, and we cannot find any other solution provider in Bangladesh as an alternative, which presents another challenge. Competitor solutions have more attack signatures, which ensure better security compared to Cloudflare's predefined configurations. Customers do not have options to modify any configuration parameters in Cloudflare, whereas other competitor solutions, such as F5 Distributed Cloud, allow customers to tune configurations according to their requirements. Cloudflare could improve in this area. Additionally, regarding visibility, Cloudflare has static visibility, but they could adopt dynamic graph features for their customers.
Chaudhary Muhammad Moez Manzar - PeerSpot reviewer
Senior manager at a tech services company with 201-500 employees
Reduces operational costs through bandwidth optimization but struggles with high traffic licensing and complex deployments
The logs in Steelhead are fantastic. There is a deep level of logs such as top 10 docker and top 50 docker. I can check from the top 50 docker which type of application is optimizing well and which type of traffic is not optimized. Steelhead provides logs and percentage levels, which is good. I can see any type of log report, report security, different types of report availability, but it is not customizable. Overall, this is a good feature. Steelhead provides real-time optimization with graphs and tables on real-time optimization, informing us packet by packet including port, source IP, destination IP, and destination port number. This reporting and real-time monitoring is fantastic, although I faced a problem in Oracle. Steelhead mainly saves the money that needs to be paid to ISPs. My actual traffic is around 2 GB, but I purchased a link from the ISP for only around 700 to 800 MB. All the prices that need to be paid monthly to the ISP are saved, which is a significant saving for my company after using Riverbed.
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Comms Service Provider
10%
Financial Services Firm
10%
Manufacturing Company
8%
Computer Software Company
8%
Construction Company
16%
Manufacturing Company
16%
Outsourcing Company
10%
Financial Services Firm
10%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business46
Midsize Enterprise11
Large Enterprise26
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business5
Midsize Enterprise7
Large Enterprise14
 

Questions from the Community

Which is the best DDoS protection solution for a big ISP for monitoring and mitigating?
Cloudflare. We are moving from Akamai prolexic to Cloudflare. Cloudflare anycast network outperforms Akamai static GRE tunnels. We have decreased site load times on Mobile 3G from 8 to 1,6 seconds ...
Which would you choose - Cloudflare DNS or Quad9?
Cloudflare DNS is a very fast, very reliable public DNS resolver. It is an enterprise-grade authoritative DNS service that offers great redundancy and advanced security with built-in unmetered and ...
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Cloudflare DNS?
The pricing, setup cost, and licensing for Cloudflare are a bit on the higher side overall.
What is the best network monitoring software for large enterprises?
We just did an assessment for our 47 datacenters around North America. The top two enterprise-level network monitoring solutions were ExtraHop first, Riverbed SteelCenter second. Their negotiated c...
What is your primary use case for Riverbed Steelhead?
I am currently working with Riverbed for replication between PR to DR for synchronization purposes, and for WAN optimization between replication from one data center to another data center. The mai...
What advice do you have for others considering Riverbed Steelhead?
Application performance may improve with Steelhead, but it varies application to application. Some applications, such as Oracle traffic, are not working well, but other traffic performs fine. The t...
 

Comparisons

 

Also Known As

Cloudflare DNS
RIverbed Steelhead
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Trusted by over 9,000,000 Internet Applications and APIs, including Nasdaq, Zendesk, Crunchbase, Steve Madden, OkCupid, Cisco, Quizlet, Discord and more.
ElAraby, SFK Leblanc, Bobst Group, Northwest Pipe Company, Halkbank, Tradebridge, EFG Hermes
Find out what your peers are saying about Cloudflare vs. Steelhead and other solutions. Updated: August 2026.
909,725 professionals have used our research since 2012.