Exinda vs Steelhead comparison

GFI and Riverbed are both solutions in the WAN Optimization category. GFI is ranked #4, while Riverbed is ranked #3 with an average rating of 9.0. GFI holds a 4.5% mindshare in WO, compared to Riverbed’s 13.7% mindshare. Additionally, 87% of GFI users are willing to recommend the solution, compared to 95% of Riverbed users who would recommend it.

Exinda

Read 9 Exinda reviews

365 Views
68 Comparison Views

87% willing to recommend

Steelhead

Read 25 Steelhead reviews

572 Views
281 Comparison Views

95% willing to recommend

Exinda

Steelhead

Comparison Buyer's Guide

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Executive SummaryUpdated on Sep 10, 2024

Steelhead and Exinda compete in the WAN optimization market. Despite both having strong offerings, users favor the comprehensive feature set of Exinda, suggesting it is worth its cost, while Steelhead is often preferred for its support and pricing.

Features: Steelhead is valued for efficient data compression, application acceleration, and reliable support. Exinda excels with granular bandwidth management, real-time monitoring capabilities, and advanced analytics.

Room for Improvement: Steelhead users suggest improvements in reporting capabilities, scalability, and software updates. Exinda users desire more intuitive configuration options, enhanced technical support, and better user interface design.

Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: Steelhead is noted for its straightforward deployment and reliable customer support. Exinda offers complex deployment but compensates with superior customization options and better network optimization. Users highlight the need for better deployment documentation for Exinda.

Pricing and ROI: Steelhead is seen as more cost-effective, with a faster ROI due to lower initial setup costs. Exinda, although higher in price, is justified by potent features and network optimization that deliver significant ROI. Differences in pricing strategies affect user demand, with Steelhead being favorable for budget-conscious buyers while Exinda attracts those prioritizing advanced capabilities.

To learn more, read our detailed Exinda vs. Steelhead Report (Updated: June 2025).

Buyer's Guide

Exinda vs. Steelhead

June 2025

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Review summaries and opinions

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

Categories and Ranking

Exinda

Ranking in WAN Optimization

4th

Average Rating

8.8

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

No ranking in other categories

Steelhead

Ranking in WAN Optimization

3rd

Average Rating

8.4

Reviews Sentiment

7.6

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

WAN Edge (14th)

Mindshare comparison

As of June 2025, in the WAN Optimization category, the mindshare of Exinda is 4.5%, up from 3.8% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Steelhead is 13.7%, down from 18.4% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.

WAN Optimization

Featured Reviews

Marek Jaworski

Senior Engineer, Team Lead, Network Operations at a comms service provider with 1,001-5,000 employees

Allows us to have better control over our network by shaping traffic more gently

There might be room for improvement in the speed and throughput of some of their devices. They're getting a bit slow on some of the bigger devices. It would be helpful if there were some sort of an ISP model. Also, while I don't think it would be possible for them to do, it would be better if they had the Citrix support and the visualization to visualize your network. Besides that, it fits its purpose as a shaper and accelerator. Some people would say things like, "Add a firewall to it," but I disagree. I think a firewall's a firewall, and Exinda's a shaper and accelerator.

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Raj Metkar

Director, Head of Networks at MUFG, EMEA

Auto-optimization mode enhance efficiency & bandwidth saving, best layer 7 QoS shaping policy can be achieved with ease

There are several features specific to branches, like keeping data hot and active on Steelhead devices. These features prevent unnecessary data travel across the international MPLS. Additionally, functions like acting as an NTP server, DNS, DHCP for branches and auto-optimization mode enhance efficiency along with really good QoS for bandwidth shaping.

Read full review

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"The most valuable feature is the ability to create policies where we can tailor them to the customer. It enables us to prioritize apps and users for bandwidth."

"The most valuable feature is the ability to provide very granular classes of service. That's important because it allows us to prioritize certain traffic types over others, to a very granular level."

"Exinda can show you which product uses how much throughput and can help you manage it."

"The most valuable feature is the ability to manage the traffic at the application layer. It makes things a lot easier. We're not digging for port numbers and IP addresses and different services... It makes us far more responsive in our ability to do things and speed up the process. We're a very small shop, so having something that's straightforward and easy to use is a big help."

"The most valuable features are the shaper, accelerator, and the reporting... it will shape the traffic better than, for example, a Cisco, because it's more gentle on the shaping side of things. Suppose you were selling a 20-meg link. Because you can shape to the nth degree of traffic, the 20-meg link feels like about a 30 to 40-meg link."

"It has the ability to prioritize, providing an automatic optimization. I can put it in a hierarchy and know that certain devices will be prioritized over others. It is able to identify the traffic. It can pick out whether if its a Zoom meeting (or something like that), then it's able to put that somewhere in the hierarchy based on the traffic type."

"The connectivity to speed is the valuable feature."

"Scalable data referencing is a great feature."

"One of our most valuable features is Steelhead's cloud migration optimization. Moving to the cloud helped optimize our workflow, improving performance for end-users."

"Steelhead's most valuable feature is its ability to hash and send only the important parts of the information, avoiding the resending of data."

"I find the most valuable to be the compression and exchange replication."

"It is very easy to install the solution."

"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."

"There are several features specific to branches, like keeping data hot and active on Steelhead devices. These features prevent unnecessary data travel across the international LAN."

More Steelhead pros

Cons

"In terms of improvement, one thing that has always frustrated me about it is that when you look at real-time monitoring, you can only filter it by IP address. You can't filter it by anything else. It would be good if we could filter by VLAN."

"It should improve the quality of service. It can improve their connection to the internet and your IP."

"The updating of applications that the system knows about could be a little quicker. For example, Zoom had been out for a while, but it took a while for it to show up as an application that Exinda could natively handle. We had to write some things in order to handle Zoom, initially."

"What I don't like is the fact that I haven't purchased the overall management interface. That is the interface that allows you to manage multiple Exindas. Personally, I think Exinda should provide that for free. I think that if you buy more and more Exinda boxes, you shouldn't then have to incur a charge for the overall management software. While I can manage each Exinda separately, if they provided me with the overall management platform for free that would probably encourage me to buy more appliances."

"There might be room for improvement in the speed and throughput of some of their devices. They're getting a bit slow on some of the bigger devices. It would be helpful if there were some sort of an ISP model."

"A lot of working with this solution is really intuitive. I have picked it up mostly on my own. I'm sure that there are some things that maybe I hadn't thought of or really hadn't considered, and I think it would be good just to promote some day courses. I don't really see a whole lot that comes out for Exinda as far as training or informational sessions through our normal resellers. It would be cool to know more about the solution by utilizing educational resources or even have Exinda promoted a bit better."

"Steelhead is considered an expensive solution in our country. On a scale of one to ten for expense, it would be rated an eight."

"Application response time and network performance could 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"

"One area for improvement is related to monitoring and visibility."

"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."

"The product should offer more integration capabilities."

"There was a significant challenge when moving from an older version to a newer one due to changed quality of service policies."

More Steelhead cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

"It is priced well for the market, for what it needs to do."

"The pricing and licensing are pretty fair and really competitive. There are other SD-WAN solutions that are pretty costly because they build in a service where they'll manage it for you, which is really great. I don't know if Exinda has that option as well. However, we are a small shop and cost-conscious. For things like this, we are accustomed to self-managing and this solution suits us just fine. For a tool that gives you, like the graphs and reporting, it has a fair price point."

"Across our 12 data centers, we spend around $150k annually."

"The solution is expensive and the service contacts are costly too. The cost of the device makes the value proposition borderline acceptable for us. The service contract fees we pay is approximately $30,000 annually."

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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Computer Software Company

24%

Real Estate/Law Firm

13%

Government

11%

Financial Services Firm

11%

Computer Software Company

19%

Manufacturing Company

13%

Government

11%

Financial Services Firm

10%

Company Size

By reviewers

Large Enterprise

Midsize Enterprise

Small Business

Questions from the Community

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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...

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What do you like most about Riverbed Steelhead?

One of our most valuable features is Steelhead's cloud migration optimization. Moving to the cloud helped optimize our workflow, improving performance for end-users.

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What is your primary use case for Riverbed Steelhead?

In the past, we have sold a lot of Steelhead ( /products/steelhead-reviews ) for retail companies, insurance companies, some finance companies, and some engineering companies. Steelhead ( /products...

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Comparisons

No data available

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Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

Exinda

June 2025

Download Exinda product report

Buyer's Guide

Steelhead

May 2025

Download Steelhead product report

Also Known As

No data available

RIverbed Steelhead

Overview

Exinda is designed to help Network Managers solve pressing IT problems in today's complex network. Our award winning technology combines interactive analytics, an intelligent recommendation engine and powerful actions like shaping and optimization, all in one solution.

GFI

Steelhead is the leading network optimization and application performance solution chosen by over 30,000 organizations worldwide. The performance of networks and applications directly impacts business productivity. Riverbed draws from nearly two decades of experience in driving network and application performance over Wide Area Networks with its flagship offering, SteelHead. SteelHead delivers the underlying technology that helps enterprises of all sizes maximize the efficiency and performance of the networks and applications used to run modern business.

SteelHead is proven to dramatically speed up the performance of applications anywhere in the organization while delivering the best end-user experience even under sub optimal network conditions. Reduce bandwidth utilization by up to 95%, deferring costly network bandwidth upgrades. Increase performance by up to 100x for on-premises applications.

Riverbed

Sample Customers

UMass Dartmouth, MLB Network, R&R Ice Cream, Savills, Manhattan School of Music, Blum Shapiro, Cincinnati Public Schools, City of Richmond, Genting Casinos, The Salvation Army, VoIP Unlimited, Frontier Silicon, Lakeshore Toltest, CTI Foods

ElAraby, SFK Leblanc, Bobst Group, Northwest Pipe Company, Halkbank, Tradebridge, EFG Hermes

Buyer's Guide

Exinda vs. Steelhead

June 2025

Free Report: Exinda vs. Steelhead

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