We performed a comparison between Forcepoint Next Generation Firewall 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 feature that we like the most about Forcepoint is that we know the technology and have confidence in it. We can have several functionalities to simplify operations and management. We can combine functionalities like log ownership to review the number of devices in the infrastructure."
"The simplicity of the solution is its most valuable asset. It's very user-friendly."
"It is stable and scalable. In addition, their support is great. When you ask them for something, they provide support, and if required, they also involve the R&D team to help you to resolve the issues in your configuration."
"The most valuable feature of this solution is the support."
"I have found that Forcepoint Next Generation Firewall is easy to use, highly secure, and the main VPN tunnel is created automatically which is a benefit."
"We like the scalability of Forcepoint because with the Forcepoint NGFW solution, we can scale anything. The solution has central management, so we can manage all the branches and devices centrally in one controller."
"Forcepoint Next Generation Firewall is very simple, easy to use, and flexible."
"When comparing this solution to others this one has better reporting, user management, and is easy to use."
"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 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."
"The connectivity to speed is the valuable feature."
"The compression of Riverbed is very powerful. It can also handle large quantities of traffic."
"TCP optimization... caches a particular TCP connection and the next time a user uses that connection he will reach the destination easily."
"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."
"Scalable data referencing is a great feature."
"I find the most valuable to be the compression and exchange replication."
"In larger companies with extensive infrastructure, retrieving logs for a longer period of time can sometimes take a bit longer than desired."
"Its management center should be easier to use. The management interface of Forcepoint is unique and a little bit different from some of the firewall solutions on which people might have worked before. Sometimes, the customers say that it is not very friendly, and we help them with how to use this management interface. It just takes a little bit of time, and after some time, it gets easy to manage or use. It is quite similar to Palo Alto, Fortinet, and legacy Juniper solutions. Their support should be faster. We have received complaints that they are not responding fast, which is not good for the vendor and us."
"The solution needs to add an antivirus profile and anti-spyware profile, not just policies and VPN."
"Forcepoint is a little difficult to configure compared to its competitors."
"They need to increase the local support here. There are also some bugs or fixes on which they need to work. They very well know about these bugs. In terms of licensing, I would like them to either increase the number of features in a single license or make licensing more flexible."
"My team is looking for more throughput and better integration with our security framework."
"The optimization is not really ready. If you want very good optimization, you have to add it to the network."
"The network interface could be better, and it could be cheaper."
"One area for improvement is related to monitoring and visibility."
"They should include a network switch in a future release."
"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"
"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 needs improvement in its integration with SDN."
"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 application response time of the solution can be improved."
More Forcepoint Next Generation Firewall Pricing and Cost Advice →
Forcepoint Next Generation Firewall is ranked 11th in WAN Edge with 40 reviews while Steelhead is ranked 15th in WAN Edge with 23 reviews. Forcepoint Next Generation Firewall is rated 7.6, while Steelhead is rated 8.2. The top reviewer of Forcepoint Next Generation Firewall writes "Provides decent protection for the LAN but complicated interface". On the other hand, the top reviewer of Steelhead writes "Exceptionally stable and reliable but costly". Forcepoint Next Generation Firewall is most compared with Fortinet FortiGate, Palo Alto Networks Advanced Threat Prevention, Check Point NGFW, Cisco Secure Firewall and Sophos XG, whereas Steelhead is most compared with Fortinet FortiGate, Aruba EdgeConnect SD-WAN Platform, Citrix SD-WAN, WAAS and Noction IRP. See our Forcepoint Next Generation Firewall 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.
