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."The most valuable feature is the application-level routing."
"We would recommend this solution to customers looking to implement it on a global scale. We recommend the solution, not only because of the functionality or the technical support, but also because of the delivery of the solution, and the docking and upgrading capabilities."
"Cisco SD-WAN is a good product."
"SD-WAN is very stable - once it's deployed, you can just forget about it, it runs by itself."
"The most valuable features of Cisco SD-WAN are reliability and scalability."
"The solution is stable and reliable."
"So far, the feature that I like best is the policy configuration manager."
"The user experience is pretty good."
"Scalable data referencing is a great feature."
"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."
"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."
"I find the most valuable to be the compression and exchange replication."
"The most valuable feature of Steelhead is its optimization capabilities."
"TCP optimization... caches a particular TCP connection and the next time a user uses that connection he will reach the destination easily."
"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 compression of Riverbed is very powerful. It can also handle large quantities of traffic."
"Cisco could do more to offer bundling of the SD-WAN and other solutions."
"There should be more security features in the hybrid and on-premise deployments of Cisco SD-WAN. The cloud has most of the security features."
"The solution needs to be more flexible around legacy devices."
"Some competitors are much faster in providing out-of-the-box solutions, more innovative solutions. In terms of innovation, in many cases, they're lagging behind."
"The initial setup was not very straightforward, but it gets easier the more deployments you complete."
"We recently found some bugs."
"Cisco SD-WAN could improve on the ease of integration, the configuration should be easier. At the moment the process is more command line based and it would be better if it was able to be done through an interface."
"Cisco SD-WAN's clustering mechanism needs to be improved. If there are more than five milliseconds of latency time between installations of the VM manager, the cluster automatically breaks down."
"The product should offer more integration capabilities."
"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."
"Application response time and network performance could 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."
"The application response time of the solution can be improved."
"One area for improvement is related to monitoring and visibility."
"They should include a network switch in a future release."
"The product needs improvement in its integration with SDN."
Cisco SD-WAN is ranked 2nd in WAN Edge with 86 reviews while Steelhead is ranked 15th in WAN Edge with 23 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, Noction IRP, WAAS and SteelConnect EX Enterprise SD-WAN. See our Cisco SD-WAN vs. Steelhead report.
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