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."From my observations, Cisco has been rolling out new features every other day, so I would say their speed of innovation is one of the most valuable aspects for me."
"When considering the most valuable features of Cisco SD-WAN, the decoupling of self-monitoring stands out significantly."
"Cisco SD-WAN has separate OMP routing."
"The most valuable features are manageability, scalability, and simplicity."
"Configuration interfaces are quite easy and intuitive. Being a part of the Cisco environment, Cisco SD-WAN is quite straightforward."
"The user experience is pretty good."
"Cisco SD-WAN's best features are the development of network links, application control, and bandwidth monitoring."
"This solution can scale from SMB to the enterprise level. It is very impressive."
"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."
"I find the most valuable to be the compression and exchange replication."
"Scalable data referencing is a great feature."
"The connectivity to speed is the valuable 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."
"TCP optimization... caches a particular TCP connection and the next time a user uses that connection he will reach the destination easily."
"The compression of Riverbed is very powerful. It can also handle large quantities of traffic."
"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."
"The initial setup is complex and can be improved."
"The product should improve its prices."
"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."
"It is the best solution that I ever had, but there might be something better than this in the future."
"Cyber security should also be implemented in the solution, along with maybe implementation of AI/ML."
"All of the configurations are based on templates, and we need to spend a lot of time doing the templates. It's good because that means that all of the configurations will be equal in the network. However, we need to spend a lot of time implementing the templates and doing the customizations."
"We have found that their SD-WAN has a lot of scope for improvement."
"Cisco's router and voice gateway has not been available since the launch of SD-WAN."
"The solution needs to have alert notifications."
"The product needs improvement in its integration with SDN."
"The application response time of the solution can 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."
"One area for improvement is related to monitoring and visibility."
"They should include a network switch in a future release."
"The product should offer more integration capabilities."
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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