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."Huge companies use SD-WAN. It is largely scalable."
"Any technical support we needed was great."
"When considering the most valuable features of Cisco SD-WAN, the decoupling of self-monitoring stands out significantly."
"This solution comes with comprehensive technical support."
"It is very simple to deploy. It's a point-and-click type of deployment, so it's fairly simple."
"SD-WAN is very stable - once it's deployed, you can just forget about it, it runs by itself."
"The initial setup is quite simple."
"Cisco SD-WAN's best features are the development of network links, application control, and bandwidth monitoring."
"TCP optimization... caches a particular TCP connection and the next time a user uses that connection he will reach the destination easily."
"The most valuable feature of Steelhead is its optimization capabilities."
"The connectivity to speed is the valuable feature."
"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."
"It is very easy to install the solution."
"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."
"The product needs to have more understanding staff in their support team. The tool needs to provide support in every stage of deployment. We did not get the expected support from their team. The product is also not easy to use."
"The initial setup was not very straightforward, but it gets easier the more deployments you complete."
"The deployment is complex."
"If you don't have an in-house design team or outsource to a third party with expertise, the setup will be difficult."
"The technical support is a bit slow."
"They have taken away our ability to do what we are good at, which is working on the CLI, the interface right on the router. They have limited the commands so much that troubleshooting is nearly impossible."
"Cisco SD-WAN doesn't have automation capabilities, artificial intelligence, machine learning, and isn't IOT-based."
"The solution is very costly."
"The product needs improvement in its integration with SDN."
"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."
"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"
"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."
"The solution needs to have alert notifications."
"The application response time of the solution can be improved."
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.
See our list of best WAN Edge vendors.
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