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."Cisco SD-WAN's collaborative features are unique and sustainable. I also like the protocols, which use two SD-WAN."
"Encryption, which is native to the solution, is a valuable feature. Also, central management, onboarding of devices, QS, and routing applications are all okay."
"Load balancing is a feature that allows us to take the best of our links and distribute the load intelligently, always with an eye on the end-customer experience."
"The centralized management is the most important feature. We can monitor what is going on at every location in our network with just one center."
"Cisco products are rated to handle the heat and are very rugged, making them a good corporate standard."
"The deployment is quite simple and straightforward."
"Any technical support we needed was great."
"Customizing SD-WAN is very easy because you can define two colors. You can define two different operators. You can deploy a partial mesh, a full mesh, or hub-and-spoke totally differently. If you want to do this on a DMVPN solution, that's really hard."
"The most valuable feature of Steelhead is its optimization capabilities."
"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."
"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."
"The connectivity to speed is the valuable feature."
"Scalable data referencing is a great feature."
"It is very easy to install the solution."
"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 technical support is a bit slow."
"When you buy the equipment, they should already put it into your cloud account. It should already be set up so that we can manage with vBond. We came across an issue where it wasn't resolved in the DNS. We are using Umbrella, so we need to create a VPN IPSec tunnel to Umbrella to enable the users to browse. I would really like to see an internal built-in firewall so that we don't have to go to Umbrella. This functionality might already be there. We are quite new to this solution, and we are still learning about it."
"Some configurations or procedures could be more user-friendly. Adding a bandwidth management feature would make Cisco SD-WAN more scalable and less resource-intensive."
"This solution is expensive so pricing is a concern."
"We need them to start focusing on the SD-WAN compatibility with other environments and not being so vendor locked with Cisco environments."
"The inexpensive Viptela hardware may be replaced with overpriced Cisco routers. This would be a tragic mistake for Cisco as the lightweight commodity platform built by Viptela is the reason to own this solution."
"The solution is expensive and could be cheaper."
"The product needs improvement in its integration with SDN."
"Application response time and network performance could be improved."
"They should include a network switch in a future release."
"The product should offer more integration capabilities."
"One area for improvement is related to monitoring and visibility."
"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"
"The application response time of the solution can be improved."
"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."
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.
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.