Exinda vs Steelhead comparison

GFI and Riverbed are both solutions in the WAN Optimization category. GFI is ranked #5, while Riverbed is ranked #3 with an average rating of 9.0. Additionally, 87% of GFI users are willing to recommend the solution, compared to 95% of Riverbed users who would recommend it.

Comparison Buyer's Guide

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Executive SummaryUpdated on Sep 10, 2024

Steelhead and Exinda compete in the WAN optimization market. Despite both having strong offerings, users favor the comprehensive feature set of Exinda, suggesting it is worth its cost, while Steelhead is often preferred for its support and pricing.

Features: Steelhead is valued for efficient data compression, application acceleration, and reliable support. Exinda excels with granular bandwidth management, real-time monitoring capabilities, and advanced analytics.

Room for Improvement: Steelhead users suggest improvements in reporting capabilities, scalability, and software updates. Exinda users desire more intuitive configuration options, enhanced technical support, and better user interface design.

Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: Steelhead is noted for its straightforward deployment and reliable customer support. Exinda offers complex deployment but compensates with superior customization options and better network optimization. Users highlight the need for better deployment documentation for Exinda.

Pricing and ROI: Steelhead is seen as more cost-effective, with a faster ROI due to lower initial setup costs. Exinda, although higher in price, is justified by potent features and network optimization that deliver significant ROI. Differences in pricing strategies affect user demand, with Steelhead being favorable for budget-conscious buyers while Exinda attracts those prioritizing advanced capabilities.

To learn more, read our detailed Exinda vs. Steelhead Report (Updated: April 2025).

Buyer's Guide

Exinda vs. Steelhead

April 2025

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Review summaries and opinions

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:

Categories and Ranking

Cloudflare

Featured Reviews

Spencer Malmad

Owner at Tech Exchange

It's easy to set up because you point the DNS to it, and it's working in under 15 minutes

Cloudflare is highly scalable. Cloudflare is a system with a web portal that the end users like me see. It's a console where we can adjust the DNS, caching, and security features all in that console. Cloudflare owns thousands of servers across the world that cache the data. It's a powerful solution. When clients sign up for Cloudflare, they're getting this monster content delivery network, security, and a web application firewall in one. It's all rolled into one, and it's massive. Unless you have your website hosted on a massive hosting provider, there's no way that you can deliver the amount of data that Cloudflare can provide to the end users. If you have static content, there's no way that you can ever match what Cloudflare can do. Obviously, there are competitors to Cloudflare that do the same, but I'm saying other types of solutions. Let's say you go with F5. Great, that's on-prem. That's in your colo. You can't deliver as much data to the internet as you can with a CDN. You don't have to spend $20,000 on a net scaler, F5, or whatever Cisco's selling now. You don't have to buy that. You pay them $50 a month or $150 a month. It's totally worth it because even in five years, you'll never get the performance value, not just the actual ROI. You have to consider how much throughput you can get with Cloudflare.

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Marek Jaworski

Senior Engineer, Team Lead, Network Operations at a comms service provider with 1,001-5,000 employees

Allows us to have better control over our network by shaping traffic more gently

There might be room for improvement in the speed and throughput of some of their devices. They're getting a bit slow on some of the bigger devices. It would be helpful if there were some sort of an ISP model. Also, while I don't think it would be possible for them to do, it would be better if they had the Citrix support and the visualization to visualize your network. Besides that, it fits its purpose as a shaper and accelerator. Some people would say things like, "Add a firewall to it," but I disagree. I think a firewall's a firewall, and Exinda's a shaper and accelerator.

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Raj Metkar

Director, Head of Networks at MUFG, EMEA

Auto-optimization mode enhance efficiency & bandwidth saving, best layer 7 QoS shaping policy can be achieved with ease

There are several features specific to branches, like keeping data hot and active on Steelhead devices. These features prevent unnecessary data travel across the international MPLS. Additionally, functions like acting as an NTP server, DNS, DHCP for branches and auto-optimization mode enhance efficiency along with really good QoS for bandwidth shaping.

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Quotes from Members

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:

Pros

"Cloudflare offers CDN and DDoS protection. We have the front end, API, and database in how you structure applications."

"Even when there is a high load on our servers, Cloudflare is able to cache the data and serve it to users, ensuring they can still access the website."

"I get a lot of value from Cloudflare's API because it enables you to build a separate environment inside the solution. You can create a domain for performing test requests before you move to the production environment and connect various domains."

"It is a fast and secure DNS."

"The most valuable feature is its usability."

"Its most significant benefit to date is the speed with which it refreshes DNS records on the internet once you change it. If you are changing a website or registering a new record, it is very quick."

"The most valuable feature of Cloudflare is that it has a free version. They give us the free version with the anti-DDoS features and also the load balancing solution."

"Its ease of integration with Office 365 and the fact that it's a good product compared to what I had before"

More Cloudflare pros

"Exinda can show you which product uses how much throughput and can help you manage it."

"The most valuable features are the shaper, accelerator, and the reporting... it will shape the traffic better than, for example, a Cisco, because it's more gentle on the shaping side of things. Suppose you were selling a 20-meg link. Because you can shape to the nth degree of traffic, the 20-meg link feels like about a 30 to 40-meg link."

"The most valuable feature is the ability to provide very granular classes of service. That's important because it allows us to prioritize certain traffic types over others, to a very granular level."

"The most valuable feature is the ability to manage the traffic at the application layer. It makes things a lot easier. We're not digging for port numbers and IP addresses and different services... It makes us far more responsive in our ability to do things and speed up the process. We're a very small shop, so having something that's straightforward and easy to use is a big help."

"The most valuable feature is the ability to create policies where we can tailor them to the customer. It enables us to prioritize apps and users for bandwidth."

"It has the ability to prioritize, providing an automatic optimization. I can put it in a hierarchy and know that certain devices will be prioritized over others. It is able to identify the traffic. It can pick out whether if its a Zoom meeting (or something like that), then it's able to put that somewhere in the hierarchy based on the traffic type."

"TCP optimization... caches a particular TCP connection and the next time a user uses that connection he will reach the destination easily."

"There are several features specific to branches, like keeping data hot and active on Steelhead devices. These features prevent unnecessary data travel across the international LAN."

"Steelhead's most valuable feature is its ability to hash and send only the important parts of the information, avoiding the resending of data."

"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."

"It is very easy to install the solution."

"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 has drastically improved user experience."

"I find the most valuable to be the compression and exchange replication."

More Steelhead pros

Cons

"The product needs to improve its automation."

"Integration involving API with other products could be more user-friendly."

"There are some issues with the CDN services."

"Cloudflare should add more documentation and pricing to the cloud version."

"For the free and Pro plans, Cloudflare could use a simple bot to provide information to users. This would improve support, especially for less advanced users who utilize the free components."

"They lack a good way to manage DNS as a company, since everything is relegated to single account logins until you get to the higher levels. They have come out with a paid feature to remedy this, but I have not had a chance to fully review it yet to know if it fixes the access problem."

"We are a product integrator and reseller, and we would like to have a better partner relationship, similar to a channel sales relationship. Sometimes we are on our own or get diverted by Cloudflare because they have direct sales, which competes with us and makes it difficult to build a relationship with this company since we want to be an MSP or a managed service provider for the solution."

"An integrated SSO feature would be useful for Cloudflare DNS."

More Cloudflare cons

"There might be room for improvement in the speed and throughput of some of their devices. They're getting a bit slow on some of the bigger devices. It would be helpful if there were some sort of an ISP model."

"What I don't like is the fact that I haven't purchased the overall management interface. That is the interface that allows you to manage multiple Exindas. Personally, I think Exinda should provide that for free. I think that if you buy more and more Exinda boxes, you shouldn't then have to incur a charge for the overall management software. While I can manage each Exinda separately, if they provided me with the overall management platform for free that would probably encourage me to buy more appliances."

"A lot of working with this solution is really intuitive. I have picked it up mostly on my own. I'm sure that there are some things that maybe I hadn't thought of or really hadn't considered, and I think it would be good just to promote some day courses. I don't really see a whole lot that comes out for Exinda as far as training or informational sessions through our normal resellers. It would be cool to know more about the solution by utilizing educational resources or even have Exinda promoted a bit better."

"It should improve the quality of service. It can improve their connection to the internet and your IP."

"The updating of applications that the system knows about could be a little quicker. For example, Zoom had been out for a while, but it took a while for it to show up as an application that Exinda could natively handle. We had to write some things in order to handle Zoom, initially."

"In terms of improvement, one thing that has always frustrated me about it is that when you look at real-time monitoring, you can only filter it by IP address. You can't filter it by anything else. It would be good if we could filter by VLAN."

"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"

"There was a significant challenge when moving from an older version to a newer one due to changed quality of service policies."

"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."

"Application response time and network performance could 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."

"The solution needs to have alert notifications."

"There was a significant challenge when moving from an older version to a newer one due to changed quality of service policies."

More Steelhead cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

"I believe their performance has improved, but I'd like to refrain from discussing the pricing aspect related to the cloud. The pricing, in my opinion, could be simplified, and I think they should consider reevaluating the pricing for support, as it can be quite high. At times, this cost can make it challenging to choose CARFAGuard or opt for the support."

"For Cloudflare, I recommend it heavily for small businesses with revenue under a couple of million dollars. Onboarding is easy, and they even have a free plan. This makes it simple for businesses in the $100,000-$500,000 range to try it out and see its value, allowing them to scale up their infrastructure as needed."

"The cost primarily depends on the size of the organization."

"The pricing for the service is reasonable, neither excessively cheap nor prohibitively expensive. It aligns well with the value of their solution."

"The product's pricing is cheap."

"A free version of the solution is available."

"When you compare Cloudflare DNS to other solutions, such as Akamai, the price is reasonable."

"I think the pricing is competitive. I think as far as licensing is concerned it's pretty straightforward because it's based on domain. It's just that sometimes domains could be tricky with some customers."

More Cloudflare pricing and cost advice

"The pricing and licensing are pretty fair and really competitive. There are other SD-WAN solutions that are pretty costly because they build in a service where they'll manage it for you, which is really great. I don't know if Exinda has that option as well. However, we are a small shop and cost-conscious. For things like this, we are accustomed to self-managing and this solution suits us just fine. For a tool that gives you, like the graphs and reporting, it has a fair price point."

"It is priced well for the market, for what it needs to do."

"Across our 12 data centers, we spend around $150k annually."

"The solution is expensive and the service contacts are costly too. The cost of the device makes the value proposition borderline acceptable for us. The service contract fees we pay is approximately $30,000 annually."

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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Educational Organization

18%

Computer Software Company

13%

Comms Service Provider

Financial Services Firm

Computer Software Company

25%

Real Estate/Law Firm

12%

Financial Services Firm

11%

Government

11%

Computer Software Company

20%

Manufacturing Company

15%

Financial Services Firm

11%

Government

10%

Company Size

By reviewers

Large Enterprise

Midsize Enterprise

Small Business

Questions from the Community

Which is the best DDoS protection solution for a big ISP for monitoring and mitigating?

Cloudflare. We are moving from Akamai prolexic to Cloudflare. Cloudflare anycast network outperforms Akamai static GR...

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Which would you choose - Cloudflare DNS or Quad9?

Cloudflare DNS is a very fast, very reliable public DNS resolver. It is an enterprise-grade authoritative DNS service...

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What do you like most about Cloudflare?

Cloudflare offers CDN and DDoS protection. We have the front end, API, and database in how you structure applications.

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What is the best network monitoring software for large enterprises?

We just did an assessment for our 47 datacenters around North America. The top two enterprise-level network monitorin...

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What do you like most about Riverbed Steelhead?

One of our most valuable features is Steelhead's cloud migration optimization. Moving to the cloud helped optimize ou...

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What is your primary use case for Riverbed Steelhead?

In the past, we have sold a lot of Steelhead ( /products/steelhead-reviews ) for retail companies, insurance companie...

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Comparisons

Quad9 vs Cloudflare

Compared 50% of the time

Akamai vs Cloudflare

Compared 4% of the time

Azure Front Door vs Cloudflare

Compared 4% of the time

Azure DNS vs Cloudflare

Compared 3% of the time

Imperva DDoS vs Cloudflare

Compared 2% of the time

More Cloudflare Competitors

No data available

Fortinet FortiGate vs Steelhead

Compared 27% of the time

Cisco Catalyst SD-WAN vs Steelhead

Compared 25% of the time

Noction IRP vs Steelhead

Compared 17% of the time

Aruba EdgeConnect SD-WAN Platform vs Steelhead

Compared 16% of the time

WAAS vs Steelhead

Compared 15% of the time

More Steelhead Competitors

Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

Cloudflare

April 2025

Download Cloudflare product report

Buyer's Guide

Exinda

April 2025

Download Exinda product report

Buyer's Guide

Steelhead

March 2025

Download Steelhead product report

Also Known As

Cloudflare DNS

No data available

RIverbed Steelhead

Overview

Cloudflare is a highly-regarded Content Delivery Network (CDN) and a Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) protection solution. The robust global connectivity cloud platform that is Cloudflare ensures users are able to connect to the Internet quickly, securely, and reliably. Cloudflare is one of the world's largest networks in the marketplace today. Using Cloudflare, businesses, educational entities, NGOs, vloggers, bloggers, and anyone else with an internet presence can experience more secure, faster websites and applications.

Currently, there are millions of Internet locations on Cloudflare, and the Cloudflare network
continues to grow every day by the thousands. The solution is able to fulfill the requests for
millions of websites seamlessly and serves on average 45 million HTTP requests per second.

Cloudflare has safe, secure data centers in close to 300 cities worldwide to ensure every
client request is filled as quickly as possible. It is Cloudflare’s edge network that makes this
possible by keeping content and other services as close to each client as possible, so the
information requests are always only seconds away.

Many organizations that work in democracy, civil society, human rights, or the arts are able to
access Cloudflare's highest levels of protection for free via Project Galileo. Additionally, official
election websites can be secured from hacking and fraud through Cloudflare’s Project
Athenian, also at no additional cost.

Cloudflare can also help organizations of all sizes develop a robust zero-trust strategy to
ensure the highest levels of productivity and profitability. Employees, stakeholders, and end users have a greater level of satisfaction and overall improved user experience, which can, in
turn, result in higher revenues and overall ROI. Zero-trust and BYOD (bring your own device)
access ensure end users and employees always have the best resources and technology
available to them at all times.

Cloudflare benefits

Cloudflare has many benefits. Some of its most valuable benefits include:

- Faster load times

- Robust DNS security

- Intuitive cloud Web Application Firewall (WAF)

- Free universal SSL

- Image enhancement

- Automatic browser caching

- Next-generation cloud load balancer

- Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP)

- Rate limiting

- Minification

- Zero-trust capabilities

- Cost-effective

- Reduced carbon footprint

Reviews from real users

“Many websites require an SSL certificate because they sell stuff and want SSL. Cloudflare
comes with an SSL certificate built in. It's automatic. You sign yourself up for Cloudflare, and
an SSL certificate automatically protects your website. If you have a connection between your
website and your host, the server, Cloudflare, and the host, you don't necessarily need a
certificate.” Spencer M., Owner at Tech Exchange

“What I like best about Cloudflare is that my company can use it to trace and manage
applications and monitor traffic. The solution tells you if there's a spike in traffic. Cloudflare
also sends you a link to check your equipment and deployment and track it through peering,
so it's a valuable tool.” Daniel P., Network Engineer at Ufinet

“The most valuable feature of Cloudflare is the GUI. You are able to control the solution very
well through the interface. There is a lot of functionality that is embedded in the service.” PeerSpot user, Competence Center Manager at a tech services company

Cloudflare

Exinda is designed to help Network Managers solve pressing IT problems in today's complex network. Our award winning technology combines interactive analytics, an intelligent recommendation engine and powerful actions like shaping and optimization, all in one solution.

GFI

Steelhead is the leading network optimization and application performance solution chosen by over 30,000 organizations worldwide. The performance of networks and applications directly impacts business productivity. Riverbed draws from nearly two decades of experience in driving network and application performance over Wide Area Networks with its flagship offering, SteelHead. SteelHead delivers the underlying technology that helps enterprises of all sizes maximize the efficiency and performance of the networks and applications used to run modern business.

SteelHead is proven to dramatically speed up the performance of applications anywhere in the organization while delivering the best end-user experience even under sub optimal network conditions. Reduce bandwidth utilization by up to 95%, deferring costly network bandwidth upgrades. Increase performance by up to 100x for on-premises applications.

Riverbed

Sample Customers

Trusted by over 9,000,000 Internet Applications and APIs, including Nasdaq, Zendesk, Crunchbase, Steve Madden, OkCupid, Cisco, Quizlet, Discord and more.

UMass Dartmouth, MLB Network, R&R Ice Cream, Savills, Manhattan School of Music, Blum Shapiro, Cincinnati Public Schools, City of Richmond, Genting Casinos, The Salvation Army, VoIP Unlimited, Frontier Silicon, Lakeshore Toltest, CTI Foods

ElAraby, SFK Leblanc, Bobst Group, Northwest Pipe Company, Halkbank, Tradebridge, EFG Hermes

Buyer's Guide

Exinda vs. Steelhead

April 2025

Free Report: Exinda vs. Steelhead

Find out what your peers are saying about Exinda vs. Steelhead and other solutions. Updated: April 2025.

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