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Aruba Boost Unified WAN Optimization vs Steelhead comparison

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Executive Summary

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 Web Application ...
Sponsored
Average Rating
8.6
Reviews Sentiment
7.4
Number of Reviews
26
Ranking in other categories
Web Application Firewall (WAF) (6th)
Aruba Boost Unified WAN Opt...
Average Rating
0.0
Reviews Sentiment
7.0
Number of Reviews
1
Ranking in other categories
WAN Optimization (14th)
Steelhead
Average Rating
8.2
Reviews Sentiment
7.0
Number of Reviews
26
Ranking in other categories
WAN Optimization (1st), WAN Edge (13th)
 

Featured Reviews

DB
CTO at PlayNirvana
Advanced security reporting has protected high-traffic betting platforms from constant attacks
I don't see room for improvement to Cloudflare Web Application Firewall. One thing I don't know much about because we have a dedicated IT team for that, and I'm not involved with Cloudflare much anymore. But if I were to compare them to F5, I would like to see more features that F5 offers. F5 has an option to bring the whole infrastructure, the whole WAF and all their packages, Bot Management, and everything else on your infrastructure. You need to install certain services from their side, and then you can choose if you would like requests to hit your servers immediately or if requests need to be proxied through F5 backbone. That would be a nice addition because we have 90% of the traffic as legit traffic coming from whitelisted servers. If it comes from whitelisted servers, I don't need to go every request through the backbone; I could easily just IP whitelist everything. Then I could maybe have Bot Management on my infrastructure that drastically reduces the price of Cloudflare. I would like to see Push CDN more improved in the next release of Cloudflare Web Application Firewall. And maybe something similar to Pushpin that Fastly has, which is an option where you can push messages that then can be scaled globally over the network. From our perspective, if we have a listener that listens for stock updates, I would just need to have one processor that pushes those updates to the Cloudflare API, and then Cloudflare would broadcast that message to all listeners. Cloudflare will check the order of the message, and if you, as a customer, are not connected or have some kind of network issue, when you reconnect, you will receive the latest state and missing updates.
WaqasNaeem - PeerSpot reviewer
Cyber Security Consultant at a tech services company with 11-50 employees
Easy-to-deploy with valuable features for web optimization
The platform’s features for latency mitigation help optimize user experience. There are multiple techniques one could follow to enhance the application's performance. To optimize cloud connectivity, they provide strategies such as local internet breakout. In the context of cloud services, particularly Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) and Software as a Service (SaaS) applications, deploying virtual appliances contributes to reducing costs associated with express route links. This approach enhances web optimization. The traffic shaping features play a crucial role in optimizing web operations and enhancing WAN efficiency. It can be integrated with most of the applications. I rate it a nine out of ten.
Chaudhary Muhammad Moez Manzar - PeerSpot reviewer
Senior manager at a tech services company with 201-500 employees
Reduces operational costs through bandwidth optimization but struggles with high traffic licensing and complex deployments
The logs in Steelhead are fantastic. There is a deep level of logs such as top 10 docker and top 50 docker. I can check from the top 50 docker which type of application is optimizing well and which type of traffic is not optimized. Steelhead provides logs and percentage levels, which is good. I can see any type of log report, report security, different types of report availability, but it is not customizable. Overall, this is a good feature. Steelhead provides real-time optimization with graphs and tables on real-time optimization, informing us packet by packet including port, source IP, destination IP, and destination port number. This reporting and real-time monitoring is fantastic, although I faced a problem in Oracle. Steelhead mainly saves the money that needs to be paid to ISPs. My actual traffic is around 2 GB, but I purchased a link from the ISP for only around 700 to 800 MB. All the prices that need to be paid monthly to the ISP are saved, which is a significant saving for my company after using Riverbed.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"The solution protects our application, which runs on the HTTP protocol, from DDoS attacks."
"It is a SaaS solution unlike much of the competition."
"We like that there's load balancing, firewall capabilities, DDoS protection, et cetera, all covered by Cloudflare."
"Cloudflare WAF provides protection through rules and functionalities like Cloudflare's SDRAP."
"The Cloudflare Web Application Firewall's most valuable feature is its ease of configuration."
"The rate limiting features and customizations in terms of URL match and applying policies are valuable to me."
"I have not had any issues with this solution, and I would recommend it to others who are interested in using it."
"Someone with a basic understanding of networking and security will be able to implement the firewall's basic features within 15 minutes."
"The platform’s features for latency mitigation help optimize user experience."
"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."
"The connectivity to speed is the valuable feature."
"You should buy SteelHead for WAN optimization because it delivers more."
"Scalable data referencing is a great feature."
"The data compression through the WAN is like being on a LAN and is even more effective when the technology uses an adaptive transfer scheme known as warm transfer."
"The compression of Riverbed is very powerful. It can also handle large quantities of traffic."
"Riverbed has excellent technical support."
 

Cons

"I have experienced some difficulties with Cloudflare's support as a customer based in India."
"The user interface is very simple and straightforward, but users need knowledge about DNS to accomplish tasks."
"The accuracy of the Cloudflare Web Application Firewall could be improved by reducing the number of false-negative alerts."
"WAF doesn't directly affect bandwidth costs. It saves costs on protection. However, with the correct setup, it's difficult to determine if it saves costs overall due to the fixed enterprise plan fee."
"If they add logs history within the Cloudflare offering, that would be a great benefit."
"Its stability could be better."
"Cloudflare Web Application Firewall should include port forwarding features."
"They have some limitations with third-party integrations."
"Currently, we encounter challenges in terms of the functioning of compression, deduplication, and other features even after uploading the certificate for encrypted traffic."
"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."
"They should include a network switch in a future release."
"The advertised “fail open” feature doesn’t work as expected."
"I didn't like the way platforms were scaled – if you started with a top end model of one of the tiers, if you needed to upgrade you had to rip and replace the box with a whole new one."
"Personally, my expertise with this device I feel is too low to determine what areas could be improved."
"If we lose the primary Steelhead that handles the optimization, the secondary Steelhead cannot handle the same High Availability."
"The product should offer more integration capabilities."
"Need to handle more traffic simultaneously."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"It is not too pricey."
"It starts at $20 and can easily go up to $200 monthly"
"The pricing model is very straightforward compared to the competition. You just pay per month for the product and usage."
"The solution is expensive."
"What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing? I believe the pricing is not the best, but it's reasonable and acceptable. We also use the McAfee system in parallel. In terms of pricing, its okay - not great, but not bad either. It falls in the middle, which is acceptable. In terms of support licensing, last time, we were searching for a solution, and we considered products from resellers rather than directly from the cloud provider. However, the pricing we encountered was exceptionally high. As a result, we are inclined to select support from the reseller."
"The solution's pricing option needs to be more transparent for enterprise clients."
"Cloudflare Web Application Firewall is more affordable than other solutions."
"Cloudflare offers different types of subscriptions for businesses, enterprises, and personal users, and the pricing is negotiable."
"The product has flexible pricing models."
"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."
"Across our 12 data centers, we spend around $150k annually."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Construction Company
17%
Comms Service Provider
9%
Financial Services Firm
9%
Outsourcing Company
7%
No data available
Manufacturing Company
16%
Construction Company
16%
Outsourcing Company
10%
Financial Services Firm
10%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business16
Midsize Enterprise6
Large Enterprise6
No data available
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business5
Midsize Enterprise7
Large Enterprise14
 

Questions from the Community

What needs improvement with Cloudflare Web Application Firewall?
I don't see room for improvement to Cloudflare Web Application Firewall. One thing I don't know much about because we...
What is your primary use case for Cloudflare Web Application Firewall?
We are using Cloudflare Web Application Firewall's advanced reporting and analytics tools with their Zero Trust, so e...
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Earn 20 points
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...
What is your primary use case for Riverbed Steelhead?
I am currently working with Riverbed for replication between PR to DR for synchronization purposes, and for WAN optim...
What advice do you have for others considering Riverbed Steelhead?
Application performance may improve with Steelhead, but it varies application to application. Some applications, such...
 

Also Known As

Cloudflare WAF
Silver Peak Unity Boost, Unity Boost
RIverbed Steelhead
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

crunchbase, udacity, marketo, okcupid, zendesk
Information Not Available
ElAraby, SFK Leblanc, Bobst Group, Northwest Pipe Company, Halkbank, Tradebridge, EFG Hermes
Find out what your peers are saying about Riverbed, Hewlett Packard Enterprise, Cato Networks and others in WAN Optimization. Updated: July 2026.
908,800 professionals have used our research since 2012.