Citrix SD-WAN [EOL] vs Steelhead comparison

Citrix and Riverbed are both solutions in the WAN Optimization category. Additionally, 90% of Citrix users are willing to recommend the solution, compared to 95% of Riverbed users who would recommend it.

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Executive SummaryUpdated on Oct 12, 2025

Steelhead and Citrix SD-WAN [EOL] compete in the WAN optimization category, with Steelhead having an upper hand due to its Scalable Data Referencing (SDR) and advanced TCP optimization, providing faster LAN-like speeds in WAN environments.

Features: Steelhead offers Scalable Data Referencing (SDR), advanced TCP optimization, and substantial MPLS bandwidth enhancement through compression and data caching. Citrix SD-WAN [EOL] provides reliable connectivity, efficient load balancing for video and voice traffic, and flexible cloud management for extensive connectivity between branches.

Room for Improvement: Steelhead needs better handling of encrypted traffic and simplified setup for QoS alongside an improved RI OS upgrade process. Citrix SD-WAN [EOL] could benefit from lower costs, better integration with security features, and an improved user interface for diagnostics and configurations.

Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: Steelhead focuses on physical deployment with strong on-premises support, though complex issues may require time-consuming assistance. Citrix SD-WAN [EOL] offers both on-premises and cloud flexibility, but some improvements in technical knowledge and responsiveness are needed despite efficient support.

Pricing and ROI: Steelhead has a high initial cost but offers significant ROI through bandwidth optimization, though licensing is complex. Citrix SD-WAN [EOL] provides various licensing options such as a perpetual license model and is perceived as costly, but users note cost savings and connectivity management ease as offsets to the price.

To learn more, read our detailed WAN Optimization Report (Updated: March 2026).

Buyer's Guide

WAN Optimization

March 2026

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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 Web Application ...

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Dean Barisic

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.

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Rohit Ghorpade

Cloud Network Engineer at a insurance company with 5,001-10,000 employees

A scalable solution for MCN controller but lacks technical supports, upgrades

There are a few things that can be improved, are domain-based routing and the slowness of virtual parts, and it may be due to the wrong configuration, which we have been unable to find out. Previously, we faced some issues with the slowness part. Apart from that, feature like end gateway level antivirus. We are currently using a NetFlow proxy to establish a virtual position for the NetFlow. Our current environment has many use cases, but we are not using them on the Citrix SD-WAN. When I navigate the NCL part, it involves configuration. I want to highlight this disadvantage. Sometimes, when we push the configuration, it tries to push it to all branch locations. This process takes a lot of time, nearly 30 minutes, to push a single change from the NCL. Overall, I don't think Citrix meets our use cases what we have. This is based on my feedback after using it for the past year and working on this Citrix SD-WAN. However, from my experience, it is the worst solution I have seen. There's no domain-based routing, which is horrible. That's why we are moving to other products. We have checked our use case requirements with Fortinet, Palo Alto, and they meet them. I will consider the PoC or another OEM. There are many things in the area you need to be prompt, like the automation part. If any link or device goes down, alerting notification, etc. We need to perform and highlight so many things to your management. This should be improved.

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Chaudhary Muhammad Moez Manzar

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.

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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

"There is a huge signature repository"

"Cloudflare WAF provides protection through rules and functionalities like Cloudflare's SDRAP."

"The solution protects our application, which runs on the HTTP protocol, from DDoS attacks."

"Someone with a basic understanding of networking and security will be able to implement the firewall's basic features within 15 minutes."

"The initial setup process is simple."

"Does a good job preventing web application attacks."

"The impact of Cloudflare Web Application Firewall's integration with existing web technologies on our site's performance and security measures is quite great, actually."

"Cloudflare has positively impacted my organization by making it easier for me to handle and set up DNS for multiple clients; I can easily go in and access their accounts, make changes they need, and it's a one-stop shop."

More Cloudflare Web Application Firewall pros

"It allows you to combine two asymmetrical connections."

"The SD-WAN solution as it is already is quite feature-rich and the upgrade process is very simple."

"They have a zero downtime failover mechanism, where, when there's a link failure or a link weakness, or bad link conditions, they provide the ability to fail back seamlessly."

"It allows us to use additional VPNs, offering more options compared to other VPN solutions."

"The most valuable feature is security, as it gives me the port bindings that cannot be accomplished using other solutions."

"The scalability and stability are quite good in general."

"If you only take into consideration its features and capability, it is definitely one of the better products available in the market to date."

"The solution's most valuable feature is load balancing."

More Citrix SD-WAN [EOL] pros

"The compression features are valuable, as at most sites it doubled our effective MPLS bandwidth capabilities for transfers."

"This product is far way ahead from its competitors."

"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 good at optimizing WAN traffic and it has so many more features on top of that which help global enterprises monitor, identify and police traffic by application type, IP subnet, source, and/or destination."

"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, and 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."

"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."

"The data reduction that we realize (>85% for our most common protocols) is amazing."

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

More Steelhead pros

Cons

"The dashboard could be more user-friendly."

"The ModSecurity core rules need to be updated."

"The accuracy of the Cloudflare Web Application Firewall could be improved by reducing the number of false-negative alerts."

"It would be ideal if the solution offered better log integration and more integration with different platforms."

"The notification part could be improved. It's very much connected to Web Application Firewall, rate-limiting, and DDoS protection."

"Cloudflare Web Application Firewall should improve visibility for a customer."

"Support can be challenging at times."

"Their documentation could be better. They don't have documentation that explains everything well. They have documentation for everything you're looking for, but they lack a single piece of documentation to tie everything together. As a new user or beginner, it took us a little bit of time to figure out how to put all these things in place."

More Cloudflare Web Application Firewall cons

"Citrix SD-WAN does not have the SD-WAN with one optimization in a single license. Other competitors have this option and it should be added to this solution."

"I would like to see support for additional reporting."

"The initial setup could be a bit easier."

"Overall, network security and next-generation firewall features are areas that they can improve on."

"The firewall reporting could be easier to use and filter. (It works well enough, but if I need to give an area for improvement, I think this would be it.). The built-in reporting on the product in this regard is not great."

"Citrix should continue to offer a perpetual licensing model because it is very important to us."

"I am happy with this product. If anything, its price can be reduced. It is a bit expensive."

"The only improvement for Citrix SD-WAN would be to lower its cost."

More Citrix SD-WAN [EOL] cons

"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 Central Management Console (CMC) newly named SteelCentral Controller (SCC) has rudimentary netflow capabilities, but it doesn’t have particularly in-depth data."

"We had some stability problems with a few devices."

"Steelhead is considered an expensive solution in our country. On a scale of one to ten for expense, it would be rated an eight."

"The traffic is passing, but Oracle DB traffic experiences lag and slowness due to Steelhead, while other applications perform fine."

"Personally, my expertise with this device I feel is too low to determine what areas could be improved."

"There are issues with the tech support and scalability."

"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."

More Steelhead cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

"It is not too pricey."

"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 annual licensing fee is $10,000 USD."

"It starts at $20 and can easily go up to $200 monthly"

"The solution's pricing option needs to be more transparent for enterprise clients."

"The pricing model is very straightforward compared to the competition. You just pay per month for the product and usage."

"We pay $210 per month for CloudFlare WAF."

"Cloudflare offers different types of subscriptions for businesses, enterprises, and personal users, and the pricing is negotiable."

More Cloudflare Web Application Firewall pricing and cost advice

"I'm not quite sure of the price ranges. Roughly, the hidden devices can scale up to $20K for one appliance. However, the branch CPs are USD $1,000 to $2,500."

"Citrix SD-WAN is quite an affordable product."

"The license was a one-time purchase. It's expensive."

"It's a little bit on the high side compared to the other products."

"It is a bit expensive. A cheaper product would be good, but everybody likes things to be cheaper. We bought the devices up front, and then we pay for the annual support."

"It depends on the scale. In our case, it would have been better if we had known about the life cycling steps, but otherwise, it is worth the money."

"The price is relatively expensive."

"It would be helpful to have a demo license available for customers who want to prove the concept and conduct a proof of concept (POC) before committing to the solution. This is particularly important for customers in Egypt who often require a demonstration of the solution's features and compatibility with their needs before making any investment or incurring costs. Providing a demo license would allow customers to assess whether the solution would meet their needs or not."

More Citrix SD-WAN [EOL] pricing and cost advice

"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

Computer Software Company

11%

Manufacturing Company

Financial Services Firm

Comms Service Provider

Marketing Services Firm

Manufacturing Company

Computer Software Company

Government

Manufacturing Company

15%

Computer Software Company

12%

Outsourcing Company

10%

Government

Company Size

By reviewers

Large Enterprise

Midsize Enterprise

Small Business

By reviewers
Company Size	Count
Small Business	16
Midsize Enterprise	6
Large Enterprise	6

By reviewers
Company Size	Count
Small Business	7
Midsize Enterprise	5
Large Enterprise	10

By reviewers
Company Size	Count
Small Business	5
Midsize Enterprise	7
Large Enterprise	14

Questions from the Community

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Cloudflare Web Application Firewall?

The price of Cloudflare Web Application Firewall is reasonable.

See all answers

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...

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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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What needs improvement with Citrix SD-WAN?

The solution's licensing model could be improved. Citrix SD-WAN is a good product from a technical point of view. How...

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What advice do you have for others considering Citrix SD-WAN?

If a customer already has Citrix NetScaler and is not looking to change anything in their existing environment, we pr...

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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?

I am currently working with Riverbed for replication between PR to DR for synchronization purposes, and for WAN optim...

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Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

Cloudflare Web Application Firewall

March 2026

Cloudflare Web Application Firewall report

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Buyer's Guide

Citrix SD-WAN [EOL]

March 2026

Download Citrix SD-WAN [EOL] product report

Buyer's Guide

Steelhead

February 2026

Download Steelhead product report

Also Known As

Cloudflare WAF

Citrix CloudBridge, WOC, NetScaler SD-WAN

RIverbed Steelhead

Overview

Cloudflare Web Application Firewall's intuitive dashboard enables users to build powerful rules through easy clicks and also provides Terraform integration. Every request to the WAF is inspected against the rule engine and the threat intelligence curated from protecting over 27 Million websites. Suspicious requests can be blocked, challenged or logged as per the needs of the user while legitimate requests are routed to the destination, agnostic of whether it lives on-premise or in the cloud. Analytics and Cloudflare Logs enable visibility into actionable metrics for the user.

Cloudflare

Citrix SD-WAN [EOL] enhances connectivity and performance by optimizing bandwidth utilization, ensuring reliable communication across branch offices and headquarter data centers. It offers centralized management, efficient deployment options, and improved network reliability.

Citrix SD-WAN [EOL] is designed for businesses seeking enhanced connectivity solutions that boost application performance while reducing costs. With HDX WAN Optimization and reliable Active-Active connectivity, it assures improved bandwidth management. Tailored for both cloud and on-premise deployments, it supports fast communication and seamless integration, making it user-friendly even for those with limited technical expertise. Security features and zero-touch deployments further enhance its appeal. However, users highlight areas needing improvement, such as configuration intuitiveness, pricing alignment for specific markets, and stability. Enhanced reporting, networking features, and technical support are desired. Integration with Windows, security elements like firewalls, and licensing clarity require attention to meet user expectations.

What are the key features of Citrix SD-WAN [EOL]?

HDX WAN Optimization: Enhances application performance and traffic.
Load Balancing: Ensures efficient traffic distribution across networks.
Reliable Connectivity: Provides seamless failover and reduced costs through MPLS replacement.
Cloud Management: Simplifies deployment and management via the cloud.
Zero-Touch Deployment: Facilitates easy setup and provisioning.
Active-Active Lines: Optimizes bandwidth utilization and performance.
Backup Capabilities: Centralizes data management for security.

What benefits should users look for in Citrix SD-WAN [EOL]?

Enhanced Connectivity: Improves stability and reduces downtime.
Cost Reduction: Efficiently decreases expenses by replacing MPLS.
Network Optimization: Offers better bandwidth for diverse communication types.
Secure Interconnectivity: Ensures secure and reliable network connections.
Management Flexibility: Supports cloud or on-premise deployment options.

Industries benefit from Citrix SD-WAN [EOL] by leveraging its features to ensure stable, redundant connectivity between branches and data centers. Organizations experiencing frequent line failures or high reliance on bandwidth-heavy applications find it particularly useful. It caters to sectors needing reliable data management and enhanced networking.

Citrix

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

crunchbase, udacity, marketo, okcupid, zendesk

AIDS Healthcare Foundation, Cornerstone Home Lending Inc., Dallara, ecVision, Essar, Eurofred, Groupe Promutuel, HMSHost Corporation, Royal Caribbean Cruise Lines Ltd, Royal Caribbean International

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

Find out what your peers are saying about Riverbed, Cato Networks, Hewlett Packard Enterprise and others in WAN Optimization. Updated: March 2026.

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