Exinda vs Steelhead comparison

GFI and Riverbed are both solutions in the WAN Optimization category. GFI is ranked #5, while Riverbed is ranked #1 with an average rating of 8.3. Additionally, 87% of GFI users are willing to recommend the solution, compared to 95% of Riverbed users who would recommend it.

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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 2026).

Buyer's Guide

Exinda vs. Steelhead

April 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 ...

Featured Reviews

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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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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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

"Very glad the WAF rulesets works out of box, and requires very little tuning or maintenance."

"Caching is the most valuable feature of Cloudflare Web Application Firewall."

"It is configurable via API."

"In general, it's a very good product: the solution is very stable, the performance is great, the product offers very good scalability, the pricing is very reasonable, the installation is very straightforward and quite simple, and technical support has a very fast response time and is helpful."

"This solution does a good job of preventing web application attacks, SQL injections, and cross-site scripting attacks."

"It protects web applications efficiently."

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

"It's pretty convenient and pretty easy to set up and run. And then kind of for static content, it also offers caching."

More Cloudflare Web Application Firewall pros

"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."

"You can use Exinda as a network orchestrator so you can be sure that the throughput is managed well and everything gets what it needs."

"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 benefit that we have seen is that if we turn it off, people notice that the applications are running slowly."

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

"Customer Service: Top notchTechnical Support: Top notch"

"Getting Exinda was a life saver for our voice traffic"

"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."

More Exinda pros

"Without Riverbed WAN Optimization, it took one hour to send one gig of traffic, but with Riverbed, one gig of traffic was sent in five minutes."

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

"You should buy SteelHead for WAN optimization because it delivers more."

"Steelhead has drastically improved user experience."

"The compression of Riverbed is very powerful. It can also handle large quantities of traffic."

"Through this product, we can easily find the bottlenecks and where the traffic occurs or is generated in the network."

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

"It has improved the stability and throughput of the WAN, especially for remote small branches with low link speed, and reduced the impact on network performance from Windows updates deployment on users PCs."

More Steelhead pros

Cons

"The reporting could be improved if it were more granular."

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

"The reporting could be more granular."

"Cloudflare Web Application Firewall should include port forwarding features."

"The dashboard could be more user-friendly."

"We have noticed some latency when the call goes through the firewall. That could be improved."

"The product can improve by having more multitenancy capability, which is currently not available."

"The platform's control features related to real-time authentication and response time need improvement."

More Cloudflare Web Application Firewall cons

"Creating the custom application is a bit awkward. I kind of have to guess my way through it sometimes."

"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."

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

"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."

"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."

"The stability was terrible in version 7.0 but it's been good since version 7.2."

"It should improve the quality of service."

"The areas for improvement would be around the support service that GFI provides."

More Exinda cons

"Setting up QoS marking is not all that intuitive."

"Need to handle more traffic simultaneously."

"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."

"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."

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

"Applicative specifics optimizations shall always be improved."

"The solution needs to have alert notifications."

"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"

More Steelhead cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

"Cloudflare Web Application Firewall is more affordable than other solutions."

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

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

"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 is expensive."

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

"It is not too pricey."

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

More Cloudflare Web Application Firewall pricing and cost advice

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

"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."

"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

Construction Company

17%

Comms Service Provider

Financial Services Firm

Computer Software Company

18%

Financial Services Firm

15%

Construction Company

10%

Manufacturing Company

15%

Computer Software Company

11%

Construction Company

11%

Outsourcing Company

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	1
Midsize Enterprise	4
Large Enterprise	4

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.

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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 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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Azure Web Application Firewall vs Cloudflare Web Application Firewall

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Compared 19% of the time

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Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

Cloudflare Web Application Firewall

May 2026

Cloudflare Web Application Firewall report

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Buyer's Guide

Exinda

May 2026

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Buyer's Guide

Steelhead

April 2026

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Also Known As

Cloudflare WAF

No data available

RIverbed Steelhead

Overview

Cloudflare Web Application Firewall integrates DDoS protection, load balancing, and firewall capabilities. Its ease of use, configurability, and robust security measures make it a versatile choice for protecting web applications.

Cloudflare Web Application Firewall provides a comprehensive defense against threats with advanced reporting and robust security measures. It includes DNS integration, rate limiting, and extensive rule sets, all within a SaaS model that allows API configurability. Users value its caching, scalability, and pricing, although enhancements are needed in rate-limiting and third-party integration. Improvements in customer support, especially in India, real-time controls, and user documentation are also desired. Users seek a more intuitive dashboard, better log management, and improved alert systems, along with multitenancy capabilities and enhanced reporting.

What are the key features of Cloudflare Web Application Firewall?

DDoS Protection: Shields applications from denial-of-service attacks
Load Balancing: Ensures efficient traffic distribution
DNS Integration: Enhances domain name system security
Rate Limiting: Controls traffic flow and reduces abuse
Extensive Rule Sets: Offers customizable security rules

What benefits and ROI can users find in reviews?

Scalability: Easily adapts to growing business needs
Pricing: Offers reasonable pricing structure
Caching: Improves application performance and speed
Configurable Security: Provides customizable defense settings
Efficient Management: Simplifies security and application control

Cloudflare Web Application Firewall finds application in industries like banking and retail by acting as a comprehensive security gateway, managing authentication and authorization while protecting web applications from malicious Layer 7 traffic. It also implements load balancing, CDN, and zero-trust policies, supported by advanced reporting, analytics tools, and threat scoring to meet specific industry needs.

Cloudflare

Exinda provides granular traffic management and application performance monitoring with policy-based traffic shaping for prioritizing critical applications.

Exinda offers a user-friendly interface for managing bandwidth, ensuring business-critical applications receive priority while controlling non-essential traffic. Real-time monitoring offers network visibility, identifies bottlenecks, and suggests policy adjustments. It supports WAN optimization, satellite link management, and bandwidth control, aiding entities from corporate offices to remote locations.

What are Exinda's key features?

Granular Traffic Management: Provides precise control over network traffic.
Application Performance Monitoring: Monitors and analyzes application performance.
Policy-Based Traffic Shaping: Prioritizes critical applications efficiently.
Real-Time Monitoring Dashboard: Offers network visibility and identifies issues.
User-Friendly Interface: Simplifies bandwidth and traffic control.

What benefits or ROI should users look for?

Efficient Resource Utilization: Ensures critical applications receive necessary bandwidth.
Improved Network Performance: Identifies and resolves network bottlenecks.
Enhanced Traffic Control: Balances and limits non-critical traffic efficiently.
Actionable Insights: Provides recommendations for policy optimization.

Exinda is implemented in industries for WAN optimization, helping manage satellite links and control bandwidth on campuses and remote locations. It aids troubleshooting by monitoring satellite services and prioritizes network traffic for customers.

GFI

Steelhead is designed to optimize WAN performance by reducing data load and enhancing network efficiency. It utilizes advanced data compression and caching techniques to improve speeds and manage bandwidth, crucial for cost reduction.

Steelhead offers enhancements in data throughput and network optimization with its ability to improve TCP and WAN efficiency. Organizations benefit from scalable data referencing and adaptive transfer schemes that simulate LAN-like speeds over WAN. Its monitoring features provide insights into network dynamics, although potential improvements are noted in areas like QoS configuration and handling encrypted traffic. Users also recognize challenges in upgrading, GUI design, and monitoring tools.

What are Steelhead's key features?

Data Compression: Reduces data size for efficient WAN usage.
WAN Optimization: Enhances network speed and lowers costs.
TCP Optimization: Improves data flow over WAN connections.
Scalable Data Referencing: Encourages efficient data transfers.
Real-Time Monitoring: Offers insights into network performance.
Local Caching: Stores data locally to speed up access.
QoS Management: Prioritizes critical traffic effectively.

What benefits can organizations expect from Steelhead?

Cost Reduction: Decreases expenses related to bandwidth usage.
Improved Network Performance: Enhances application and data transfer speeds.
Bandwidth Management: Allows prioritization for critical tasks.
Reduced Latency: Mitigates delay issues in data transmission.

Steelhead is widely used in industries like banking and distribution for optimizing traffic between data centers and ensuring efficient branch connectivity. It addresses latency problems, boosts application performance, and helps reduce data traffic. In environments with limited bandwidth, its features ensure critical data is prioritized, creating significant cost savings.

Riverbed

Sample Customers

crunchbase, udacity, marketo, okcupid, zendesk

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 2026

Free Report: Exinda vs. Steelhead

Find out what your peers are saying about Exinda vs. Steelhead and other solutions. Updated: April 2026.

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