--- title: Riverbed SteelHead Reviews meta_title: 'Riverbed SteelHead Reviews 2026: Details, Pricing, & Features | G2' meta_description: Filter 13 reviews by the users' company size, role or industry to find out how Riverbed SteelHead works for a business like yours. aggregate_rating: rating_value: 4.5 review_count: 13 scale: '5' date_modified: '2025-10-31' parent_category: name: IT Infrastructure url: https://www.g2.com/categories/it-infrastructure --- # Riverbed SteelHead Reviews **Vendor:** Riverbed Technology **Category:** [WAN Optimization Software](https://www.g2.com/categories/wan-optimization) **Average Rating:** 4.5/5.0 **Total Reviews:** 13 ## About Riverbed SteelHead 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. In today’s hybrid world of cloud workloads, SaaS applications, Internet Broadband and MPLS, the SteelHead family of products and solutions is built upon 4 core principles required for any organization interested in making sure networks and apps perform reliably and securely while enhancing the user experience. ## Riverbed SteelHead Reviews ### 1. A device that can do a big thing **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Saad u. | Network Engineer, Enterprise (> 1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** February 06, 2022 **What do you like best about Riverbed SteelHead?** Brilliant performance with very minimal configurations that can perform high reduction for all kinds of applications and databases and can use in different scenarios and I have personally used almost types of designs whether it is Datacenter and DR-SITE replication, Hub and spoke, physical in-path, out-of-path scenarios **What do you dislike about Riverbed SteelHead?** The least helpful about steelhead is sometimes about reporting, which is limited to 30 days if you do not have the controller and the other aspect is that you need to be more technical if you wish to troubleshoot yourself that is very technical. **Recommendations to others considering Riverbed SteelHead:** Steelhead is a brilliant device when performing reduction in traffic. I have experienced the majority of applications that can be easily optimized. Also shared those applications/databases that already performed deduplication like data domain. Overall it is the best option to perform WAN Optimization between Hub and Hub, Hub and spoke. It will help you in making your business productive with fast convergence of application **What problems is Riverbed SteelHead solving and how is that benefiting you?** Steelhead reduces traffic for layer1, layer4, and layer7 traffic. The not only reduction in traffic, but it also accelerates and reduces the lags in the traffic. ### 2. Riverbed Steelhead - The cold hard truth **Rating:** 3.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Alex T. | Systems Administrator, Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** December 08, 2021 **What do you like best about Riverbed SteelHead?** I like that they are easy to set up, they work decent, and the support is good. The best though is they are easy to set up. You can deploy to remote offices fairly quickly, the longest part is the initial sync. **What do you dislike about Riverbed SteelHead?** I dont like that if you make changes, you have to resync the data sometimes. And some file types do not work the best with them as far as speeding up the speed that much. **What problems is Riverbed SteelHead solving and how is that benefiting you?** We had multiple larger files that we used at remote locations and this sped up how fast the other remote sites saw the files' changes. It helped with larger CAD drawings the most ### 3. Steelhead is a world leader in Wan optimization **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Niketan S. | Lead Administrator, Enterprise (> 1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** December 16, 2021 **What do you like best about Riverbed SteelHead?** Steelhead over years has become the most efficient and stable solution for WAN optimization, acceleration as well as automation related solutions. Great service, amazing ROE, scalability are just a few topics. Whatever angle we look at it, it surfaces to be the best in class today **What do you dislike about Riverbed SteelHead?** So far, just the delayed updates, nothing else **Recommendations to others considering Riverbed SteelHead:** Ensure you go for a third party support, it's cheaper **What problems is Riverbed SteelHead solving and how is that benefiting you?** It's a very scalable solution, easy to manage and deploy. Has a great interface to work with. I have also realised that training a complete fresher on installation of a steelhead is not that difficult either. ### 4. Best WAN optimizer **Rating:** 4.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Syed Mohammad Azharuddin I. | Technical Specialist , Enterprise (> 1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** February 07, 2022 **What do you like best about Riverbed SteelHead?** Ease of deployment and configuration. Also the support and documentation. **What do you dislike about Riverbed SteelHead?** Need more helping hand on deciding the right products considering the environment. **Recommendations to others considering Riverbed SteelHead:** Evaluate your network, identify the key issues faced due to legacy applications, then, look for right product at steelhead to solve your issues. **What problems is Riverbed SteelHead solving and how is that benefiting you?** Applications that eats lot of bandwidth are now optimized to get the best use of WAN circuits. Also, the latency of other applications has also improved significantly. ### 5. Provides some benefit in specific use cases **Rating:** 3.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** brian k. | aspiring CTP, Enterprise (> 1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** November 30, 2021 **What do you like best about Riverbed SteelHead?** We had a specific use case where we host MS files on premises and the users who are overseas were struggling with bad performance. The Steelhead mobile client did a great job accelerating this traffic to improve the users experience and shortened file open times from 60 seconds to 10-15 seconds. **What do you dislike about Riverbed SteelHead?** It doesnt accelerate much else as almost all other apps and file stores are in the cloud and there's limited opportunity to do anything with both encrypted and cloud hosted data. **What problems is Riverbed SteelHead solving and how is that benefiting you?** Slow file opening and saving. We recognized 40-80% speed improvements. ### 6. this the world best WAN optimaization Riverbed tool that reduce bandwidth **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Parvej A. | Senior Network Engineer, Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.) **Reviewed Date:** February 23, 2022 **What do you like best about Riverbed SteelHead?** Its completly user fraiednly WAn optimazation tool which worlds most enterprizes are using this technology and **What do you dislike about Riverbed SteelHead?** In the current Market there is very advanced WAn optimaation tool came into the market **What problems is Riverbed SteelHead solving and how is that benefiting you?** WAN Report and confiration change and monitioring ### 7. Riverbed is one of the great Product for WAN Optimization. **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Mohammad Hassan M. | Network Services Specialist, Enterprise (> 1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** February 04, 2022 **What do you like best about Riverbed SteelHead?** Its Performance, we were used in Number of companies. **What do you dislike about Riverbed SteelHead?** Nothing it is best product for WAN optimization **What problems is Riverbed SteelHead solving and how is that benefiting you?** We mostly taking TAC support whenever we are facing any problem ### 8. Riverbed SteelHead - A classic, reliable and trusted WAN Optimizer **Rating:** 4.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Gopal Krishan M. | Manager Network Engineering & Architect, Information Technology and Services, Enterprise (> 1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** January 04, 2022 **What do you like best about Riverbed SteelHead?** Data, Application & Transport streamlining with elastic performance **What do you dislike about Riverbed SteelHead?** Non-intuitive and difficult to understand technologies and configurations. **Recommendations to others considering Riverbed SteelHead:** Ensure your tech staff is adequately trained with the free KT they provide while delivering the product. **What problems is Riverbed SteelHead solving and how is that benefiting you?** WAN acceleration for poor applications and much faster delivery. ### 9. Great product for wan optimization. **Rating:** 4.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Mohammad I. | Network Security Engineer, Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** November 23, 2021 **What do you like best about Riverbed SteelHead?** Products works excellently even with very low bandwidth links. **What do you dislike about Riverbed SteelHead?** In beginning it was little hard to setup as the product was not having much tutorials on youtube and other forums. **Recommendations to others considering Riverbed SteelHead:** Highly recommended for wan optimization.. **What problems is Riverbed SteelHead solving and how is that benefiting you?** It will help you if you have offices with lower wan links then it will assist you to boost up the wan speed. ### 10. Steelhead **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Jeet S. | Technology Support, Enterprise (> 1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** December 22, 2021 **What do you like best about Riverbed SteelHead?** A very straight forward interface to use for administration of our Riverbed device(s). **What do you dislike about Riverbed SteelHead?** Not too intuitive. Took me a while to learn the different commands. Definitely not for someone new to the field. **What problems is Riverbed SteelHead solving and how is that benefiting you?** Administration and optimisation of Riverbed devices. ### 11. I was the admin role of the Riverbed steelhead appliance **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Consumer Goods | Enterprise (> 1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** December 23, 2021 **What do you like best about Riverbed SteelHead?** Riverbed is the stable platform for WAN optimization, and it is working fine on application acceleration **What do you dislike about Riverbed SteelHead?** WAN optimization is an old approach to maintain the SLA of the internet line; we changed to use SD-WAN instead **What problems is Riverbed SteelHead solving and how is that benefiting you?** the lag of the application traffic and mailbox warm up ### 12. Best WAN optimizer available, especially using tunnel protocols to link international sites. **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Martin B. | Director Information Technology Engineering and Plans, Enterprise (> 1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** August 26, 2021 **What do you like best about Riverbed SteelHead?** Best WAN optimizer available, especially using tunnel protocols to link international sites or remote offices with limited network access **What do you dislike about Riverbed SteelHead?** Nothing. It is the best WAN optimization device on the market **Recommendations to others considering Riverbed SteelHead:** Review these devices before upgrade the WAN circuit access. **What problems is Riverbed SteelHead solving and how is that benefiting you?** We run IP tunnels from Virginia to Panama. The Steelhead devices improve latency and overall users access. ### 13. Security Manager **Rating:** 4.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Chemicals | Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** September 29, 2021 **What do you like best about Riverbed SteelHead?** It is a simple product with the best support in performance WAN optimization. **What do you dislike about Riverbed SteelHead?** I do not have anything which I dislike from this product. **What problems is Riverbed SteelHead solving and how is that benefiting you?** This product helps my company optimize the bandwidth and transfer files between Headquater and the branch. ## Riverbed SteelHead Discussions - [What does Riverbed Technology do?](https://www.g2.com/discussions/what-does-riverbed-technology-do) - 1 comment - [What is SteelHead CX?](https://www.g2.com/discussions/what-is-steelhead-cx) - 1 comment - [View Riverbed SteelHead pricing details and edition comparison](https://www.g2.com/products/riverbed-steelhead/reviews?section=pricing&secure%5Bexpires_at%5D=2026-07-02+11%3A39%3A45+-0500&secure%5Bsession_id%5D=0f7197a6-88b2-4ac7-be58-d5720149574d&secure%5Btoken%5D=75f28aa1ac49047c789eb929e8a684cd5590baad7eac5ad0c3471b0b82c5f45f&format=llm_user) ## Riverbed SteelHead Features **Network** - Traffic Overview - Cost - ROI - Bandwidth **Application Performance** - Response Times - Traffic Optimization - Application Issues - Increase Productivity - Improved Performance ## Top Riverbed SteelHead Alternatives - [Barracuda CloudGen Firewall](https://www.g2.com/products/barracuda-cloudgen-firewall/reviews) - 4.5/5.0 (51 reviews) - [WAN Optimization](https://www.g2.com/products/wan-optimization/reviews) - 4.3/5.0 (10 reviews) - [Windstream OfficeSuite UC](https://www.g2.com/products/windstream-officesuite-uc/reviews) - 4.1/5.0 (27 reviews)