Exinda vs Steelhead comparison

Why PeerSpot?

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 8.0. GFI holds a 7.1% mindshare in WO, compared to Riverbed’s 15.5% mindshare. Additionally, 87% of GFI users are willing to recommend the solution, compared to 95% of Riverbed users who would recommend it.

Exinda

Read 9 Exinda reviews

1,646 Views
1,547 Comparison Views

87% willing to recommend

Steelhead

Read 26 Steelhead reviews

3,811 Views
2,591 Comparison Views

95% willing to recommend

Exinda

Steelhead

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: September 2026).

Buyer's Guide

Exinda vs. Steelhead

September 2026

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Helped 917,433 peers since 2012

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

Exinda

Ranking in WAN Optimization

5th

Average Rating

8.8

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

No ranking in other categories

Steelhead

Ranking in WAN Optimization

1st

Average Rating

8.2

Reviews Sentiment

7.0

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

WAN Edge (13th)

Mindshare comparison

As of October 2026, in the WAN Optimization category, the mindshare of Exinda is 7.1%, up from 6.2% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Steelhead is 15.5%, up from 14.3% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.

WAN Optimization Mindshare Distribution
Product	Mindshare (%)
Steelhead	15.5%
Exinda	7.1%
Other	77.4%

WAN Optimization

Featured Reviews

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.

Read full review

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.

Read full review

Quotes from Members

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

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."

"Compared to some of the stuff that I've used a decade ago, the Exinda solution is night and day."

"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 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."

"A customer can either buy 50 Mb with us or 50 Mb with somebody else, but they'll get a 70 Mb feel with us because we can shape it a little bit better."

"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."

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

More Exinda pros

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

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

"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."

"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."

"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 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."

"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."

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

More Steelhead pros

Cons

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

"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."

"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."

"More free training on the website for those just getting started."

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

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

"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."

"One of the concerns that we've had with Exinda is the fact that ever since GFI took over Exinda, they haven't really put in much time into actually developing the product."

More Exinda cons

"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."

"The solution needs to have alert notifications."

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

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

"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."

"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

"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."

"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

Outsourcing Company

15%

Computer Software Company

14%

Construction Company

11%

Manufacturing Company

Outsourcing Company

15%

Manufacturing Company

14%

Construction Company

13%

Financial Services Firm

10%

Company Size

By reviewers

Large Enterprise

Midsize Enterprise

Small Business

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

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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 monitoring solutions were ExtraHop first, Riverbed SteelCenter second. Their negotiated c...

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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 optimization between replication from one data center to another data center. The mai...

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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 as Oracle traffic, are not working well, but other traffic performs fine. The t...

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Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

Exinda

October 2026

Download Exinda product report

Buyer's Guide

Steelhead

September 2026

Download Steelhead product report

Also Known As

No data available

RIverbed Steelhead

Overview

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

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

September 2026

Free Report: Exinda vs. Steelhead

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

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