New Relic vs Riverbed SteelHead Comparison: Reviews, Features, Pricing & Alternatives in 2026

Detailed side-by-side comparison to help you choose the right solution for your team

Updated May 2026 8 min read

New Relic

0.0 (0 reviews)

New Relic is a cloud-based observability platform that helps you monitor, debug, and optimize your entire technology stack through real-time data visualization and full-stack performance analysis.

Starting at Free
Free Trial NO FREE TRIAL
VS

Riverbed SteelHead

0.0 (0 reviews)

Riverbed SteelHead is a network optimization solution that accelerates application performance and reduces bandwidth consumption across hybrid cloud environments to ensure your distributed teams stay productive and connected.

Starting at --
Free Trial 0 days

Quick Comparison

Feature New Relic Riverbed SteelHead
Website newrelic.com riverbed.com
Pricing Model Freemium Custom
Starting Price Free Custom Pricing
FREE Trial ✘ No free trial ✓ 0 days free trial
Free Plan ✓ Has free plan ✘ No free plan
Product Demo ✓ Request demo here ✓ Request demo here
Deployment cloud mobile desktop saas on-premise desktop
Integrations AWS Google Cloud Microsoft Azure Kubernetes Slack PagerDuty Terraform GitHub Jira Docker Microsoft 365 Salesforce ServiceNow Box Dropbox AWS Microsoft Azure Google Cloud SAP Oracle
Target Users small-business mid-market enterprise mid-market enterprise
Target Industries
Customer Count 0 0
Founded Year 2008 2002
Headquarters San Francisco, USA San Francisco, USA

Overview

N

New Relic

New Relic gives you a unified view of your entire software ecosystem, from infrastructure and applications to end-user experiences. Instead of jumping between disconnected tools, you can ingest data from any source and visualize it in a single dashboard to pinpoint performance bottlenecks. You can track every transaction, identify slow database queries, and resolve errors before they impact your customers.

The platform is built for engineers who need deep visibility into complex distributed systems and microservices. It offers a generous free tier that includes 100 GB of data ingestion per month and full access to over 30 capabilities. Whether you are a solo developer or part of a global enterprise, you can scale your monitoring as your infrastructure grows without losing granular detail.

strtoupper($product2['name'][0])

Riverbed SteelHead

Riverbed SteelHead helps you overcome network latency and bandwidth constraints that slow down your business applications. Whether your tools live in a private data center, a public cloud, or are delivered as SaaS, this platform uses advanced data reduction and transport streamlining to make your apps run faster. You can significantly reduce the time it takes to transfer large files and sync data across long distances.

The software gives you deep visibility into how your applications are performing and how your bandwidth is being used. You can prioritize business-critical traffic over less important data, ensuring your most vital operations always have the resources they need. It is designed for mid-market and enterprise organizations with multiple branch offices or a significant remote workforce that relies on consistent network speed.

Overview

N

New Relic Features

  • Application Performance Monitoring Monitor your application health in real-time and trace distributed requests across complex microservices to find the root cause of latency.
  • Infrastructure Monitoring Connect your hosts, containers, and cloud resources to see how infrastructure health impacts your application performance and user experience.
  • Log Management Search through billions of log messages instantly and correlate them with specific application errors to troubleshoot issues faster than ever.
  • Browser Monitoring Measure actual user load times and frontend performance across different devices and geographies to ensure a smooth customer experience.
  • Error Tracking Group similar errors automatically and get alerted the moment new bugs appear in your production environment so you can fix them quickly.
  • Vulnerability Management Identify security risks within your software dependencies and prioritize fixes based on the actual impact they have on your live applications.
strtoupper($product2['name'][0])

Riverbed SteelHead Features

  • Data Streamlining. Reduce your bandwidth consumption by up to 99% by only sending new or changed data across your network.
  • Transport Streamlining. Minimize the impact of high latency by reducing the number of round trips required for data to travel.
  • Application Streamlining. Accelerate specific protocols like HTTP, FTP, and SMB to ensure your web and file applications respond instantly.
  • SaaS Acceleration. Speed up popular tools like Microsoft 365, Salesforce, and ServiceNow by optimizing the path to the cloud.
  • Path Selection. Direct your traffic over the most efficient path available, whether it is MPLS, internet, or a satellite link.
  • Centralized Management. Control your entire optimization deployment from a single console to simplify configuration and reporting across all sites.

Pricing Comparison

N

New Relic Pricing

Free
$0
  • 100 GB/month free data ingest
  • 1 Full Platform User
  • Unlimited Basic Users
  • Unlimited Core Users
  • Standard support access
  • Full stack observability access
R

Riverbed SteelHead Pricing

Pros & Cons

M

New Relic

Pros

  • Extremely deep visibility into application code and database queries
  • Generous free tier provides full access to most features
  • Unified dashboard reduces the need for multiple monitoring tools
  • Powerful querying language for creating highly customized data visualizations

Cons

  • Pricing model can be difficult to predict as data grows
  • Initial setup and configuration requires significant technical expertise
  • Interface can feel overwhelming due to the massive feature set
A

Riverbed SteelHead

Pros

  • Drastically reduces file transfer times for remote offices
  • Significantly lowers monthly bandwidth costs for expensive links
  • Reliable performance for critical enterprise applications
  • Excellent visibility into network traffic patterns

Cons

  • Initial hardware or licensing costs are relatively high
  • Requires technical expertise for complex initial configurations
  • Encrypted traffic requires additional steps to optimize effectively
x

Please claim profile in order to edit product details and view analytics. Provide your work email address to receive a verification link.

x

Please login in order to edit product details and view analytics.