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Akamai Guardicore Segmentation vs Vectra AI comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive Summary

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

Akamai Guardicore Segmentation
Average Rating
8.2
Reviews Sentiment
7.0
Number of Reviews
18
Ranking in other categories
Cloud and Data Center Security (1st), Cloud Workload Protection Platforms (CWPP) (12th), Breach and Attack Simulation (BAS) (8th), Microsegmentation Software (3rd)
Vectra AI
Average Rating
8.6
Reviews Sentiment
7.1
Number of Reviews
45
Ranking in other categories
Intrusion Detection and Prevention Software (IDPS) (5th), Network Detection and Response (NDR) (2nd), Extended Detection and Response (XDR) (18th), Identity Threat Detection and Response (ITDR) (10th), AI-Powered Cybersecurity Platforms (6th)
 

Mindshare comparison

While both are Network Security Systems solutions, they serve different purposes. Akamai Guardicore Segmentation is designed for Microsegmentation Software and holds a mindshare of 26.6%, up 26.1% compared to last year.
Vectra AI, on the other hand, focuses on Intrusion Detection and Prevention Software (IDPS), holds 7.9% mindshare, up 7.7% since last year.
Microsegmentation Software Market Share Distribution
ProductMarket Share (%)
Akamai Guardicore Segmentation26.6%
Illumio29.3%
VMware NSX15.4%
Other28.69999999999999%
Microsegmentation Software
Intrusion Detection and Prevention Software (IDPS) Market Share Distribution
ProductMarket Share (%)
Vectra AI7.9%
Fortinet FortiGate16.4%
Darktrace13.8%
Other61.900000000000006%
Intrusion Detection and Prevention Software (IDPS)
 

Featured Reviews

Uday Varma - PeerSpot reviewer
Offers granular control and ease of policy creation with features like telemetry and micro-segmentation but incident tagging is missing
Our customers use the solution for micro-segmentation within the data center or cloud environments. One customer uses it for their on-premises infrastructure, deployed at the code level across their massive network. Another customer uses it in a data center to monitor microsegmentation for their 500-node workload. Moreover, Akamai Guardicore Segmentation has helped our customers manage and secure traffic between different applications or workloads. Earlier, they were using VMware NSX-v, which offered good logging for distributed services on an analytical level. However, Akamai Guardicore Segmentation provides them with better overall visibility and granular control over-segmentation, even for inter-application and inter-routing traffic.
Mohammad Alkurdi - PeerSpot reviewer
Innovative detection features enhance monitoring
The advantages of the integration are not entirely out-of-the-box. You have to do it manually. When I'm doing tier response, an out-of-the-box solution is not available. You need to have a Linux server, and from the Linux server, you must perform AI tasks, and there is a lot to be handled in the back end. This is a major consideration about them. The recall feature, if it can be placed in some areas instead of the cloud, and charged for, would be better. Recall the storage where you watch all the traffic, and you can recall it and try to analyze it in the back end. It’s cloud-based. If they offer it on-prem, it would be better. I think they have a solution, but I have never tested it, to be honest with you.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"Guardicore makes its own rule set automatically, so we can work fast when creating a rule set."
"Guardicore Centra offers the best coverage specifically in backward compatibility with legacy operating systems."
"Its deception features are great, providing a rich telemetry of lured origins, and are a great resource for any active defense strategy."
"We like the centralized management of the firewalls. Until we installed Guardicore Centra, we managed all our firewalls individually, so making changes was complicated, difficult, and time-consuming."
"The label-based segmentation is the most valuable feature."
"Initially, I liked the telemetry part. But later, we used the microsegmentation features that we were able to deploy and found that they really stood out from other vendors. It allows us to see microsegmentation as distributed services."
"The interface and dashboard are amazing."
"That is primarily because I've seen increased rules. It's kind of caught us a little off guard. With GuardiCore, I have had to deal with their technical support and engineering team in Israel. They are amazing. They are very quick to adapt."
"The solution is currently used as a central threat detection and response system."
"The core product provides excellent visibility, but my favorite feature is Vectra Recall."
"One of the most valuable features is all the correlation that it does using AI and machine learning. An example would be alerting on a host and then alerting on other things, like abnormal behavior, that it has noticed coming from the same host. It's valuable because we're a very lean team."
"The solution's ability to reduce alerts, by rolling up numerous alerts to create a single incident or campaign, helps in that it collapses all the events to a particular host, or a particular detection to a set of hosts. So it doesn't generate too many alerts. By and large, whatever alerts it generates are actionable, and actionable within the day."
"The key feature for me for Detect for Office 365 is that it can also concentrate all the information and detection at one point, the same as the network solution does. This is the key feature for me because, while accessing data from Office 365 is possible using Microsoft interfaces, they are not really user-friendly and are quite confusing to use. But Detect for Office 365 is aggregating all the info, and it's only the interesting stuff."
"The fact that we get the visualization of what's happening on our network, which is a way of improving our security in-depth is most valuable."
"Vectra is very compatible with various cloud providers, such as Amazon and Azure AD. This is helpful as customers often migrate their network infrastructure to the cloud."
"I like the way that Vectra AI focuses on the internal network. Nowadays, most of the attackers are already inside, and they can be inside for many years before they start attacking. With normal monitoring, it's quite difficult to find them."
 

Cons

"The maps could go a bit faster. They are useful but slightly slow."
"The product needs a few features like enhanced user policies and payload-level inspection to improve the offering."
"Needs more customization of honeypots and a vaster catalog of systems able to be mimicked."
"It would be very helpful for beginners if the solution had more windows to help with the terms inside instead of going to the documentation."
"Kubernetes is not installed in the way we need it."
"It doesn't support a PAAC solution (Platforma as a service) in the cloud."
"The dashboard needs improvement. It should be more flexible so that I can easily see what I want or need to see."
"In our version, when using the terminal server, we cannot exclude user tasks for each session."
"I think Vectra AI's automation, reporting, and integration could be improved."
"I'd like to be able to get granular reports and to be able to output them into formats that are customizable and more useful. The reporting GUI is lacking."
"The main improvement I can see would be to integrate with more external solutions."
"We have a lot of system solutions and integrations with system solutions. Vectra is a type of black box. It implements AI-informed detection mechanisms, but we cannot create system detections. I understand that the product is designed this way, but it would be great if we could create our own detections as well."
"You are always limited with visibility on the host due to the fact that it is a network based tool. It gives you visibility on certain elements of the attack path, but it doesn't necessarily give you visibility on everything. Specifically, the initial intrusion side of things that doesn't necessarily see the initial compromise. It doesn't see stuff that goes on the host, such as where scripts are run. Even though you are seeing traffic, it doesn't necessarily see the malicious payload. Therefore, it's very difficult for it to identify these type of host-driven complex attacks."
"The UI/UX and detection could be improved. More detections of specific security events could be useful. We've had a few incidents that were not detected by Vectra. The teams are working on it right now, but more detection is always better."
"I would like to see a bit more strategic metrics instead of technical data. Information that I could show to my executive management team or board would be valuable."
"For S&D account scans, it would be easier if Vectra AI could triage with users. If a client uses a lot of accounts, then it could indicate that these accounts are benign, for example. That would help a lot."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"Akamai Guardicore Segmentation is expensive."
"GuardiCore has made some new changes to the license now. We've seen monthly and annual licenses based on a subscription. We have a few clients that pay anywhere from $25,000 a year."
"The price is the same as other products in the market. There's no price argument to choose one or the other product, it will cost the customer approximately the same."
"The pricing is too high."
"Compared to the pricing we were seeing from both Illumio and Edgewise, Guardicore was very competitive."
"This is not a cheap solution but you have to consider the bigger picture, which is what it is giving you."
"Guardicore Centra provides better value for money than NSX, was the other solution that we looked at, which was too expensive for what it does."
"The solution is reasonably priced and I would rate it a six out of ten. The tool's licensing costs are yearly."
"The license is based on the concurrent IP addresses that it's investigating. We have 9,800 to 10,000 IP addresses."
"At the time of purchase, we found the pricing acceptable. We had an urgency to get something in place because we had a minor breach that occurred at the tail end of 2016 to the beginning of 2017. This indicated we had a lack of ability to detect things on the network. Hence, why we moved quickly to get into the tool in place. We found things like Bitcoin mining and botnets which we closed quickly. In that regard, it was worth the money."
"Its cost is too much. It's an investment that we can afford. It's a lot, but it's worth it."
"The pricing is very good. It's less expensive than many of the tools out there."
"We have a desire to increase our use. However, it all comes down to budget. It's a very expensive tool that is very difficult to prove business support for. We would like to have two separate networks. We have our corporate network and PCI network, which is segregated due to payment processing. We don't have it for deployed in the PCI network. It would be good to have it fully deployed there to provide us with additional monitoring and control, but the cost associated with their licensing model makes it prohibitively expensive to deploy."
"There are additional features that can be purchased in addition to the standard licensing fee, such as Cognito Recall and Stream."
"From a licensing perspective, the Vectra detect platform is pretty doable. Also, the hardware prices are nothing that we're not used to. The stream part is a little overpriced compared to the detect part. The reason is that you need to stream data to detect events anyway, so the data is in there. The only thing that's not available is the UI to be able to look at the stream data, which is also on the appliances but is just not activated. That's mainly the thing that we want to improve on."
"The pricing and licensing are quite straightforward because they're based on the IP licenses. As a result, they are easy to count."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
18%
Computer Software Company
15%
Manufacturing Company
7%
Insurance Company
7%
Financial Services Firm
11%
Computer Software Company
11%
Manufacturing Company
8%
Government
7%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business6
Midsize Enterprise3
Large Enterprise9
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business9
Midsize Enterprise10
Large Enterprise27
 

Questions from the Community

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Guardicore Centra?
I would rate the pricing a six out of ten, where one is cheap and ten is expensive. I know other micro-segmentation tools like Cisco or Illumio, and so I think they are in the middle.
What do you like most about Guardicore Infection Monkey?
Initially, I liked the telemetry part. But later, we used the microsegmentation features that we were able to deploy and found that they really stood out from other vendors. It allows us to see mi...
What needs improvement with Guardicore Infection Monkey?
When we have more than one interface, we can only have one policy for both interfaces. Normally, you have assets with a production interface and a server interface that are only for management. But...
What is the biggest difference between Corelight and Vectra AI?
The two platforms take a fundamentally different approach to NDR. Corelight is limited to use cases that require the eventual forwarding of events and parsed data logs to a security team’s SIEM or ...
What do you like most about Vectra AI?
The solution is currently used as a central threat detection and response system.
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Vectra AI?
It is very acceptable when you compare it with Darktrace, for example.
 

Also Known As

Guardicore Centra, GuardiCore
Vectra Networks, Vectra AI NDR
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Santander, Frontier Airlines, OpenLink, Intermountain Healthcare, Cellcom, BancoBASE
Tribune Media Group, Barry University, Aruba Networks, Good Technology, Riverbed, Santa Clara University, Securities Exchange, Tri-State Generation and Transmission Association
Find out what your peers are saying about Broadcom, Illumio, Akamai and others in Microsegmentation Software. Updated: October 2025.
873,209 professionals have used our research since 2012.