Try our new research platform with insights from 80,000+ expert users

Akamai Guardicore Segmentation vs Vectra AI comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive Summary
 

Categories and Ranking

Akamai Guardicore Segmentation
Average Rating
8.2
Number of Reviews
18
Ranking in other categories
Cloud and Data Center Security (2nd), Cloud Workload Protection Platforms (CWPP) (12th), Breach and Attack Simulation (BAS) (4th), Microsegmentation Software (2nd)
Vectra AI
Average Rating
8.6
Number of Reviews
42
Ranking in other categories
Intrusion Detection and Prevention Software (IDPS) (2nd), Network Detection and Response (NDR) (2nd), Extended Detection and Response (XDR) (9th), Identity Threat Detection and Response (ITDR) (5th), AI-Powered Cybersecurity Platforms (4th)
 

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 21.9% compared to last year.
Vectra AI, on the other hand, focuses on Intrusion Detection and Prevention Software (IDPS), holds 11.4% mindshare, up 9.5% since last year.
Microsegmentation Software
Intrusion Detection and Prevention Software (IDPS)
 

Featured Reviews

Matthias Kropf - PeerSpot reviewer
Jan 16, 2024
The tool's most valuable feature is visibility but needs improvement in Kubernetes
We use the product in the production environment of server infrastructure.  The tool's most valuable feature is its visibility.  Kubernetes is not installed in the way we need it.  I have been using the product since October.  We faced some minor issues, but overall, the product is stable. I…
Tony Whelton - PeerSpot reviewer
Mar 7, 2023
Integrates well with other security solutions and provides good technical support
The biggest feature for us, because we are heavy Microsoft users, is its integration with Office 365. On top of Vectra AI, we use all of the Microsoft security platforms, such as Defender ATP and Sentinel. Having full integration and a central platform to look at all of the threats that are coming through from the different platforms is a huge benefit for us. With one nice front dashboard, we can look at the high-volume threats rather than all of the noise. We do get a lot of noise as our students all own their own devices. With Vectra AI, we can look at threats in a controlled manner, which saves us an extraordinary amount of time. Even if I doubled the manpower, I doubt that I would still have the same visibility that I have with the correct security platform. Vectra AI's Threat Detection and Response platform has done remarkably well. We're well-versed in using the security dashboard from Microsoft Defender, and we're at the stage where we are checking both. We haven't fully switched to relying on only the Vectra dashboard yet. In terms of Vectra AI Attack Signal Intelligence for empowering security analysts within our organization, we have complete faith in the data that's coming through from Vectra. If we could also have what's happening at the front-end, that is, the firewall, then it would give us the complete security front dashboard.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"This tool greatly helps in understanding the footprint of the attacks."
"The tool's most valuable feature is its visibility."
"From day one, you get threat intelligence. It will immediately block active threats, which has been useful."
"Guardicore makes its own rule set automatically, so we can work fast when creating a rule set."
"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 real bonus is the fact that we can secure applications, all the way down to the individual services, on each host. It's actually more granular security than we can get out of a traditional firewall."
"The most valuable features of the solution are the maps and ring fencing that help monitor events."
"I found the solution to be stable."
"One of the key advantages for us is we define a 24/7 service around it. We use far more of Vectra alerts than we do with our SIEM product because we understand that when we get an alert from Vectra we actually need to do something about it."
"The automatic filtering that they provide is valuable. The logic inside that makes some detections instead of us is very useful. We are confident that if we are just looking into it and there is nothing, nothing could happen."
"The initial setup was pretty straightforward."
"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."
"The most valuable feature for Cognito Detect, the main solution, is that external IDS's create a lot of alerts. When I say a lot of alerts I really mean a lot of alerts. Vectra, on the other hand, contextualizes everything, reducing the number of alerts and pinpointing only the things of interest. This is a key feature for me. Because of this, a non-trained analyst can use it almost right away."
"Vectra AI is the best. It is a major product in our cybersecurity."
"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."
"It does a reliable job of parsing out the logs of all the network traffic so that we can ingest them into our SIEM and utilize them for threat hunting and case investigations. It is pretty robust and reliable. The administration time that we spend maintaining it or troubleshooting it is very low. So, the labor hour overhead is probably our largest benefit from it. We spend 99% of our time in Vectra investigating cases, responding to incidents, or hunting, and only around 1% of our time is spent patching, troubleshooting, or doing anything else. That's our largest benefit from Vectra."
 

Cons

"It doesn't support a PAAC solution (Platforma as a service) in the cloud."
"They can maybe improve their customer service just because they are kind of a small organization, and customer service isn't as big as others such as VMware."
"Kubernetes is not installed in the way we need it."
"In our version, when using the terminal server, we cannot exclude user tasks for each session."
"Sometimes, the speed needs improvement, especially when it comes to the generation of maps, where it can be a bit slow."
"Guardicore Centra should incorporate automation so that we don't require to write custom scripts and APIs. The tool also has limitations on rules where it allows only sixty thousand rules. Our clients have also commented that there are too many manual clicks and effort to do changes. I think that the incorporation of automation can help our clients make changes with confidence and without the possibility of human error."
"Needs more customization of honeypots and a vaster catalog of systems able to be mimicked."
"The long-term management of the security policies could be improved with some kind of automation platform, something like Chef or Puppet or Ansible, to help you manage the policies after day-one... to then manage the policies and changes to those policies, going forward, through some type of automation process is not turning out to be really easy."
"The false positives and the tuning side of it is something that could use improvement. But that could be from our side."
"An area for improvement in Vectra AI is reporting because it currently needs some details. For example, when you download a report from Vectra AI, you won't see complete information about the alerts or triggers. Another area for improvement in the tool is that sometimes, an alert has high severity, yet it's marked as low severity. Vectra AI should have a mechanism to change the severity level from low to high or critical."
"A blind spot that I have is around the ease with which you can automate threat intervention."
"In comparison with a lot of systems I used in the past, the false positives are really a burden because they are taking a lot of time at this moment."
"Some of the customization could be improved. Everything is provided for you as an easy solution to use, but working with it and doing specific development could be worked on a bit more in the scope of an incident response team."
"The reporting from Cognito Detect is very limited and doesn't give you too many options. If I want to prepare a customized report on a particular host, even though I see the data, I have to manually prepare the report. The reporting features that are built into the tool are not very helpful."
"It would be commercially beneficial if Vectra AI had something like Darktrace's Antigena Email or something similar to email protection."
"The main improvement I can see would be to integrate with more external solutions."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"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."
"Akamai Guardicore Segmentation is expensive."
"The customer would complain about the cost."
"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 pricing is too high."
"Compared to the pricing we were seeing from both Illumio and Edgewise, Guardicore was very competitive."
"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 solution's pricing was 50 percent lower than the other vendors shortlisted."
"Their licensing model is antiquated. I'm not a fan of their licensing model. We have to pay for licensing based on four different things. You have to pay based on the number of unique IPs, the number of logs that we send through Recall and Stream, and the size of our environment. They need to simplify their licensing down to just one thing. It should be based on the amount of data, the number of devices, or something else, but there should be just one thing for everything. That's what they need to base their licensing on. Cost-wise, they're not cheap. They were definitely the most expensive option, but you get what you pay for. They're not the cheapest option."
"The upfront pricing model that we have would have been more beneficial if it had been a recurring license fee, but that wasn't a massive issue for us. It's fairly priced."
"Its cost is too much. It's an investment that we can afford. It's a lot, but it's worth it."
"It's relatively on the pricier side, but when compared to other solutions. It's not the most budget-friendly option, but it can be considered somewhat more cost-effective in comparison to other alternatives."
"Vectra is a bit on the higher side in terms of price, but they have always been transparent. The reason that they are this good is that they invest, so they need to charge accordingly."
"The pricing is high."
"It is an expensive solution, but it's not the most expensive we've seen. We also know how much we're going to pay, unlike with some other providers where all of a sudden our license explodes."
report
Use our free recommendation engine to learn which Microsegmentation Software solutions are best for your needs.
814,649 professionals have used our research since 2012.
 

Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
19%
Computer Software Company
16%
Manufacturing Company
7%
Insurance Company
6%
Computer Software Company
17%
Financial Services Firm
12%
Manufacturing Company
7%
Government
7%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
 

Questions from the Community

What do you like most about Guardicore Centra?
Guardicore Centra offers the best coverage specifically in backward compatibility with legacy operating systems.
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 needs improvement with Guardicore Centra?
Customers would want to see the cost improved.
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.
 

Also Known As

Guardicore Centra, GuardiCore
Vectra Networks, Vectra AI NDR
 

Learn More

Video not available
 

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 VMware, Akamai, Illumio and others in Microsegmentation Software. Updated: October 2024.
814,649 professionals have used our research since 2012.