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AlienVault OSSIM vs Devo comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Sep 18, 2024

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

AlienVault OSSIM
Ranking in Security Information and Event Management (SIEM)
10th
Average Rating
7.4
Reviews Sentiment
7.1
Number of Reviews
31
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
Devo
Ranking in Security Information and Event Management (SIEM)
30th
Average Rating
8.4
Reviews Sentiment
7.1
Number of Reviews
22
Ranking in other categories
Log Management (27th), IT Operations Analytics (6th), AIOps (16th)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of February 2025, in the Security Information and Event Management (SIEM) category, the mindshare of AlienVault OSSIM is 4.2%, up from 3.2% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Devo is 1.0%, down from 1.2% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Security Information and Event Management (SIEM)
 

Featured Reviews

Aman Aijaz - PeerSpot reviewer
An easy-to-scale open-source solution used for monitoring events on devices
The area for improvement is a lot. When I started using it on our enterprise side, the issue we faced was, for example, if we were running at that time on AlienVault OSSIM v5.7.4. So, for some orders, we had to install some packages, and when we tried installing that package, some dependencies got upgraded to a new version. Now once that dependency got upgraded, the SQL, since you might be aware that OSSIM uses SQL database, now SQL and all the dependency in everything was not on the same version, and that caused the database to crash. The aforementioned area should be eased out by upgrading the patches and upgrading dependencies. This kind of thing is a disadvantage of OSSIM, and I would like them to work on this. But I have also raised service requests many times and gave it a push on the community section too. However, since it is a local source, they don't reply much over there. That is why I don't like to work on OSSIM because it is unpredictable. Once the storage goes above 50 percent, it starts behaving unpredictably. If you get stuck with a situation, then you need to drill a lockdown into that. Sometimes you get no luck. Then you have to just reimage the server with the new fresh OS of AlienVault. As for additional features, not much because if you move to the newer version, it is kind of getting more stable. But, to make my life easier, then I would say try to give more features. I know it's open source, so they also cannot provide me with more features. But still, if they can provide me with more features because right now it's becoming old. Right now, we are even moving from SIEM to Security Data Lake. So when we move to it, this will be literally outdated. No one can even expect anything out of it. The way security is moving, it will be outdated very soon. They have to also provide something new to keep this going for the future also.
Michael Wenn - PeerSpot reviewer
Has cloud-first architecture with SIEM technology to run security operations
When it comes to scale, they're architected quite well. They handle some of the biggest customers globally, with significant throughput on their platform, managing thousands of customers. One of the most impressive aspects of Devo is its customer community. A large majority, over 80 percent of their customers, actively participate on a Devo-specific community page. They're contributing to product development and support, events, and user group information, helping each other out. This high level of engagement is rare and demonstrates both the loyalty of their customer base and the quality of their product. They offer a range of small, medium, and large options to cater to everyone. I sold Devo products while working with them, focusing on enterprise solutions. However, as a small reseller, my customers were typically smaller businesses. I rate the solution's scalability a nine out of ten.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"You pay monthly for the solution. I think it's one of the best products. If you compare with other companies, like LogRhythm, etc., the top 8 or 10 CMs, I think Alien Vault has the best price-performance ratio."
"The initial setup is straightforward."
"OSSIM is the only solution that includes the large number of modules that we need: a vulnerability scanner, a network IDS system, a host IDS system."
"The solution is free to use."
"I recommend it due to the experience of the people running it."
"The solution has a very good open source community, and whenever we have problems, we are always able to resolve it online."
"The most valuable features of AlienVault OSSIM are vulnerability assessment, network intrusion detection system, response to critical events, and awareness of the whole network."
"Inbuilt IDS, inbuilt integration with threat intelligence platform and with vulnerability assessment modules."
"The alerting is much better than I anticipated. We don't get as many alerts as I thought we would, but that nobody's fault, it's just the way it is."
"The user experience [is] well thought out and the workflows are logical. The dashboards are intuitive and highly customizable."
"It centralizes security management within a business, functioning as a core system for a SOC."
"The ability to have high performance, high-speed search capability is incredibly important for us. When it comes to doing security analysis, you don't want to be doing is sitting around waiting to get data back while an attacker is sitting on a network, actively attacking it. You need to be able to answer questions quickly. If I see an indicator of attack, I need to be able to rapidly pivot and find data, then analyze it and find more data to answer more questions. You need to be able to do that quickly. If I'm sitting around just waiting to get my first response, then it ends up moving too slow to keep up with the attacker. Devo's speed and performance allows us to query in real-time and keep up with what is actually happening on the network, then respond effectively to events."
"The most powerful feature is the way the data is stored and extracted. The data is always stored in its original format and you can normalize the data after it has been stored."
"Being able to build and modify dashboards on the fly with Activeboards streamlines my analyst time because my analysts aren't doing it across spreadsheets or five different tools to try to build a timeline out themselves. They can just ingest it all, build a timeline out across all the logging, and all the different information sources in one dashboard. So, it's a huge time saver. It also has the accuracy of being able to look at all those data sources in one view. The log analysis, which would take 40 hours, we can probably get through it in about five to eight hours using Devo."
"Devo has a really good website for creating custom configurations."
"The querying and the log-retention capabilities are pretty powerful. Those provide some of the biggest value-add for us."
 

Cons

"There needs to be more support or some kind of training program so users can self-learn the system more effectively."
"The documentation could be improved."
"There are somewhat more false positives with the user behavior analytics, which could benefit from an additional machine learning model to detect user patterns more rapidly."
"We need more dashboards and we need more customization for dashboards."
"There are somewhat more false positives with the user behavior analytics, which could benefit from an additional machine learning model to detect user patterns more rapidly."
"GUI could be improved."
"AlienVault OSSIM gives unwanted notifications."
"I don't like to work on OSSIM because it is unpredictable."
"The Activeboards feature is not as mature regarding the look and feel. Its functionality is mature, but the look and feel is not there. For example, if you have some data sets and are trying to get some graphics, you cannot change anything. There's just one format for the graphics. You cannot change the size of the font, the font itself, etc."
"Devo has a lot of cloud connectors, but they need to do a little bit of work there. They've got good integrations with the public cloud, but there are a lot of cloud SaaS systems that they still need to work with on integrations, such as Salesforce and other SaaS providers where we need to get access logs."
"Their documentation could be better. They are growing quickly and need to have someone focused on tech writing to ensure that all the different updates, how to use them, and all the new features and functionality are properly documented."
"One major area for improvement for Devo... is to provide more capabilities around pre-built monitoring. They're working on integrations with different types of systems, but that integration needs to go beyond just onboarding to the platform. It needs to include applications, out-of-the-box, that immediately help people to start monitoring their systems. Such applications would include dashboards and alerts, and then people could customize them for their own needs so that they aren't starting from a blank slate."
"Technical support could be better."
"Some basic reporting mechanisms have room for improvement. Customers can do analysis by building Activeboards, Devo’s name for interactive dashboards. This capability is quite nice, but it is not a reporting engine. Devo does provide mechanisms to allow third-party tools to query data via their API, which is great. However, a lot of folks like or want a reporting engine, per se, and Devo simply doesn't have that. This may or may not be by design."
"Some of the documentation could be improved a little bit. A lot of times it doesn't go as deep into some of the critical issues you might run into. They've been really good to shore us up with support, but some of the documentation could be a little bit better."
"From our experience, the Devo agent needs some work. They built it on top of OS Query's open-source framework. It seems like it wasn't tuned properly to handle a large volume of Windows event logs. In our experience, there would definitely be some room for improvement. A lot of SIEMs on the market have their own agent infrastructure. I think Devo's working towards that, but I think that it needs some improvement as far as keeping up with high-volume environments."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The licensing fees for the non-community edition are paid on an annual basis, and there are no costs in addition to this."
"I used the paid version of the tool and found it to be expensive. It has been a while since I changed to Securonix. I will have to check whether AlienVault charges per device, user, or log."
"The price of AlienVault OSSIM is too high sometimes for us to present to our customers. The price should be lower. We are on a three-year license to use the solution. We had to pay extra for the support."
"The tool's licensing costs are yearly."
"The solution is open source, so it's free to use."
"AlienVault pricing is the best. Whatever cost you are paying, you are getting a return on every penny... It's not like your IBM, your QRadar, or Splunk, where the cost is too high."
"OSSIM is open source, and USM is the paid license. So, if you want, you can switch to USM. There you will have to buy a license, and they have a support team that helps you out on issues you face."
"OSSIM is free."
"We have an OEM agreement with Devo. It is very similar to the standard licensing agreement because we are charged in the same way as any other customer, e.g., we use the backroom."
"Devo is a hosted or subscription-based solution, whereas before, we purchased QRadar, so we owned it and just had to pay a maintenance fee. We've encountered this with some other products, too, where we went over to subscription-based. Our thought process is that with subscription based, the provider hosts and maintains the tool, and it's offsite. That comes with some additional fees, but we were able to convince our upper management it was worth the price. We used to pay under 10k a year for maintenance, and now we're paying ten times that. It was a relatively tough sell to our management, but I wonder if we have a choice anymore; this is where the market is."
"I rate the pricing a four on a scale of one to ten, where one is cheap, and ten is expensive."
"Our licensing fees are billed annually and per terabyte."
"Be cautious of metadata inclusion for log types in pricing, as there are some "gotchas" with that."
"I like the pricing very much. They keep it simple. It is a single price based on data ingested, and they do it on an average. If you get a spike of data that flows in, they will not stick it to you or charge you for that. They are very fair about that."
"[Devo was] in the ballpark with at least a couple of the other front-runners that we were looking at. Devo is a good value and, given the quality of the product, I would expect to pay more."
"Devo is definitely cheaper than Splunk. There's no doubt about that. The value from Devo is good. It's definitely more valuable to me than QRadar or LogRhythm or any of the old, traditional SIEMs."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Computer Software Company
17%
Financial Services Firm
10%
Comms Service Provider
9%
University
7%
Financial Services Firm
16%
Computer Software Company
15%
University
7%
Government
7%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
 

Questions from the Community

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for AlienVault OSSIM?
It depends. I would need to review their cost models, but generally, they are on a scaled basis based on throughput usage. Because it's a software as a service solution for their core product for U...
What needs improvement with AlienVault OSSIM?
Scaling for USM is always challenging for any product unless it is purpose-built or overbuilt at the front end. They will use Palo Alto and its competitors, and LevelBlue will manage that implement...
What do you like most about Devo?
Devo has a really good website for creating custom configurations.
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Devo?
Compared to Splunk or SentinelOne, it is really expensive. I rate the product’s pricing a nine out of ten, where one is cheap and ten is expensive.
What needs improvement with Devo?
They can improve their AI capabilities. If you look at some integrations like XDR or AI, which add to the platform to correlate situations in events, there are areas for enhancement. For instance, ...
 

Comparisons

 

Also Known As

OSSIM
No data available
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Council Rock School District
United States Air Force, Rubrik, SentinelOne, Critical Start, NHL, Panda Security, Telefonica, CaixaBank, OpenText, IGT, OneMain Financial, SurveyMonkey, FanDuel, H&R Block, Ulta Beauty, Manulife, Moneylion, Chime Bank, Magna International, American Express Global Business Travel
Find out what your peers are saying about AlienVault OSSIM vs. Devo and other solutions. Updated: January 2025.
838,713 professionals have used our research since 2012.