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Arista NDR vs Cisco Secure Network Analytics comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Aug 6, 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

Arista NDR
Ranking in Network Traffic Analysis (NTA)
6th
Ranking in Network Detection and Response (NDR)
10th
Average Rating
9.0
Reviews Sentiment
7.6
Number of Reviews
14
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
Cisco Secure Network Analytics
Ranking in Network Traffic Analysis (NTA)
3rd
Ranking in Network Detection and Response (NDR)
5th
Average Rating
8.2
Reviews Sentiment
6.9
Number of Reviews
60
Ranking in other categories
Network Monitoring Software (22nd), Cisco Security Portfolio (4th)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of February 2025, in the Network Traffic Analysis (NTA) category, the mindshare of Arista NDR is 7.1%, down from 7.6% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Cisco Secure Network Analytics is 15.1%, down from 17.2% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Network Traffic Analysis (NTA)
 

Featured Reviews

reviewer1719513 - PeerSpot reviewer
it's much easier to create your own queries and hunt for threats
We take in IOCs from my SOC and from AlienVault, and then we focus on traffic that hits IOCs and alerts us to it. The one thing that the Awake platform lacks is the ability to automate the ingestion of IOCs rather than having to import CSV files or JSON files manually. Awake didn't support the manual importation of CSV and JSON in version 3.0, but they added it in version 4.0. It's helpful, but it still has to be a specific CSV format. Automated IOCs are on the roadmap. Hopefully, they will be able to automate the ingestion of IOCs by Q1 next year. I'm currently leveraging Mind Meld, an open-source tool by Palo Alto, to ingest IOCs from external parties. I aggregate those lists and spit them out as a massive list of domains, hashes, file names, IPS. Then we aggregate those into their own specific categories, like a URL category. Awake ingests that just like the Palo Alto firewall does, and then it alerts me if traffic attempts to go into it. Some of that is already on the Palo Alto firewall, which blocks it, but that doesn't mean that there is no attempted communication. I want to know if there's a communication attempt because there might be an indicator on that specific device trying to reach an IOC. Yes, my Palo Alto blocked it, but there's still something odd sitting there, and what if it can reach a different IOC that I don't have information about? I want to focus on it. I could do that by leveraging Awake if it could ingest the IOCs automatically. That's something I leverage Awake for today. I still have to manually import it, which is cumbersome because I have to manipulate the files that I get from the different IOC providers into a specific format that it understands. Once they add the ability to automate that, it'll be more useful.
Sudhakar T - PeerSpot reviewer
Strong network security analytics with excellent encrypted traffic analysis features
Improvements are needed on the application layer for complete security analysis. The solution should have the ability to analyze security events not only at the network layer but also at the application and OS layers. There's a need for a more comprehensive licensing model where all necessary licenses are included by default.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"This solution help us monitor devices used on our network by insiders, contractors, partners, or suppliers. Its correlation and identification of specific endpoints is very good, especially since we have a large, virtualized environment. It discerns this fairly well. Some of the issues that we have had with other tools is we sometimes are not able to tell the difference between users on some of those virtualized instances."
"The query language makes it easy to query the records on the network, to do searches for the various threat activities that we're looking for. The dashboard, the Security Knowledge Graph, displays information meaningfully and easily. I am able to find the information that I want to find pretty quickly."
"The security knowledge graph has been very helpful in the sense that whenever you try a new security solution, especially one that's in the detection and response market, you're always worried about getting a lot of false positives or getting too many alerts and not being able to pick out the good from the bad or things that are actual security incidents versus normal day to day operations. We've been pleasantly surprised that Awake does a really good job of only alerting about things that we actually want to look into and understand. They do a good job of understanding normal operations out-of-the-box."
"This solution’s encrypted traffic analysis helps us stay in compliance with government regulations. It is all about understanding data exfiltration, what is ingressing and egressing in our network. One common attack vector is exfiltrating data using encryption. My capabilities to see potential data exfiltration over encrypted traffic is second to none now."
"Arista NDR's scalability is very good, making it easy to add more hardware components. You can order additional hardware and integrate it by stacking it with the existing setup. This feature cannot be seen in other NDR tools."
"Other solutions will say, "Hey, this device is doing something weird." But they don't aggregate that data point with other data points. With Awake you have what's called a "fact pattern." For example, if there's a smart toaster on the third floor that is beaconing out to an IP address in North Korea, sure that's bizarre. But if that toaster was made in North Korea it's not bizarre. Taking those two data points together, and automating something using machine-learning is something that no other solution is doing right now."
"The interface itself is clean and easy to use, yet customizable. I like that I can create my own dashboards fairly easily so that I can see what is important to me. Also, the query language is pretty easy to use. I haven't needed to use it a ton, but as I need to go in and do different queries based on their requests, it has been fairly simple to use."
"The most valuable feature is the ability to see suspicious activity for devices inside my network. It helps me to quickly identify that activity and do analysis to see if it's expected or I need to mitigate that activity quickly."
"It is a good application, providing for real-time monitoring of the organization of data. It can basically identify points of peak traffic where possible issues are being caused."
"The fact that it can identify down to an IP address of a system that is causing problems, or potentially causing problems, is very valuable."
"The most valuable features include encrypted traffic analytics and the ability to fulfill requirements at the network level."
"It has definitely helped us improve our mean time to resolution on network issues."
"The most valuable feature of this solution is the way the net flow is being merged together in a single pane. That's been extremely useful for us, because can see what's going on with traffic in one single place."
"Overall, the implementation is very good."
"The most valuable feature is having visibility into the data segments throughout our network."
"I value the feature which enables me to detect devices talking to suspect IPs."
 

Cons

"When I looked at the competitors, such as Darktrace, they all have prettier interfaces. If Awake could make it a little more user-friendly, that would go a long way."
"I would like to see the capability to import what's known as STIX/TAXII in an IOC format. It currently doesn't offer this."
"I enjoy the query language, but it could be a bit more user-friendly, especially for new users who come across it... They should push it more into a natural language style as opposed to a query language."
"While the appliance is very good, and I think they're working on it, it would probably help if they integrated the management team cases into the appliance so that everything we are working on with them would be accessible on our platform, on the dashboard, on the portal. Right now, Awake is just an additional team that uses the appliance that we use and then we communicate with them directly. Communication isn't through the portal."
"One concern I do have with Awake is that, ideally, it should be able identify high-risk users and devices and entities. However, we don't have confidence in their entity resolution, and we've provided this feedback to Awake. My understanding is that this is where some of the AI/ML is, and it hasn't been reliable in correctly identifying which device an activity is associated with. We have also encountered issues where it has merged two devices into one entity profile when they shouldn't be merged. The entity resolution is the weakest point of Awake so far."
"Arista NDR needs to open legal offices to be closer to customers and partners. It needs more visibility in the NDR market in the Middle East. While they are doing well, they lack sufficient engineers. They need to hire more engineers to meet the demand and expand their presence. The current team is good but not enough to fully capture the market."
"Be prepared to update your SOPs to have your analysts work in another tool separately. There are some limitations in the integrations right now. One of the things that I want from a security standpoint is integration with multiple tools so I don't need to have my analysts logging into each individual tool."
"One thing I would like to see is a little bit more education or experience on AWS cloud for their managed services team. We've explained how we have the information set up, that the traffic coming in goes to the AWS load balancer and then gets sent on to our internal servers... but when I get notices they always tell me this traffic is coming from the IPs belonging to the load balancers, not the source IPs. So a little bit more education for their team about how AWS manages the traffic might help out."
"I would like the search page available with Cisco Stealthwatch to be more intuitive. The previous release was better than the current one for the UI."
"It is time-consuming to set it up and understand how the tool works."
"The reporting of day-to-day metrics still has room for improvement."
"Stealthwatch needs improvement when it comes to speed."
"Improvements are needed on the application layer for complete security analysis."
"I would like to see interoperability with other Cisco products because we have ThousandEyes, Cisco Prime, and others. The interaction among these is important to us."
"Complexity on integration is not so straightforward and you really need an expert to help build it out."
"One update I would like to see is an agent-based client. Currently StealthWatch is network based."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The solution has saved thousands of dollars within the first day. Our ROI has to be in the tens of thousands of dollars since October last year."
"The solution is very good and the pricing is also better than others..."
"We switched to Awake Security because they were able to offer a model that was significantly less expensive and the value that we get out of it is higher."
"Awake Security was the least expensive among their competitors. Everyone was within $15,000 of each other. The other solutions were not providing the MNDR service, which is standard with Awake Security's pricing/licensing model."
"Awake's pricing was very competitive. It's not a cheap option though. It's an investment to utilize it, but it's one that we decided was worth the cost, with the managed services. At our scale, it was a much better option to utilize their software and their managed services to handle this, rather than hiring another person to be an analyst. It was quite cost-effective for us."
"Because I represent a hedge fund, I have some leverage. I told them that they had to meet my conditions if they wanted me as a client. It was the same way with Awake. They wanted an initial four-year agreement. Initially, we signed on for a one-year contract, but they wanted the four-year deal when it came time for the renewal. I told them that I was not doing that. I said that they either had to do it on my terms, or I'd go somewhere else."
"The pricing seems pretty reasonable for what we get out of it. We also found it to be more competitive than some other vendors that we've looked at."
"NetFlow is very expensive."
"Our fees are approximately $3,000 USD."
"One of the things which bugs me about Lancope is the licensing. We understand how licensing works. Our problem is when we bought and purchased most of these Lancope devices, we did so with our sister company. Somewhere within the purchase and distribution, licensing got mixed up. That is all on Cisco, and it is their responsibility. They allotted some of our sister company's equipment to us, and some of our equipment to them. To date, they have never been able to fix it."
"It has a subscription model. There is yearly support, and there is also three-year support. It depends on what the customers want."
"The pricing for this solution is good."
"There are additional licenses needed for the number of so-called network flows. It's hard to plan the number of flows you need in the network, this is a problem. The price of the Cisco Stealthwatch is relatively inexpensive"
"​Licensing is done by flows per second, not including outside (in traffic)."
"On a yearly basis, licensing is somewhere around $30,000."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Computer Software Company
15%
Financial Services Firm
11%
Government
9%
Manufacturing Company
7%
Computer Software Company
30%
Financial Services Firm
11%
Government
9%
Manufacturing Company
6%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
 

Questions from the Community

What do you like most about Arista NDR?
Arista NDR's scalability is very good, making it easy to add more hardware components. You can order additional hardware and integrate it by stacking it with the existing setup. This feature cannot...
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Arista NDR?
The tool's pricing is expensive but it is competitive.
What needs improvement with Arista NDR?
Arista NDR needs to open legal offices to be closer to customers and partners. It needs more visibility in the NDR market in the Middle East. While they are doing well, they lack sufficient enginee...
What do you like most about Cisco Stealthwatch?
The most valuable feature of Cisco Secure Network Analytics is the Threat Intelligence integration.
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Cisco Stealthwatch?
The tool is not cheaply priced. In cybersecurity, you want an extra layer of security in your organization. Some sectors want NDR solutions, so you cannot deploy such tools everywhere, as they are ...
What needs improvement with Cisco Stealthwatch?
The expensive nature of the tool is an area of concern where improvements are required.
 

Also Known As

Awake Security Platform
Cisco Stealthwatch, Cisco Stealthwatch Enterprise, Lancope StealthWatch
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

- Dolby Laboratories- Seattle Genetics- ARM Energy- Ooma- Prophix- Yapstone
Edge Web Hosting, Telenor Norway, Ivy Tech Community College of Indiana, Webster Financial Corporation, Westinghouse Electric, VMware, TIAA-CREF
Find out what your peers are saying about Arista NDR vs. Cisco Secure Network Analytics and other solutions. Updated: January 2025.
838,713 professionals have used our research since 2012.