Arista NDR vs Darktrace comparison

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Arista NDR

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Executive SummaryUpdated on Jun 3, 2026

Darktrace and Arista NDR compete in the realm of network threat detection and response. Darktrace holds the upper hand due to its advanced AI-driven insights into network behavior, complementing its comprehensive visibility across cloud services.

Features: Darktrace offers AI-driven threat detection, self-learning AI for autonomous responses, and extensive network monitoring across various environments. Arista NDR excels in network detection with real-time traffic analysis, anomaly detection, and strong integration capabilities.

Room for Improvement: Darktrace could enhance its false positive management, visualization tools, endpoint protection, and simplifying configuration. Arista NDR should improve entity resolution accuracy, third-party tool integration, and API capabilities for better interoperability.

Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: Darktrace is versatile for deployment in different environments, though initial setup may be complex. Support is generally good but could be enhanced for complex deployments. Arista NDR integrates seamlessly with existing infrastructure and offers strong initial setup assistance, making it easier for users with comprehensive support.

Pricing and ROI: Darktrace is often considered expensive but justified by its security features and significant ROI through prevention and visibility enhancements. Arista NDR provides competitive pricing and is more cost-effective, offering managed services that offset in-house resource needs, ultimately strengthening security postures at a lower cost.

To learn more, read our detailed Arista NDR vs. Darktrace Report (Updated: September 2026).

Arista NDR vs. Darktrace

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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)

8th

Ranking in Network Detection and Response (NDR)

17th

Average Rating

9.0

Reviews Sentiment

7.6

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

No ranking in other categories

Darktrace

Ranking in Network Traffic Analysis (NTA)

1st

Ranking in Network Detection and Response (NDR)

1st

Average Rating

8.2

Reviews Sentiment

7.1

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

Email Security (10th), Intrusion Detection and Prevention Software (IDPS) (2nd), Extended Detection and Response (XDR) (6th), Cloud Security Posture Management (CSPM) (11th), Cloud-Native Application Protection Platforms (CNAPP) (10th), Attack Surface Management (ASM) (4th), AI-Powered Cybersecurity Platforms (4th), AI Observability (7th)

Mindshare comparison

As of September 2026, in the Network Detection and Response (NDR) category, the mindshare of Arista NDR is 2.9%, down from 4.0% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Darktrace is 13.3%, down from 22.7% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.

Network Detection and Response (NDR) Mindshare Distribution
Product	Mindshare (%)
Darktrace	13.3%
Arista NDR	2.9%
Other	83.8%

Network Detection and Response (NDR)

Featured Reviews

it_user1719513

Chief Technology Officer at a financial services firm with 11-50 employees

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.

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Pasan Jayarathna

Network Security Engineer at Cyberwell Solution

Monitoring has improved data loss detection and now spots abnormal internal file transfers quickly

In my understanding, the best feature Darktrace offers is the identification of copying files, which acts as a DLP, and it is a main concern for companies because users sometimes copy data outside without knowing, especially those without a technical background. When I mention the DLP-like feature and file copying detection, the alerts have been very timely, as we get an alert within a couple of minutes, which is excellent. Even if some developers are working after hours and copying files, our SOC team detects this, and most of the time they call us so we can identify the users. The alerts are quite accurate and proactive.

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Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"Having a network monitoring team on our side with the Awake Security appliance is a big step up."

"It gives us something that is almost like an auditing tool for all of our network controls, to see how they are performing. This is related to compliance so that we can see how we are doing with what we have already implemented. There are things that we implemented, but we really didn't know if they were working or not. We have that visibility now."

"Awake Security gets a solid nine (out of 10) based on our experience, which is based on their technology, professionalism, and communication."

"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."

"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."

"But we had zero visibility into our network before and so now we have visibility into our network."

"For a network traffic-analysis platform, it's definitely the best in industry."

"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."

More Arista NDR pros

"The most valuable features of Darktrace are the tracing of unusual external emails and monitoring the local network."

"Darktrace impacts my organization positively by providing us with a better understanding of abnormal activities detected among users."

"The main valuable feature is that we don't need a lot of analysts. With few analysts, we have all the network monitored, 24/7."

"The solution automatically monitors everything on the network to prevent anti-phishing by monitoring, responding, and restoring the system."

"In terms of features, the data or information they collect and unsupervised machine learning are very valuable. Its unsupervised machine learning has reduced our team's effort. Both Darktrace and Vectra work on unsupervised machine learning that learns the behavior or develops a profile on its own, which allows our security team to do some other tasks rather than spending time on Darktrace or Vectra. Because of unsupervised machine learning, its detection capability is quite good. Along with that, if we utilize the integration feature properly, the automated incident response capability of Darktrace is quite useful."

"I have found the automation and AI features to be valuable. If someone were to come in to the office at midnight and log in, Darktrace would flag it."

"Darktrace is a good product and it can be implemented on premises."

"The solution is stable. We've never had any problems with it."

More Darktrace pros

Cons

"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."

"It's important that Awake continues to develop its APIs to be able to help intertwine their product into the overall security architecture of a company, just because it is a single tool."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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 to see a bit more in terms of encrypted traffic. With the advent of programs that live off the land, a smart attacker is going to leverage encryption to execute their operation. So I would like to see improvements there, where possible. Currently, we're not going to be decrypting encrypted traffic. What other approaches could be used?"

"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."

More Arista NDR cons

"One area for improvement is the alerting system, which generates too many alerts and becomes labor-intensive for organizations not equipped with enough personnel in their SOC."

"I would like to see some additional enhancements."

"It's sometimes a challenge getting logs from different sources."

"Darktrace is a closed technology, meaning we know very little about how it works, including the architecture, which is significant. As a result, when we implement the system and find we're getting many false positives, we have minimal insight into why it's happening and what we can do to fix it. We don't know how the solution is configured, the criteria for threats to be determined, or the product's inner workings. We understand that they have to ensure privacy and their copyright, but we want to see some documentation or public research into the security Darktrace provides."

"Its documentation is not up to the mark. At times, I have a lot of trouble finding a solution."

"Darktrace needs to simplify most of the positive reports. We have to field all the positive reports, false positives, too."

"The program is quite expensive."

"It's quite expensive to have."

More Darktrace cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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 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."

"Darktrace is pricey, but the price is reasonable for what the solution does, and it's comparable to other products."

"The price of Darktrace is high and could be reduced. We pay approximately $30,000 to $54,000 annually."

"The cost of the solution is expensive for smaller businesses. They will not be able to afford it or might not need this type of security solution."

"The pricing is quite high, estimated at around $350,000 per year."

"It's an expensive solution."

"The product is expensive."

"We had an issue with pricing initially and had to cancel some of the features of the projects to fit the budget. I would like to see pricing that is not broken up into parts so that we can buy the whole package once. Darktrace is more expensive than an average solution, but it's functionality won't match that of an average solution."

"The solution is about $6,000 per quarter."

More Darktrace pricing and cost advice

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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Outsourcing Company

10%

Financial Services Firm

Comms Service Provider

Manufacturing Company

10%

Financial Services Firm

Comms Service Provider

Computer Software Company

Company Size

By reviewers

Large Enterprise

Midsize Enterprise

Small Business

By reviewers
Company Size	Count
Small Business	5
Midsize Enterprise	2
Large Enterprise	7

By reviewers
Company Size	Count
Small Business	44
Midsize Enterprise	20
Large Enterprise	29

Questions from the Community

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How does Crowdstrike Falcon compare with Darktrace?

Both of these products perform similarly and have many outstanding attributes. CrowdStrike Falcon offers an amazing user interface that makes setup easy and seamless. CrowdStrike Falcon offers a cl...

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Which is better - SentinelOne or Darktrace?

Which solution is better depends on which is more suitable specifically for your company. Darktrace, for example, is meant for smaller to medium-sized businesses. It is also a good option for organ...

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What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Darktrace?

Concerning pricing for the product, I would say it is somewhat expensive.

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Comparisons

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Bitdefender Network Traffic Security Analytics vs Arista NDR

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Compared 4% of the time

CrowdStrike Falcon vs Darktrace

Compared 3% of the time

Cisco Secure Network Analytics vs Darktrace

Compared 2% of the time

SentinelOne Singularity Endpoint vs Darktrace

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Bitdefender GravityZone Extended Detection and Response (XDR) vs Darktrace

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Product Reports

Arista NDR

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Also Known As

Awake Security Platform

No data available

Overview

Arista NDR specializes in advanced traffic monitoring, effective false positive reduction, and strong data science capabilities, positioning itself as a leading solution in network detection and response.

Arista NDR enhances threat detection with innovations like the Security Knowledge Graph, which boosts situational awareness by up to 50%. Users value the intuitive interface and query language, allowing insights into encrypted traffic without impacting performance. Arista also offers robust threat-hunting services, aiding in proactive security measures. However, improvements are needed in API integration, entity resolution reliability, automation for IOC handling, and AWS configuration education. Greater security tool integration and enhanced query language usability are requested, along with overcoming challenges in encrypted traffic analysis, particularly in the Middle East.

What are Arista NDR's most important features?

Advanced Traffic Monitoring: Provides comprehensive visibility into network activities.
False Positive Reduction: Minimizes alerts, focusing on genuine threats.
Security Knowledge Graph: Enhances threat detection and situational awareness.
Intuitive Interface: Simplifies navigation and usage through an easy-to-use design.
Threat-Hunting Services: Supports proactive security operations.

What benefits should users seek in reviews?

Improved Security Posture: Rapid enhancement of security measures.
Efficient Threat Detection: Quick identification and mitigation of suspicious activities.
Network Visibility: Detailed insights into lateral traffic and threat detection.
Performance Impact: Maintains effectiveness without slowing down operations.
Versatile Deployment: Offers both on-premise and cloud dashboard features.

Arista NDR is frequently implemented across industries for monitoring internal networks, with a focus on lateral traffic movement and threat detection, including ransomware and data exfiltration indicators. Its capabilities are utilized for both compliance and security enhancements, with many turning to its managed services for resource efficiency.

Arista

Darktrace revolutionizes network security with AI-driven alerts, anomaly detection, and robust visibility across networks. It autonomously detects threats, minimizing the need for human oversight, and offers efficient IP identification with minimal false positives.

Darktrace uses advanced AI analytics to enhance network protection. Its powerful real-time threat response capabilities and self-learning enable thorough monitoring and insightful analysis of network activities. While providing scalable and reliable security, users seek improvements in false positive reduction, user-friendly interfaces, and pricing. Enhanced third-party integration, more effective dashboards, and centralized automation features remain top priorities. Users benefit greatly from its Antigena feature, offering automated responses like blocking suspicious connections for robust network defense.

What Are Darktrace's Key Features?

AI-Driven Alerts: Provides real-time alerts for threat detection.
Anomaly Detection: Identifies unusual network activities with precision.
Real-Time Threat Response: Autonomously counteracts potential threats.
Comprehensive Monitoring: Offers detailed network activity insights.
Scalability: Adapts to expanding network environments effectively.

Which Benefits Should Users Consider in Reviews?

Stability: Reliable performance ensures constant protection.
Efficient Cloud Protection: Safeguards data across cloud infrastructures.
Intuitive Interface: Facilitates easy navigation and efficient operations.
Network Visibility: Enhances understanding of network traffic and activities.
Automated Threat Blocking: Quick response to potential network breaches.

In industries employing Darktrace, it is pivotal in securing LAN networks, analyzing behavioral patterns, and detecting internal and external threats. Adoption alongside platforms like F5 and SAP enhances incident response, traffic analysis, and threat identification, utilizing Antigena for proactive security measures.

Sample Customers

- Dolby Laboratories- Seattle Genetics- ARM Energy- Ooma- Prophix- Yapstone

Irwin Mitchell, Open Energi, Wellcome Trust, FirstGroup plc, Virgin Trains, Drax, QUI! Group, DNK, CreaCard, Macrosynergy, Sisley, William Hill plc, Toyota Canada, Royal British Legion, Vitol, Allianz, KKR, AIRBUS, dpd, Billabong, Mclaren Group.

Arista NDR vs. Darktrace