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Arista NDR vs Darktrace comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Mar 29, 2026

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)
9th
Ranking in Network Detection and Response (NDR)
17th
Average Rating
9.0
Reviews Sentiment
7.6
Number of Reviews
14
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
84
Ranking in other categories
Email Security (8th), Intrusion Detection and Prevention Software (IDPS) (2nd), Extended Detection and Response (XDR) (7th), Cloud Security Posture Management (CSPM) (10th), Cloud-Native Application Protection Platforms (CNAPP) (9th), Attack Surface Management (ASM) (4th), AI-Powered Cybersecurity Platforms (4th), AI Observability (6th)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of April 2026, in the Network Detection and Response (NDR) category, the mindshare of Arista NDR is 3.2%, down from 4.3% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Darktrace is 15.6%, down from 24.9% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Network Detection and Response (NDR) Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
Darktrace15.6%
Arista NDR3.2%
Other81.2%
Network Detection and Response (NDR)
 

Featured Reviews

it_user1719513 - PeerSpot reviewer
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.
AM
Technical Consultant - Unix Platform Services at BITS AND BYTE IT CONSULTING PVT LTD
Consistent threat hunting and anomaly detection deliver valuable insights for network security management
In terms of improvement for Darktrace, pricing is the main concern. Pricing bothers me and this is one of the major factors when choosing a solution. When we get feedback from customers, that's the only felt need. When we factor in Darktrace, we do it only limited. We put it on where the perimeters and connections are, but still, some gray areas are left out, especially if we have multiple branches. We need Darktrace on each branch to get the data out, and I suggest having some kind of a centralized product that gets data from multiple sources to aggregate and provide the data.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"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."
"Awake MNDR has made our security posture more comfortable, and we get some peace of mind knowing they're there if something should happen."
"For a network traffic-analysis platform, it's definitely the best in industry."
"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."
"The query language that they have is quite valuable, especially because the sensor itself is storing some network activity and we're able to query that. That has been useful in a pinch because we don't necessarily use it just for threat hunting, but we also use it for debugging network issues. We can use it to ask questions and get answers about our network. For example: Which users and devices are using the VPN for RDP access? We can write a query pretty quickly and get an answer for that."
"We appreciate the value of the AML (structured query language). We receive security intel feeds for a specific type of malware or ransomware. AML queries looking for the activity is applied in almost real-time. Ultimately, this determines if the activity was not observed on the network."
"But we had zero visibility into our network before and so now we have visibility into our network."
"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."
"The initial setup is simple."
"The Antigena feature is most valuable, because once it learns your environment, Antigena can step in and block a denial of service attack, a ransomware attack, or just about anything that doesn't belong in the environment."
"We're very pleased with Darktrace so it is a bit difficult to pinpoint areas for improvement."
"It is a stable solution."
"It is autonomous, so it learns; it uses algorithms and AI to learn the common behavioral patterns on the network, and it is able to identify threats based on abnormal patterns."
"The active threat dashboard is the most valuable feature of this solution."
"Implementing this solution has given us confidence that we are secure."
"It's beneficial to me and I can see that with more time and energy put into optimizing it and personalizing the unit, it can be much more powerful than the way I am using it now."
 

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."
"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."
"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."
"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."
"Awake Security needs to move to a 24/7 support model in the MNDR space. Once they do that, it will make them even better."
"One thing I would like to see is a little bit more education or experience on AWS cloud for their managed services team."
"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."
"There's room for improvement with some of the definitions, because I don't have time and I'm not a Tier 4 analyst. I believe that is something they're working towards."
"The solution can improve the reporting."
"The price point for the product was too high for what our possible use case could be."
"The management dashboards and the meter dashboards should be more user-friendly and simple to use for easy management."
"In terms of improvements, fine-tuning is the area where we have to spend some time because it works on unsupervised machine learning. It would be good if they can improve their algorithm or technical functionality to reduce the fine-tuning effort. They can also come up with something at the endpoint level. So far, Darktrace has been a network detection response (NDR) solution. It does not offer much at the endpoint level or on user-client devices or servers. There should be more visibility at the endpoint level. It would be good to have the detection and response at the endpoint level by Darktrace. It should also have integration with an agile environment so that we can have continuous development and continuous integration in the application development environment. This is currently not there. It should also have internet-facing platform visibility, which is currently missing. They also need to improve the reporting and management dashboards. Currently, these are not so easy for a non-technical person. All these features would make Darktrace much better, and they would also be helpful in selling more solutions."
"The program is quite expensive."
"We want to continue using Darktrace but it's very expensive."
"My only criticism of the product is that its licensing model isn't flexible."
"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."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"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 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."
"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."
"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."
"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."
"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."
"I am using a demo of Darktrace for deployment and testing which is free."
"The pricing is reasonable."
"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."
"It is a very expensive product."
"The solution is about $6,000 per quarter."
"The tool's pricing is costly."
"Our customers feel that the price of Darktrace is quite high compared to other solutions."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
11%
Computer Software Company
8%
Government
8%
Comms Service Provider
7%
Computer Software Company
10%
Manufacturing Company
9%
Financial Services Firm
9%
Government
7%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business5
Midsize Enterprise2
Large Enterprise7
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business45
Midsize Enterprise19
Large Enterprise29
 

Questions from the Community

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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...
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Darktrace?
Concerning pricing for the product, I would say it is somewhat expensive.
 

Also Known As

Awake Security Platform
No data available
 

Overview

 

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.
Find out what your peers are saying about Arista NDR vs. Darktrace and other solutions. Updated: March 2026.
886,174 professionals have used our research since 2012.