No more typing reviews! Try our Samantha, our new voice AI agent.

Cisco Sourcefire SNORT vs ExtraHop Reveal(x) comparison

Why PeerSpot?
 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive Summary

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

Cisco Sourcefire SNORT
Average Rating
7.8
Reviews Sentiment
6.8
Number of Reviews
20
Ranking in other categories
Intrusion Detection and Prevention Software (IDPS) (12th)
ExtraHop Reveal(x)
Average Rating
8.6
Reviews Sentiment
7.1
Number of Reviews
15
Ranking in other categories
Network Traffic Analysis (NTA) (7th), Network Detection and Response (NDR) (5th)
 

Mindshare comparison

While both are Network Security Systems solutions, they serve different purposes. Cisco Sourcefire SNORT is designed for Intrusion Detection and Prevention Software (IDPS) and holds a mindshare of 2.9%, up 2.6% compared to last year.
ExtraHop Reveal(x), on the other hand, focuses on Network Traffic Analysis (NTA), holds 5.9% mindshare, down 13.0% since last year.
Intrusion Detection and Prevention Software (IDPS) Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
Cisco Sourcefire SNORT2.9%
Darktrace10.2%
Fortinet FortiGate7.4%
Other79.5%
Intrusion Detection and Prevention Software (IDPS)
Network Traffic Analysis (NTA) Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
ExtraHop Reveal(x)5.9%
Darktrace14.3%
Cisco Secure Network Analytics9.3%
Other70.5%
Network Traffic Analysis (NTA)
 

Featured Reviews

reviewer2772102 - PeerSpot reviewer
Cloud Architect at a consultancy with 1-10 employees
Logging and customizable rules have helped improve threat monitoring and detection
The logging is mainly what I consider one of the best features with Cisco Sourcefire SNORT. Being able to log and store it in a file allows you to push it to a centralized repository. The logging and reporting help improve incident response. You should always be logging threats, any sort of misconfiguration, and anything that could be an issue. It's important to at least log and monitor it. The basic rules provide a good baseline in assessing Cisco Sourcefire SNORT's ability in providing real-time analytics for threat detection, but as a professional, you should look to constantly modify that baseline. They provide extensive customizability so you can define your own rules. The customizability allows it to be adaptable in protecting against diverse network threats to the constant change.
Henri Heuvel - PeerSpot reviewer
Technical Consultant at Axians
Cloud-based administration streamlines network security management
ExtraHop Reveal(x) can improve regarding integration capabilities. For instance, the market is getting really flooded with Microsoft Sentinel, and I know there is an integration possible, but the tools on the market right now indicate that integration should not be a skill from an integrator point of view. It should be quite easy for customers to integrate that solution into SOCs, SIEMs, or any other integration with other tools. There are various integrations from which there's a manual on how to do it, but specifically, the Microsoft portfolio, particularly Sentinel, integration is not yet there. If you score them on a scale of one to ten, ExtraHop scores around a 7.5 to an 8 on an integration basis, but there's actually room for improvement on that side. In the older days, ExtraHop had a license model where you could do all you can eat, so if you had a sensor with 10 gig of capacity, you could use all the entire 10 gig of throughput. They changed that to an asset-based license model, and that's an absolute downside of the solution, where it is harder for smaller companies to acquire the solution itself. That has given us quite some problems in positioning the solution properly within the network, so the licensing model is an absolute downside where they need to improve.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"The solution can be integrated with some network electors like Cisco Stealthwatch, Cisco ISE, and Active Directory to provide the client with authentication certificates."
"The product is inexpensive compared to leading brands such as Palo Alto or Fortinet."
"If you compare it to other vendors, the technical support from Cisco is excellent."
"It is quite an intelligent product."
"The most valuable feature of this solution is the filtering."
"Cisco Sourcefire SNORT is easy to configure and the reporting is great. It's also very user-friendly."
"In general, the features are all great. However, if I need to take hardware for ASA, because they need to upgrade to Firepower, we want to create rules. For that, most of the time we go to the command line. Right now Firepower is working really hard on the grid. You can apply all those rules to the grid. Even if you want to monitor the logs, for example, the activity will tell you which particular user has been blocked because of that rule. Firepower's monitoring interface is very good, because you can see each and every piece. ASA also had it, but there you needed to type the command and be under the server to see all that stuff. In Firepower you have the possibility to go directly to the firewall. The way the monitoring is displayed is also very nice. The feature I appreciate most in Firepower is actually the grid. The grid has worked very well."
"It has a huge rate of protection. It's has a low level of positives and a huge rate of threat protection. It's easy to deploy and easy to implement. It has an incredible price rate compared to similar solutions."
"Reveal(x)'s stability is excellent."
"The solution works well for sending sensors."
"When there are performance issues with an HTTP app, ExtraHop enables us to identify the causes within a few minutes. We can see what transactions are being impacted by something that may be happening within the server environment."
"The solution's initial setup process is easy."
"The solution's ability to decrypt SSL traffic is its most valuable feature."
"We had useful information within the hour of deployment."
"ExtraHop Reveal(x) is one of the tools that works out of the box when it comes to threat hunting."
"We had useful information within the hour of deployment. The ability to trace back for historical analysis, as well as the behavioral analysis done with the security information, puts the user in a position to make an informed decision to mitigate the performance or security incidents. Regarding the security incidents, Reveal (x) is able to create incident cards that guide your teams through the incidents and gives you the option to delve into the transaction detail to potentially view payloads as well."
 

Cons

"The customization of the rules can be simplified."
"Integration with other components — even Cisco's own products — can be enhanced to improve administrative experience."
"To be frank, the product is not really stable, although they're working on that. Whenever I go to the technical community with an issue, they will usually say that it is not there yet, but the technical team are working on it. The issues are not insolvable. I think they should just keep working on the product to make sure that the product can become very stable. The technical support is great. I appreciate that. We have a lot of communities supporting Firepower now, so you can find help for whatever issue you have."
"If the price is brought down then everybody will be happy."
"With the next release, I would like to see some PBR, so that you can do the configuration with the features."
"The pricing needs to be improved."
"To be frank, the product is not really stable, although they're working on that."
"The utopia is to see everything from one dashboard, but sometimes that's not very possible."
"Agent management could certainly use some focus. It should also be a little bit easier to work with collections. We should be able to nest collections within collections. There should be better nesting."
"Netflow - Processing Netflow can be cumbersome as it requires triggers to truly gain value and insight. This in turn can add a bit of load to the hardware. The focus of ExtraHop Reveal (x) is live packet data."
"The solution is expensive and gets more expensive if a company needs to scale it."
"Currently, we have to check manually as we do not receive any notifications about new patches, maintenance, or firmware releases."
"They used to have the ability to decode Citrix sign-on, setup, and tear down. Unfortunately, Citrix has stopped sharing that knowledge. Citrix has continued to change its model of processing, making it harder and harder to troubleshoot."
"Setting up ExtraHop is complex because we needed a nuanced understanding of the data flows into our data center."
"I would like to see improvements in areas where events are getting dropped; we're not able to view complete insights."
"I would rate the price a three out of five. It could be less expensive."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"Licensing for this solution is paid on a yearly basis."
"We have a three-year license for this solution."
"I don't know the exact amount, but most of the time when I go to a company with a proposition, they will say, "This thing that you are selling is good, but it's expensive. Why don't you propose something like FortiGate, Check Point, or Palo Alto?" Cisco device are expensive compared to other devices."
"The cost is per port and can be expensive but it does include training and support for three years."
"If one is an extremely expensive product, and ten is cheap, I rate the tool's price as a five."
"I rate the price of ExtraHop Reveal(x) a seven on a scale of one to ten, where one is a high price, and ten is a low price."
"The solution is based on an annual subscription model and is expensive."
"I would rate the price a three out of five. It could be less expensive."
"I rate ExtraHop Reveal(x) six out of 10 for affordability. We pay for an annual license. It's always one of those trade-offs. You get a lot of value, but ExtraHop isn't exorbitantly priced. You can pay extra for additional features like the ability to decode HL7 traffic, which is crucial for EMR environments."
report
Use our free recommendation engine to learn which Intrusion Detection and Prevention Software (IDPS) solutions are best for your needs.
919,003 professionals have used our research since 2012.
 

Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Construction Company
13%
Outsourcing Company
9%
Manufacturing Company
8%
Financial Services Firm
8%
Financial Services Firm
14%
Manufacturing Company
11%
Outsourcing Company
8%
Healthcare Company
8%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business5
Midsize Enterprise9
Large Enterprise7
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business3
Midsize Enterprise4
Large Enterprise9
 

Questions from the Community

What needs improvement with Cisco Sourcefire SNORT?
I have not had much experience with the community-driven rule set while utilizing Cisco Sourcefire SNORT. I don't have experience with recognizing zero-day vulnerabilities, but based on my knowledg...
What is your primary use case for Cisco Sourcefire SNORT?
Endpoint protection is the main use case. The main aspect involves specifying different rules, and when network traffic hits these rules, it will try to block the traffic or at least log the traffi...
What is the best network monitoring software for large enterprises?
We just did an assessment for our 47 datacenters around North America. The top two enterprise-level network monitoring solutions were ExtraHop first, Riverbed SteelCenter second. Their negotiated c...
What open source tool can one use to measure bandwidth from one's upstream service provider?
One I am looking closely at is AppNeta. They have an appliance that can digest the flow and do a better job than Netflow. The other one we are using is ExtraHop. This has both a Datacenter Hig...
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for ExtraHop Reveal(x)?
We manage the setup cost ourselves, so I am quite happy with that. I also had engagement with professional services from ExtraHop, and it wasn't bad, but I was not impressed; it's not academic work...
 

Also Known As

Sourcefire SNORT
Reveal(x), Revealx
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

CareCore, City of Biel, Dimension Data, LightEdge, Lone Star College System, National Rugby League, Port Aventura, Smart City Networks, Telecom Italia, The Department of Education in Western Australia
Wood County Hospital
Find out what your peers are saying about Fortinet, Darktrace, Check Point Software Technologies and others in Intrusion Detection and Prevention Software (IDPS). Updated: September 2026.
919,003 professionals have used our research since 2012.