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Cisco Sourcefire SNORT vs ExtraHop Reveal(x) comparison

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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 product is inexpensive compared to leading brands such as Palo Alto or Fortinet."
"I would recommend this solution; it's reliable and scalable, with easy installation and integration."
"It is quite an intelligent product."
"I like most of Cisco's features, like malware detection and URL filtering."
"Users have access to intelligent security automation as one of the features, which can easily automate your event impact assessment so your IPS policy tuning can be done as well as your network behavior analysis, and you can do real-time contextual awareness with correlation of events created on your applications, user devices, operating systems, or vulnerabilities, with all of this real-time data captured including your apps and port scans."
"This solution makes life a lot easier as there are fewer man-hours required and we no longer need too many resources to manage it."
"The most valuable features of Cisco Sourcefire SNORT are the dashboard for monitoring events."
"Solid intrusion detection and prevention that scales easily in very large environments."
"ExtraHop Reveal(x) is highly recommended and very good."
"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 best features of ExtraHop Reveal(x) include the cloud-based Reveal(x) 360, which is an absolute plus; you've got one point of administration where you can attach multiple vendors or solutions or sensors, and that's good."
"The solution works well for sending sensors."
"Setting up the solution is relatively easy."
"The ability ExtraHop Reveal(x) has to mitigate risk from external IP addresses has been a lifesaver for us."
"With ExtraHop Reveal(x), it gives me more visibility into the packets. It doesn't provide the entire packet capture, but it offers more information on how connections are made at the network layer. This can be helpful for detecting network attacks. Additionally, I really like the customizable dashboards and reports. The incident dashboard and alerts provide a good summary initially, and diving deeper into them gives more detailed information. It's also great for analyzing specific attacks and victim logs. The feature that tracks the full attack chain makes it easier to monitor the progress of attacks. Plus, it's connected to the Netria.com app, which I find useful for certain tasks."
"Reveal(x)'s stability is excellent."
 

Cons

"The utopia is to see everything from one dashboard, but sometimes that's not very possible."
"I want to see a better dashboard for the product. The dashboard can be a bit modified or enhanced."
"Performance needs improvement."
"While the alerts they offer are good, it could improve it in the sense that they should be more detailed to make the alerts more useful to us in general. Sometimes the solution will offer up false positives. Due to the fact that the alerts aren't detailed, we have to go dig around to see why is it being blocked. The solution would be infinitely better if there was just a bit more detail in the alert information and logging we receive."
"We are unhappy with technical support for this solution, and it is not as professional as what we typically expect from Cisco."
"There are problems setting up VPNs for some regions."
"The implementation could be a bit easier."
"To be frank, the product is not really stable, although they're working on that."
"I would rate the price a three out of five. It could be less expensive."
"It needs integration with more security vendors."
"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."
"The solution should include more support protocols."
"The solution is expensive and gets more expensive if a company needs to scale it."
"I would like to see more cloud capability."
"I would like to see improvements in areas where events are getting dropped; we're not able to view complete insights."
"The solution's reporting part and GUI are areas with certain shortcomings where improvements are required."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"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."
"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."
"Licensing for this solution is paid on a yearly basis."
"I would rate the price a three out of five. It could be less expensive."
"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."
"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."
"The solution is based on an annual subscription model and is expensive."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Construction Company
13%
Outsourcing Company
9%
Financial Services Firm
8%
Manufacturing Company
7%
Financial Services Firm
14%
Manufacturing Company
10%
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.
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