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Cisco Sourcefire SNORT vs Vectra AI comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Dec 19, 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

Cisco Sourcefire SNORT
Ranking in Intrusion Detection and Prevention Software (IDPS)
15th
Average Rating
7.6
Reviews Sentiment
6.8
Number of Reviews
19
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
Vectra AI
Ranking in Intrusion Detection and Prevention Software (IDPS)
2nd
Average Rating
8.6
Reviews Sentiment
7.1
Number of Reviews
44
Ranking in other categories
Network Detection and Response (NDR) (2nd), Extended Detection and Response (XDR) (9th), Identity Threat Detection and Response (ITDR) (5th), AI-Powered Cybersecurity Platforms (5th)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of March 2025, in the Intrusion Detection and Prevention Software (IDPS) category, the mindshare of Cisco Sourcefire SNORT is 3.1%, down from 4.0% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Vectra AI is 11.5%, up from 10.7% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Intrusion Detection and Prevention Software (IDPS)
 

Featured Reviews

Syed Shahnawaz Hussain - PeerSpot reviewer
An IPS solution for security and protection but lacks stability
We assess the client's environment, including the size of the workforce responsible for firewall management. Sourcefire can be effective despite its complexity if you have a capable team. Sourcefire might not be more appropriate if you lack a strong IT team. When it comes to real-time traffic analysis, the requirements can vary significantly. Discussing an organization's or individual user's security posture adds another layer of complexity. It's important to note that there isn't a single device that can fully meet the demands of real-time traffic analysis for security purposes. Multiple appliances and solutions are often necessary to achieve comprehensive real-time visibility. We've successfully integrated Sourcefire into various environments, making the process relatively straightforward. We've incorporated it with certain NMS, so I foresee no significant challenges in integrating the Sourcefire. Cisco Sourcefire SNORT offers visibility and robust support. Its resource management documentation is notably extensive, enhancing usability. However, its complexity may pose challenges, especially as the market trends toward simpler solutions for intricate issues. While concerns regarding maturity and stability exist, the development team has actively addressed these issues, requiring ongoing scrutiny to ensure complete resolution. Overall, I rate the solution a 7 out of 10.
Mohammad Alkurdi - PeerSpot reviewer
Innovative detection features enhance monitoring
The advantages of the integration are not entirely out-of-the-box. You have to do it manually. When I'm doing tier response, an out-of-the-box solution is not available. You need to have a Linux server, and from the Linux server, you must perform AI tasks, and there is a lot to be handled in the back end. This is a major consideration about them. The recall feature, if it can be placed in some areas instead of the cloud, and charged for, would be better. Recall the storage where you watch all the traffic, and you can recall it and try to analyze it in the back end. It’s cloud-based. If they offer it on-prem, it would be better. I think they have a solution, but I have never tested it, to be honest with you.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"It simplifies the configuration process by offering pre-defined base configurations, including security and connectivity settings."
"The whole solution is very good, and stable."
"The solution is rather easy to use."
"The most valuable feature of this solution is the filtering."
"The tool's most valuable feature is threat detection, which is important because we have multiple layers not only in Cisco."
"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."
"The solution is stable."
"The URL filtering is very good and you can create a group for customized URLs."
"It has helped us to organize our security. We get a better overview on what is happening on the network, which has helped us get quicker responses to users. If we see malicious activity, then we can quickly take action on it. Previously, we weren't getting an overview as fast as we are now, so we can now provide a quicker response."
"Vectra AI is the best. It is a major product in our cybersecurity."
"The fact that we get the visualization of what's happening on our network, which is a way of improving our security in-depth is most valuable."
"We particularly like the user experience around the dashboard, which we find to be much more straightforward than the dashboard of some of the competitive products... Vectra is a really easy system to understand and use to prioritize where we need to focus our security resources."
"Most of their use cases, including deployment, are managed by the tool itself, requiring less manual input from our team."
"The most useful feature is the anomaly detection because it's not signature-based. It picks up the initial part of any attack, like the recon and those aspects of the kill chain, very well."
"It does a reliable job of parsing out the logs of all the network traffic so that we can ingest them into our SIEM and utilize them for threat hunting and case investigations. It is pretty robust and reliable. The administration time that we spend maintaining it or troubleshooting it is very low. So, the labor hour overhead is probably our largest benefit from it. We spend 99% of our time in Vectra investigating cases, responding to incidents, or hunting, and only around 1% of our time is spent patching, troubleshooting, or doing anything else. That's our largest benefit from Vectra."
"The solution is currently used as a central threat detection and response system."
 

Cons

"I don't think this solution is a time-based control system, because one cannot filter traffic based on time."
"The solution's approach to managing traffic blocking is confusing and impractical."
"We are unhappy with technical support for this solution, and it is not as professional as what we typically expect from Cisco."
"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."
"Performance needs improvement."
"The implementation could be a bit easier."
"The customization of the rules can be simplified."
"I did not experience any pain points that required improvement. Maybe a couple of false-positives, but that's about it."
"There is room for improvement in the documentation. We would like to have more details on how it detects what we see."
"One of the things I am not so happy about when it comes to Vectra is the scoring board."
"Integration with other security components needs improvement. It should have true integration as opposed to just being a separate pane of glass."
"If you hit a certain number of rules, triage filters, or groups, the UX responds more slowly. However, we have a complex network and a lot of rules. So, our setup might not be a typical implementation example. We even had UX engineers onsite, and they looked at issues, improvements, and user feedback. Since then, it has gotten a lot better, they even built in features that we specifically requested for our company."
"The solution has not reduced the security analyst workload in our organization because we still need to SIEM. Unfortunately, while Vectra, for us, is a brilliant tool for network investigations, giving wonderful visibility, it doesn't go the whole way to replace our SIEM that is needed for compliance. So, I still have the same amount of alerting and logging that I did before. It gives us more defined ability to see incidents, but it doesn't give us enough information to satisfy a PCI or 27001 audit."
"The advantages of the integration are not entirely out-of-the-box. You have to do it manually."
"I would like more integrations with IOCs and threats currently on the Internet. I would also like to know which threats are based on zero-day attacks, current botnets, etc. Therefore, I would like more information on external threats."
"Vectra Recall could be utilized much more, and I'm seeing some indications of that today with the investigative components. I use the Visualize feature to visualize components and dashboards a lot. I'm interested in new ways to build automated searches or having them leveraged already from Vectra."
 

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."
"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."
"We have a three-year license for this solution."
"Licensing for this solution is paid on a yearly basis."
"Vectra AI is not a cheap solution."
"The pricing and licensing are quite straightforward because they're based on the IP licenses. As a result, they are easy to count."
"Vectra is a bit on the higher side in terms of price, but they have always been transparent. The reason that they are this good is that they invest, so they need to charge accordingly."
"We are running at about 90,000 pounds per year. The solution is a licensed cost. The hardware that they gave us was pretty much next to nothing. It is the license that we're paying for."
"The pricing is high."
"At the time of purchase, we found the pricing acceptable. We had an urgency to get something in place because we had a minor breach that occurred at the tail end of 2016 to the beginning of 2017. This indicated we had a lack of ability to detect things on the network. Hence, why we moved quickly to get into the tool in place. We found things like Bitcoin mining and botnets which we closed quickly. In that regard, it was worth the money."
"The pricing is very good. It's less expensive than many of the tools out there."
"Vectra's licensing model could scale to our research network, which has multiple, 100-gigabit links."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Computer Software Company
20%
Financial Services Firm
10%
University
9%
Government
8%
Computer Software Company
14%
Financial Services Firm
13%
Manufacturing Company
8%
Government
7%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
 

Questions from the Community

What do you like most about Cisco Sourcefire SNORT?
The product is inexpensive compared to leading brands such as Palo Alto or Fortinet.
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Cisco Sourcefire SNORT?
If one is an extremely expensive product, and ten is cheap, I rate the tool's price as a five. There are some other tools in the market that are more expensive than Cisco. There are no additional c...
What needs improvement with Cisco Sourcefire SNORT?
Cisco offers the Cisco DNA Center, which is a source that provides crucial information for us to monitor performance, and see whether there is any trouble. We are using Cisco DNA center, but again,...
What is the biggest difference between Corelight and Vectra AI?
The two platforms take a fundamentally different approach to NDR. Corelight is limited to use cases that require the eventual forwarding of events and parsed data logs to a security team’s SIEM or ...
What do you like most about Vectra AI?
The solution is currently used as a central threat detection and response system.
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Vectra AI?
It is very acceptable when you compare it with Darktrace, for example.
 

Also Known As

Sourcefire SNORT
Vectra Networks, Vectra AI NDR
 

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
Tribune Media Group, Barry University, Aruba Networks, Good Technology, Riverbed, Santa Clara University, Securities Exchange, Tri-State Generation and Transmission Association
Find out what your peers are saying about Cisco Sourcefire SNORT vs. Vectra AI and other solutions. Updated: January 2025.
839,255 professionals have used our research since 2012.