Cisco Sourcefire SNORT vs Vectra AI comparison

Read 42 Vectra AI reviews

6,169 Views
3,078 Comparison Views

97% willing to recommend

Cisco Sourcefire SNORT

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Download the report

Executive Summary

We performed a comparison between Cisco Sourcefire SNORT and Vectra AI based on real PeerSpot user reviews.

Find out in this report how the two Intrusion Detection and Prevention Software (IDPS) solutions compare in terms of features, pricing, service and support, easy of deployment, and ROI.

To learn more, read our detailed Cisco Sourcefire SNORT vs. Vectra AI Report (Updated: October 2024).

Cisco Sourcefire SNORT vs. Vectra AI

October 2024

Download the complete report

Helped 814,649 peers since 2012

Categories and Ranking

Cisco Sourcefire SNORT

Ranking in Intrusion Detection and Prevention Software (IDPS)

10th

Average Rating

7.6

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

No ranking in other categories

Vectra AI

Ranking in Intrusion Detection and Prevention Software (IDPS)

2nd

Average Rating

8.6

Number of Reviews

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 (4th)

Mindshare comparison

As of November 2024, in the Intrusion Detection and Prevention Software (IDPS) category, the mindshare of Cisco Sourcefire SNORT is 3.2%, down from 4.3% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Vectra AI is 11.4%, up from 9.5% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.

Intrusion Detection and Prevention Software (IDPS)

Featured Reviews

Jack Poon

Treasury Specialist at Dah Sing Bank

Jul 31, 2024

Offers ease of setup and good documentation

When it comes to the product's deployment phase, we have a lot of vendor support. We have a lot of skills here in Hong Kong. Our company doesn't find any problem deploying Cisco solutions. The solution is deployed on an on-premises version. Speaking about the time required to deploy the solution, I would say that we have quite a lot of previous experience with deploying Cisco products. We have our company's standard design document, which we need to follow. We have a standard testing procedure for all those features. We just take out some appropriate parts and then compile them into one document for an individual project. It is actually quite easy for us to do the documentation, so it just takes one or two hours, and we can do the implementation because all the materials and testing procedures are already in our company standard documents, so it is not that difficult for us.

Read full review

Tony Whelton

Director IT at Wellington College

Mar 7, 2023

Integrates well with other security solutions and provides good technical support

The biggest feature for us, because we are heavy Microsoft users, is its integration with Office 365. On top of Vectra AI, we use all of the Microsoft security platforms, such as Defender ATP and Sentinel. Having full integration and a central platform to look at all of the threats that are coming through from the different platforms is a huge benefit for us. With one nice front dashboard, we can look at the high-volume threats rather than all of the noise. We do get a lot of noise as our students all own their own devices. With Vectra AI, we can look at threats in a controlled manner, which saves us an extraordinary amount of time. Even if I doubled the manpower, I doubt that I would still have the same visibility that I have with the correct security platform. Vectra AI's Threat Detection and Response platform has done remarkably well. We're well-versed in using the security dashboard from Microsoft Defender, and we're at the stage where we are checking both. We haven't fully switched to relying on only the Vectra dashboard yet. In terms of Vectra AI Attack Signal Intelligence for empowering security analysts within our organization, we have complete faith in the data that's coming through from Vectra. If we could also have what's happening at the front-end, that is, the firewall, then it would give us the complete security front dashboard.

Read full review

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."

"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."

"The URL filtering is very good and you can create a group for customized URLs."

"Cisco Sourcefire SNORT is easy to configure and the reporting is great. It's also very user-friendly."

"The most valuable feature of this solution is the filtering."

"It simplifies the configuration process by offering pre-defined base configurations, including security and connectivity settings."

"I like most of Cisco's features, like malware detection and URL filtering."

"The tool's most valuable feature is threat detection, which is important because we have multiple layers not only in Cisco."

More Cisco Sourcefire SNORT pros

"One of the core features is that Vectra AI triages threats and correlates them with compromised host devices. From a visibility perspective, we can better track the threat across the network. Instead of us potentially finding one device that has been impacted without Vectra AI, it will give us the visibility of everywhere that threat went. Therefore, visibility has increased for us."

"The UI is easy to use and when we send detection to everybody, they easily understand what we are asking at the time."

"I like the way that Vectra AI focuses on the internal network. Nowadays, most of the attackers are already inside, and they can be inside for many years before they start attacking. With normal monitoring, it's quite difficult to find them."

"The solution provide visibility into behaviors across the full lifecycle of an attack in our network, beyond just the Internet gateway. It makes our security operations much more effective because we are now looking not just at traffic on the border, but we're looking at east-west internal traffic. Now, not only will we see if an exploit kit is being downloaded, but we would be able to see then if that exploit kit was then laterally distributed into our environment."

"Vectra AI helped our team be more productive and save time. We have less work thanks to it."

"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."

"The most valuable feature for Cognito Detect, the main solution, is that external IDS's create a lot of alerts. When I say a lot of alerts I really mean a lot of alerts. Vectra, on the other hand, contextualizes everything, reducing the number of alerts and pinpointing only the things of interest. This is a key feature for me. Because of this, a non-trained analyst can use it almost right away."

More Vectra AI pros

Cons

"The pricing needs to be improved. We have lots of low-budget clients around us. Budget constraints are always a deterrent in our market."

"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."

"The solution's approach to managing traffic blocking is confusing and impractical."

"The main dashboard of Cisco Sourcefire SNORT could improve."

"I would like to have analytics included in the suite."

"We are unhappy with technical support for this solution, and it is not as professional as what we typically expect from Cisco."

"The cloud can be improved."

"With the next release, I would like to see some PBR, so that you can do the configuration with the features."

More Cisco Sourcefire SNORT cons

"We have a lot of system solutions and integrations with system solutions. Vectra is a type of black box. It implements AI-informed detection mechanisms, but we cannot create system detections. I understand that the product is designed this way, but it would be great if we could create our own detections as well."

"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."

"It would be commercially beneficial if Vectra AI had something like Darktrace's Antigena Email or something similar to email protection."

"In education as a sector, we are looking at AI a lot in terms of how it can be used as part of the teaching and learning side of things. It would be great to have Vectra AI look at a better way to enhance the security posture related to the AI tools in our portfolio."

"An area for improvement in Vectra AI is reporting because it currently needs some details. For example, when you download a report from Vectra AI, you won't see complete information about the alerts or triggers. Another area for improvement in the tool is that sometimes, an alert has high severity, yet it's marked as low severity. Vectra AI should have a mechanism to change the severity level from low to high or critical."

"Some of their integrations with other sources of data, like external threat feeds, took a bit more work than I had hoped to get integrated."

"One area where there's room for improvement is the absence of a comprehensive TCP recording and replay feature."

"For S&D account scans, it would be easier if Vectra AI could triage with users. If a client uses a lot of accounts, then it could indicate that these accounts are benign, for example. That would help a lot."

More Vectra AI cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

"Licensing for this solution is paid on a yearly basis."

"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."

"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 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."

"Cost is a big factor, as always. However, I think we have a very good price–performance ratio."

"The license is based on the concurrent IP addresses that it's investigating. We have 9,800 to 10,000 IP addresses."

"Their licensing model is antiquated. I'm not a fan of their licensing model. We have to pay for licensing based on four different things. You have to pay based on the number of unique IPs, the number of logs that we send through Recall and Stream, and the size of our environment. They need to simplify their licensing down to just one thing. It should be based on the amount of data, the number of devices, or something else, but there should be just one thing for everything. That's what they need to base their licensing on. Cost-wise, they're not cheap. They were definitely the most expensive option, but you get what you pay for. They're not the cheapest option."

"Vectra's pricing is too high. All schools will not be able to afford it. Vectra will only end up targeting higher education and higher value independence purely because of the price. A lot of schools would love to have a product like Vectra AI, but they simply can't because they struggle to even pay the high E5 licensing from Microsoft. When you're up against that, Vectra AI is never going to be within the sector's price range."

"The solution's pricing was 50 percent lower than the other vendors shortlisted."

"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 have a desire to increase our use. However, it all comes down to budget. It's a very expensive tool that is very difficult to prove business support for. We would like to have two separate networks. We have our corporate network and PCI network, which is segregated due to payment processing. We don't have it for deployed in the PCI network. It would be good to have it fully deployed there to provide us with additional monitoring and control, but the cost associated with their licensing model makes it prohibitively expensive to deploy."

More Vectra AI pricing and cost advice

See which vendors are best for you

Use our free recommendation engine to learn which Intrusion Detection and Prevention Software (IDPS) solutions are best for your needs.

See recommendations

814,649 professionals have used our research since 2012.

Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Computer Software Company

22%

Financial Services Firm

University

Government

Computer Software Company

17%

Financial Services Firm

12%

Manufacturing Company

Government

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?

The licensing is on annual basis.

Fortinet FortiGate IPS vs Cisco Sourcefire SNORT

Comparisons

Compared 23% of the time

Palo Alto Networks Advanced Threat Prevention vs Cisco Sourcefire SNORT

Compared 19% of the time

Cisco Secure IPS (NGIPS) vs Cisco Sourcefire SNORT

Compared 16% of the time

Darktrace vs Cisco Sourcefire SNORT

Compared 12% of the time

Check Point IPS vs Cisco Sourcefire SNORT

Compared 9% of the time

More Cisco Sourcefire SNORT Competitors

Darktrace vs Vectra AI

Compared 35% of the time

ExtraHop Reveal(x) vs Vectra AI

Compared 12% of the time

Cisco Secure Network Analytics vs Vectra AI

Compared 6% of the time

Arista NDR vs Vectra AI

Compared 5% of the time

More Vectra AI Competitors

Product Reports

Download Cisco Sourcefire SNORT product report

Cisco Sourcefire SNORT

November 2024

Download Vectra AI product report

October 2024

Also Known As

Sourcefire SNORT

Vectra Networks, Vectra AI NDR

Learn More

Cisco

Overview

Snort is an open-source, rule-based, intrusion detection and prevention system. It combines the benefits of signature-, protocol-, and anomaly-based inspection methods to deliver flexible protection from malware attacks. Snort gained notoriety for being able to accurately detect threats at high speeds.

Vectra AI is used for detecting network anomalies and potential malicious activities, providing visibility into network traffic and enhancing threat detection across environments.

Organizations deploy Vectra AI mainly on-premises with additional cloud components. It helps with compliance, incident response, security monitoring, detecting insider threats, and correlating network events. Vectra AI captures and enriches network metadata, provides detailed dashboards, reduces false positives, and supports cross-environment behavioral analysis to enhance threat detection and prioritization. While valued for its high accuracy and alert aggregation, it has room for improvement in UI/UX, packet management, and integration with SIEMs and other tools. It is noted for expensive pricing and limited proactive threat response features.

What are Vectra AI's most valuable features?

High accuracy in identifying threat locations
Aggregation of alerts into single incidents
24/7 threat detection
Visibility into the entire attack lifecycle
Risk score aggregation
Effective triaging of alerts
Integration with other tools

What benefits or ROI should users look for?

Enhanced threat detection and prioritization
Comprehensive network visibility
Reduction in false positives
Better incident response capabilities
Improved compliance monitoring

In specific industries, Vectra AI is deployed to monitor complex networks and alleviate challenges in threat detection. It is particularly effective in sectors requiring stringent compliance and security measures, offering insights and capabilities crucial for protecting sensitive data and maintaining operational integrity.

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