Cisco Sourcefire SNORT vs Vectra AI comparison

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Cisco Sourcefire SNORT

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Executive SummaryUpdated on Dec 19, 2024

Cisco Sourcefire SNORT and Vectra AI compete in the cybersecurity space, offering distinct sets of features aimed at enhancing network security. Cisco Sourcefire SNORT leads in pricing and customer support, while Vectra AI excels in advanced threat detection, making it attractive despite higher costs.

Features: Cisco Sourcefire SNORT provides effective intrusion detection and prevention using a comprehensive rule-based system, ensuring robust security controls. It benefits from an open-source foundation allowing community-driven improvements. Vectra AI employs AI and machine learning to deliver automated threat detection and insightful threat responses, offering real-time visibility and reducing the manual workload.

Room for Improvement: Cisco Sourcefire SNORT could enhance its ease of use, as its rule customization requires significant technical expertise. The interface could also be more intuitive to streamline usability. Vectra AI might look at further improving its complexity reduction, as setting initial configurations requires significant time investment. Some users may benefit from enhanced documentation to better navigate advanced features.

Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: Cisco Sourcefire SNORT offers clear deployment paths with extensive documentation, yet requires more technical skills. Its open-source community provides added support. Conversely, Vectra AI's cloud-based infrastructure simplifies deployment, complemented by superior customer service for smoother system integration.

Pricing and ROI: Cisco Sourcefire SNORT is known for favorable pricing due to its open-source nature, offering potentially high ROI with customizable capabilities. Vectra AI, while more expensive, justifies its cost with advanced features that promise reduced long-term risks, appealing to those investing in comprehensive security solutions.

To learn more, read our detailed Cisco Sourcefire SNORT vs. Vectra AI Report (Updated: July 2025).

Cisco Sourcefire SNORT vs. Vectra AI

July 2025

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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)

14th

Average Rating

7.6

Reviews Sentiment

6.8

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

No ranking in other categories

Vectra AI

Ranking in Intrusion Detection and Prevention Software (IDPS)

4th

Average Rating

8.6

Reviews Sentiment

7.1

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

Network Detection and Response (NDR) (2nd), Extended Detection and Response (XDR) (14th), Identity Threat Detection and Response (ITDR) (10th), AI-Powered Cybersecurity Platforms (6th)

Mindshare comparison

As of July 2025, in the Intrusion Detection and Prevention Software (IDPS) category, the mindshare of Cisco Sourcefire SNORT is 3.6%, down from 3.8% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Vectra AI is 11.2%, 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

Jack Poon

Treasury Specialist at Dah Sing Bank

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.

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Mohammad Alkurdi

Owner at Fortibits

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.

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Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"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 solution is rather easy to use."

"The whole solution is very good, and stable."

"Solid intrusion detection and prevention that scales easily in very large environments."

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

"The most valuable features of Cisco Sourcefire SNORT are the dashboard for monitoring events."

"It is quite an intelligent product."

"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

"The initial setup was pretty straightforward."

"Using this tool for automation has provided more benefits to our processes."

"It's important for us that the user interface is easy to understand and that is the biggest benefit we see from Vectra AI."

"One of the things that we didn't expect to happen was that our network team also jumped on it faster than we thought. In most cases, if it's a security tool that's working on the network part, they can also use it to find out certain flaws that have been in the system. Certain flaws, related to some legacy stuff, were already there for quite a few years, which they couldn't explain at first, but we could explain them based on the timing of certain things."

"It has reduced the time it takes to respond to attacks. That comes back to the proactive point. It makes us able to lower down in the kill chain, we can react now, rather than reacting to incidents that happened, we can see an instant, in some cases, as it's being implemented, or as it's being launched."

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

"The key feature for me for Detect for Office 365 is that it can also concentrate all the information and detection at one point, the same as the network solution does. This is the key feature for me because, while accessing data from Office 365 is possible using Microsoft interfaces, they are not really user-friendly and are quite confusing to use. But Detect for Office 365 is aggregating all the info, and it's only the interesting stuff."

"Vectra AI can bring the ability to detect intrusion on the network more so than legacy IDS tools."

More Vectra AI pros

Cons

"I did not experience any pain points that required improvement. Maybe a couple of false-positives, but that's about it."

"The cloud can be improved."

"If the price is brought down then everybody will be happy."

"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."

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

"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."

"There are problems setting up VPNs for some regions."

More Cisco Sourcefire SNORT cons

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

"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."

"They use a proprietary logging format that is probably 90% similar to Bro Logs. Their biggest area of improvement is finishing out the remaining 10%. That 10% might not be beneficial to their ML engine, but that's fine. The industry standard is Zeek Logs or Bro Logs, or Bro or Zeek, depending on how old you are. While they have 90% of those fields, they're still missing some fields. In very rare instances, some community rules do not have the fields that they need, and we had to modify community rules for our logs. So, their biggest area of improvement would be to just finish their matching of the Zeek standard."

"We would like to see more information with the syslogs. The syslogs that they send to our SIEM are a bit short compared to what you can see. It would be helpful if they send us more data that we can incorporate into our SIEM, then can correlate with other events."

"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."

"There is room for improvement in the documentation. We would like to have more details on how it detects what we see."

"In comparison with a lot of systems I used in the past, the false positives are really a burden because they are taking a lot of time at this moment."

"What is most important for us is to have one place where we can manage a few brains because we are based on a zero-trust network. As a result, each customer needs to have a separate brain. For the SOC team, we need to have one place where the SOC analyst can go to visit the website and from that site manage all of the customers. Right now, Vectra AI doesn't have this capability, and I would really like to have this feature."

More Vectra AI cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

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

"The cost is per port and can be expensive but it does include training and support for three years."

"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."

"If one is an extremely expensive product, and ten is cheap, I rate the tool's price as a five."

"The upfront pricing model that we have would have been more beneficial if it had been a recurring license fee, but that wasn't a massive issue for us. It's fairly priced."

"The solution is low-cost and affordable."

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

"The pricing is very good. It's less expensive than many of the tools out there."

"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 pricing is high."

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

"Vectra AI's pricing is cheaper than that of Darktrace."

More Vectra AI pricing and cost advice

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

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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Computer Software Company

17%

Financial Services Firm

13%

University

Government

Financial Services Firm

14%

Computer Software Company

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?

It is very acceptable when you compare it with Darktrace, for example.

Palo Alto Networks Advanced Threat Prevention vs Cisco Sourcefire SNORT

Comparisons

Compared 20% of the time

Fortinet FortiGate IPS vs Cisco Sourcefire SNORT

Compared 19% of the time

Cisco Secure IPS (NGIPS) vs Cisco Sourcefire SNORT

Compared 17% of the time

Trend Micro TippingPoint Threat Protection System vs Cisco Sourcefire SNORT

Compared 8% of the time

ExtremeCloud IQ vs Cisco Sourcefire SNORT

Compared 8% of the time

More Cisco Sourcefire SNORT Competitors

Darktrace vs Vectra AI

Compared 30% of the time

ExtraHop Reveal(x) vs Vectra AI

Compared 11% of the time

Corelight vs Vectra AI

Compared 7% of the time

Cisco Secure Network Analytics vs Vectra AI

Compared 5% 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

July 2025

Download Vectra AI product report

June 2025

Also Known As

Sourcefire SNORT

Vectra Networks, Vectra AI NDR

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.

Cisco

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