Corelight vs Vectra AI comparison

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Corelight

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Executive SummaryUpdated on Nov 6, 2024

Vectra AI and Corelight are contenders in the network security solutions space. Vectra AI seems to have the upper hand due to its advanced AI-driven alert management capabilities.

Features: Vectra AI offers capabilities like advanced alert management that consolidates alerts into manageable incidents, captures network metadata at scale for enhanced context, and provides functionalities like Cognito Recall and Cognito Detect for improved visibility. Corelight integrates with Zeek for robust open-source traffic analysis, facilitates easy deployment, and enables detailed traffic insights.

Room for Improvement: Vectra AI needs improvements in integrating with external solutions and enhancing its user interface for better engagement. Users seek better logging and visibility on host-driven attacks. Corelight, despite its open-source strengths, requires additional feature development and ease of use improvements. Its complexity can overwhelm and complicate pricing.

Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: Vectra AI is mainly deployed on-premises with hybrid options, boasting strong technical support that enhances customer satisfaction. Corelight, also primarily on-premises, benefits from excellent technical support due to its smaller size, although its scalability might face challenges as demand grows.

Pricing and ROI: Vectra AI's high pricing reflects its comprehensive offerings, delivering a good ROI by reducing attack response time. However, it is less accessible for smaller budgets. In contrast, Corelight's pricing is more affordable and open-source, appealing to technically adept users, though additional investments may be required to maximize its value.

To learn more, read our detailed Corelight vs. Vectra AI Report (Updated: January 2025).

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Corelight vs. Vectra AI

January 2025

Helped 839,422 peers since 2012

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

Corelight

Ranking in Network Detection and Response (NDR)

15th

Average Rating

9.0

Reviews Sentiment

7.6

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

Network Traffic Analysis (NTA) (8th)

Vectra AI

Ranking in Network Detection and Response (NDR)

2nd

Average Rating

8.6

Reviews Sentiment

7.1

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

Intrusion Detection and Prevention Software (IDPS) (2nd), Extended Detection and Response (XDR) (9th), Identity Threat Detection and Response (ITDR) (5th), AI-Powered Cybersecurity Platforms (4th)

Mindshare comparison

As of March 2025, in the Network Detection and Response (NDR) category, the mindshare of Corelight is 4.8%, down from 5.4% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Vectra AI is 16.3%, down from 17.7% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.

Network Detection and Response (NDR)

Q&A Highlights

Mazin Al-Shuaili

Head Of Retail Operations at a financial services firm with 201-500 employees

Jun 09, 2020

What is the biggest difference between Corelight and Vectra AI?

Corelight is a Zeek based solution for network behavior analysis and Vectra AI is a User Behavior based solution. If you are comparing these 2 systems you are comparing apples to oranges. You shouldn't be evaluating these products against each other as they address different use cases for your network. My guess is you are either looking for better network visibility and possibly network detection or you need to understand insider threats (User Behavior). If you need both then you need both tools.

An expensive solution to monitor internet traffic with multiple dashboards

Featured Reviews

HamadaElewa

Technical Sales Manager at Spire Solutions

The huge library especially the open source link, makes it the main engine for Corelight with some enhancements in the commercial version. It has a very powerful level, such as signature-based attacks or behavioral attacks, with enhancements in the design. It is very flexible for intelligent implementations like IPs, especially between big companies and banks. Corelight is easy to understand and monitor what is going on behind the team. The solution is already integrated with other systems like Suricata, Elastic, and Microsoft tools. It's very easy to integrate signature-based or behavior-based engines. You can use Elastic for the dashboards to get it from Corelight, along with all the benefits and expandability.

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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

"Corelight is easy to use."

"It's easy to create additional dashboards specific to supporting specific tasks."

"The most valuable feature is the embedded IDS from Suricata."

"It is easy to deploy and easy to handle."

"It's an easy way for us to get visibility in a client's environment."

"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."

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

"Vectra produces actionable data using automation. That has helped us. It's less manpower now to look at incidents, which has definitely increased efficiency. Right now, in a lot of cases, our mean time to detection is within zero days. This tells me by the time something happened, and we were able to detect it, it was within the same day."

"The solution is currently used as a central threat detection and response system."

"Most of their use cases, including deployment, are managed by the tool itself, requiring less manual input from our team."

"What I like best about Vectra AI is that it alerts you about suspicious activities."

"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."

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

More Vectra AI pros

Cons

"They can enhance the interface of the product. They can make it more interactive and also easier to use for feature access."

"The solution’s architecture is complex and difficult to understand. There are multiple machines and VMs."

"Machine learning could be a good improvement, but it's very costly."

"In the next release, building a graphical user interface would be helpful."

"Corelight hasn’t added features in a long time."

"We have had a few issues with the integration of Vectra AI with EDR. Some filters have not been working. We've also had issues with the brain not being powerful enough."

"The UI/UX and detection could be improved. More detections of specific security events could be useful. We've had a few incidents that were not detected by Vectra. The teams are working on it right now, but more detection is always better."

"Some of the customization could be improved. Everything is provided for you as an easy solution to use, but working with it and doing specific development could be worked on a bit more in the scope of an incident response team."

"The solution needs to become more proactive. When Vectra AI is the primary solution in an environment - like it is in our case - you must work on response time. We have a small team so response time at endpoint level is vital."

"Neither Vectra nor Darktrace have a function like a status health check on my log sources and traffic sources."

"A blind spot that I have is around the ease with which you can automate threat intervention."

"The main improvement I can see would be to integrate with more external solutions."

"One thing which I have found where there could be improvement is with regard to the architecture, a little bit: how the brains and sensors function. It needs more flexibility with regard to the brain. If there were some flexibility in that regard, that would be helpful, because changing the mode of the brain is complex. In some cases, the change is permanent. You cannot revert it."

More Vectra AI cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

"It's a yearly fee and depends on what you are looking for."

"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."

"The pricing and licensing are quite straightforward because they're based on the IP licenses. As a result, they are easy to count."

"Vectra AI is not a cheap solution."

"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."

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

"The licensing is on an annual basis."

"Vectra's licensing model could scale to our research network, which has multiple, 100-gigabit links."

"It's relatively on the pricier side, but when compared to other solutions. It's not the most budget-friendly option, but it can be considered somewhat more cost-effective in comparison to other alternatives."

More Vectra AI pricing and cost advice

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Answers from the Community

Mazin Al-Shuaili

Head Of Retail Operations at a financial services firm with 201-500 employees

Jun 9, 2020

What is the biggest difference between Corelight and Vectra AI?

2 out of 5 answers

JJennifer Geisler

Chief Marketing Officer at Vectra

Feb 13, 2020

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 data lake. You then rely on an open-source community for things like detections. Vectra not only does that – but also enriches the underlying data. It is also delivered as an investigative workbench that includes out-of-box detections that highlight and prioritize attacker behaviors and campaigns. Perhaps just as importantly, Corelight has few integrations whereas Vectra natively integrates with parts of infrastructure like EDR, orchestration and network security products.

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OseremeOsobase

Director at Baverianvine

Feb 13, 2020

I would recommend you look at Darktrace instead. Extrahop and the new kid on the block, Awake security are also recommended.

Read full answer

See all 5 answers

Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Financial Services Firm

14%

Government

13%

Computer Software Company

12%

Manufacturing Company

Computer Software Company

14%

Financial Services Firm

13%

Manufacturing Company

Government

Company Size

By reviewers

Large Enterprise

Midsize Enterprise

Small Business

No data available

Questions from the Community

What is the biggest difference between Corelight and Vectra AI?

What do you like most about Corelight?

It's easy to create additional dashboards specific to supporting specific tasks.

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Corelight?

The solution is too expensive compared to others. If you have the technical knowledge, it's good. Corelight is a very big gap between you and others if you’re new.

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.

What needs improvement with Vectra AI?

ExtraHop Reveal(x) vs Corelight

Comparisons

Darktrace vs Corelight

Compared 34% of the time

Compared 22% of the time

Cisco Secure Network Analytics vs Corelight

Compared 8% of the time

Arista NDR vs Corelight

Compared 5% of the time

ExtraHop Reveal(x) 360 vs Corelight

Compared 4% of the time

More Corelight Competitors

Darktrace vs Vectra AI

Compared 34% of the time

ExtraHop Reveal(x) vs Vectra AI

Compared 11% of the time

Cisco Secure Network Analytics vs Vectra AI

Compared 6% of the time

Arista NDR vs Vectra AI

Compared 6% of the time

LinkShadow NDR vs Vectra AI

Compared 3% of the time

More Vectra AI Competitors

Product Reports

Network Detection and Response (NDR)

March 2025

Download Corelight product report

Download Vectra AI product report

February 2025

Also Known As

No data available

Vectra Networks, Vectra AI NDR

Overview

Corelight is the most powerful network visibility solution for information security professionals. We provide real-time data that organizations use to understand, detect, and prevent cyber attacks. Our solution is built on Zeek, the powerful and widely-used open source monitoring framework.

Corelight

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

Education First

Tribune Media Group, Barry University, Aruba Networks, Good Technology, Riverbed, Santa Clara University, Securities Exchange, Tri-State Generation and Transmission Association