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Cortex XDR by Palo Alto Networks vs Vectra AI comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Oct 8, 2024
 

Categories and Ranking

Cortex XDR by Palo Alto Net...
Ranking in Extended Detection and Response (XDR)
7th
Ranking in AI-Powered Cybersecurity Platforms
3rd
Average Rating
8.4
Number of Reviews
90
Ranking in other categories
Endpoint Protection Platform (EPP) (4th), Ransomware Protection (2nd)
Vectra AI
Ranking in Extended Detection and Response (XDR)
9th
Ranking in AI-Powered Cybersecurity Platforms
4th
Average Rating
8.6
Number of Reviews
42
Ranking in other categories
Intrusion Detection and Prevention Software (IDPS) (2nd), Network Detection and Response (NDR) (2nd), Identity Threat Detection and Response (ITDR) (5th)
 

Featured Reviews

Mohammad Qaw - PeerSpot reviewer
Dec 15, 2022
Perfect correlation and XDR capabilities for network traffic plus endpoint security
The solution should force customers to integrate with network traffic to see the full benefits of XDR. If you are not integrating it or feeding in your network traffic, then you are just buying a normal antivirus which doesn't make any sense. You are paying double the price to use the antivirus feature or to say you have XDR, but in reality you are not using it. The solution should include an on-premises option because some customers want only on-premises. It would be hard, but good to do if possible. Open XDR would be beneficial in the future. Right now, the solution is Closed XDR so cannot communicate with the few new vendors in the Open XDR market.
Tony Whelton - PeerSpot reviewer
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.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"It'll not slow down your system when compared to others."
"WildFire AI is the best option for this product."
"This software helps us understand any issues that may arise when someone is not at work."
"It blocks malicious files. It prevents attacks. It doesn't require many updates, it's a very light application."
"Its interface and pricing are most valuable. It is better than other vendors in terms of security."
"The stability of this product is very good."
"The management capabilities, allow an IT organization to get quite a good picture of attempted cyber attacks."
"The initial setup is pretty easy."
"The UI is easy to use and when we send detection to everybody, they easily understand what we are asking at the time."
"The solution's ability to reduce alerts, by rolling up numerous alerts to create a single incident or campaign, helps in that it collapses all the events to a particular host, or a particular detection to a set of hosts. So it doesn't generate too many alerts. By and large, whatever alerts it generates are actionable, and actionable within the day."
"We often use the new feature to create PCAP files from the whole data traffic. It makes it much easier to find network problems such as whether the server is responding to a request. It has nothing to do with security, but it helps a lot to find other problems."
"Cognito Streams gives you a detailed view of what happens in the network in the form of rich metadata. It is just a super easy way to capture network traffic for important protocols, giving us an advantage. This is very helpful on a day-to-day basis."
"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 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."
"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."
"What I like best about Vectra AI is that it alerts you about suspicious activities."
 

Cons

"They've been having some issues with updating their endpoint agents, and it has been quite frustrating."
"There are a large number of false positives."
"The solution lags to the real-time scenarios here and there."
"The solution should offer more dashboards and they should be better customized."
"It is not easy to sell Cortex XDR, not because it isn't a good tool. Its marketing needs to be improved."
"Whenever the tool releases a new version when deploying the product across the organization, I feel like there are some disturbances in the CPU usage after upgrading the tool to the latest version."
"The server sometimes stops continuously to check things so it would be helpful to receive access updates or technical reasons."
"The encryption is not up to the mark."
"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."
"We are using SMB 3.0, which is an encrypted protocol. When we get some alerts or something, we cannot go deep into the protocol to see what's wrong because it's encrypted. We need to decrypt the protocol in another way, which is quite difficult. We might go back to SMB 2.0 just for this reason, but that's not a good solution."
"There could be an option where Vectra manages the solution remotely, and when there is an attack, there could be a notification center to give us information about the attack."
"The reporting from Cognito Detect is very limited and doesn't give you too many options. If I want to prepare a customized report on a particular host, even though I see the data, I have to manually prepare the report. The reporting features that are built into the tool are not very helpful."
"A blind spot that I have is around the ease with which you can automate threat intervention."
"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."
"I would like to see a bit more strategic metrics instead of technical data. Information that I could show to my executive management team or board would be valuable."
"One area where there's room for improvement is the absence of a comprehensive TCP recording and replay feature."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"I don't like that they have different types of licenses."
"Our customers have expressed that the price is high."
"The price is on the higher side, but it's okay."
"Our license will require renewal in August, after which the maintenance will continue as usual."
"Very costly product."
"It's way too expensive, but security is expensive. You pay for your licensing, and then you pay for someone to monitor the stuff."
"It is cost-effective compared to similar solutions. It fits for the small businesses through to the big businesses."
"It is present, but when compared to other competitive products, I would say it is not less expensive; however, when all of the other added values are considered, the price is reasonable."
"Vectra AI is not a cheap solution."
"My company pays for the Vectra AI licensing fee yearly. I know the figure because my company recently renewed the license, and it's okay, at least for the financial sector."
"From a pricing perspective, they are very commercially competitive. From a licensing perspective, just be conscious that some of their future cloud solutions come with additional subscriptions. Also, if you're outside of the US, you will get charged freight for the device back to your country."
"It is an expensive solution, but it's not the most expensive we've seen. We also know how much we're going to pay, unlike with some other providers where all of a sudden our license explodes."
"The pricing is high."
"Vectra's licensing model could scale to our research network, which has multiple, 100-gigabit links."
"The licensing is on an annual basis."
"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."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Computer Software Company
15%
Financial Services Firm
9%
Government
8%
Manufacturing Company
7%
Computer Software Company
17%
Financial Services Firm
12%
Manufacturing Company
7%
Government
7%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
 

Questions from the Community

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How is Cortex XDR compared with Microsoft Defender?
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What is the biggest difference between Corelight and Vectra AI?
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What do you like most about Vectra AI?
The solution is currently used as a central threat detection and response system.
 

Also Known As

Cyvera, Cortex XDR, Palo Alto Networks Traps
Vectra Networks, Vectra AI NDR
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

CBI Health Group, University Honda, VakifBank
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 Cortex XDR by Palo Alto Networks vs. Vectra AI and other solutions. Updated: October 2024.
814,649 professionals have used our research since 2012.