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Devo vs Security Onion comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Oct 9, 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

Devo
Ranking in Log Management
27th
Average Rating
8.4
Reviews Sentiment
7.1
Number of Reviews
22
Ranking in other categories
Security Information and Event Management (SIEM) (28th), IT Operations Analytics (6th), AIOps (15th)
Security Onion
Ranking in Log Management
18th
Average Rating
7.6
Reviews Sentiment
5.5
Number of Reviews
3
Ranking in other categories
AWS Marketplace (5th)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of April 2025, in the Log Management category, the mindshare of Devo is 0.6%, down from 0.8% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Security Onion is 5.7%, up from 2.9% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Log Management
 

Featured Reviews

Michael Wenn - PeerSpot reviewer
Has cloud-first architecture with SIEM technology to run security operations
When it comes to scale, they're architected quite well. They handle some of the biggest customers globally, with significant throughput on their platform, managing thousands of customers. One of the most impressive aspects of Devo is its customer community. A large majority, over 80 percent of their customers, actively participate on a Devo-specific community page. They're contributing to product development and support, events, and user group information, helping each other out. This high level of engagement is rare and demonstrates both the loyalty of their customer base and the quality of their product. They offer a range of small, medium, and large options to cater to everyone. I sold Devo products while working with them, focusing on enterprise solutions. However, as a small reseller, my customers were typically smaller businesses. I rate the solution's scalability a nine out of ten.
Jörg Kippe - PeerSpot reviewer
A mature and affordable solution that is easy to install and easy to update
The product takes time to learn, it's not that easy. In the beginning we had a lot of questions. If you want to use such a tool in an real (industrial) environment, you have to ask how to get the network data. Can we do a full packet capture? Can we provide agents to our end systems? There are no simple solutions to these questions. It's a general problem when running such systems in an industrial environment.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"In traditional BI solutions, you need to wait a lot of time to have the ability to create visualizations with the data and to do searches. With this kind of platform, you have that information in real-time."
"The ability to have high performance, high-speed search capability is incredibly important for us. When it comes to doing security analysis, you don't want to be doing is sitting around waiting to get data back while an attacker is sitting on a network, actively attacking it. You need to be able to answer questions quickly. If I see an indicator of attack, I need to be able to rapidly pivot and find data, then analyze it and find more data to answer more questions. You need to be able to do that quickly. If I'm sitting around just waiting to get my first response, then it ends up moving too slow to keep up with the attacker. Devo's speed and performance allows us to query in real-time and keep up with what is actually happening on the network, then respond effectively to events."
"The most powerful feature is the way the data is stored and extracted. The data is always stored in its original format and you can normalize the data after it has been stored."
"The most valuable feature is definitely the ability that Devo has to ingest data. From the previous SIEM that I came from and helped my company administer, it really was the type of system where data was parsed on ingest. This meant that if you didn't build the parser efficiently or correctly, sometimes that would bring the system to its knees. You'd have a backlog of processing the logs as it was ingesting them."
"The alerting is much better than I anticipated. We don't get as many alerts as I thought we would, but that nobody's fault, it's just the way it is."
"Scalability is one of Devo's strengths."
"Even if it's a relatively technical tool or platform, it's very intuitive and graphical. It's very appealing in terms of the user interface. The UI has a graphically interface with the raw data in a table. The table can be as big as you want it, depending on your use case. You can easily get a report combining your data, along with calculations and graphical dashboards. You don't need a lot of training, because the UI is relatively very intuitive."
"One of the biggest features of the UI is that you see the actual code of what you're doing in the graphical user interface, in a little window on the side. Whatever you're doing, you see the code, what's happening. And you can really quickly switch between using the GUI and using the code. That's really useful."
"The most valuable feature of Security Onion for security monitoring is its ability to find infected ports."
"We use Security Onion for internal vulnerability assessment."
"Security Onion is the most mature solution in the market."
 

Cons

"Technical support could be better."
"From our experience, the Devo agent needs some work. They built it on top of OS Query's open-source framework. It seems like it wasn't tuned properly to handle a large volume of Windows event logs. In our experience, there would definitely be some room for improvement. A lot of SIEMs on the market have their own agent infrastructure. I think Devo's working towards that, but I think that it needs some improvement as far as keeping up with high-volume environments."
"I would like to have the ability to create more complex dashboards."
"They can improve their AI capabilities"
"Some of the documentation could be improved a little bit. A lot of times it doesn't go as deep into some of the critical issues you might run into. They've been really good to shore us up with support, but some of the documentation could be a little bit better."
"My opinion on the solution's technical support is not as great as it could be because of the issues I have faced regarding the service management element."
"The overall performance of extraction could be a lot faster, but that's a common problem in this space in general. Also, the stock or default alerting and detecting options could definitely be broader and more all-encompassing. The fact that they're not is why we had to write all our own alerts."
"The Activeboards feature is not as mature regarding the look and feel. Its functionality is mature, but the look and feel is not there. For example, if you have some data sets and are trying to get some graphics, you cannot change anything. There's just one format for the graphics. You cannot change the size of the font, the font itself, etc."
"The initial setup of the solution is a little bit difficult."
"The product is not easy to learn."
"Security Onion's user interface could be improved."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"Devo is definitely cheaper than Splunk. There's no doubt about that. The value from Devo is good. It's definitely more valuable to me than QRadar or LogRhythm or any of the old, traditional SIEMs."
"Devo is a hosted or subscription-based solution, whereas before, we purchased QRadar, so we owned it and just had to pay a maintenance fee. We've encountered this with some other products, too, where we went over to subscription-based. Our thought process is that with subscription based, the provider hosts and maintains the tool, and it's offsite. That comes with some additional fees, but we were able to convince our upper management it was worth the price. We used to pay under 10k a year for maintenance, and now we're paying ten times that. It was a relatively tough sell to our management, but I wonder if we have a choice anymore; this is where the market is."
"It's a per gigabyte cost for ingestion of data. For every gigabyte that you ingest, it's whatever you negotiated your price for. Compared to other contracts that we've had for cloud providers, it's significantly less."
"Pricing is based on the number of gigabytes of ingestion by volume, and it's on a 30-day average. If you go over one day, that's not a big deal as long as the average is what you expected it to be."
"I rate the pricing a four on a scale of one to ten, where one is cheap, and ten is expensive."
"It's very competitive. That was also a primary draw for us. Some of the licensing models with solutions like Splunk and Sentinel were attractive upfront, but there were so many micro-charges and services we would've had to add on to make them what we wanted. We had to include things like SOAR and extended capabilities, whereas all those capabilities are completely included with the Devo platform. I haven't seen any additional fee."
"I like the pricing very much. They keep it simple. It is a single price based on data ingested, and they do it on an average. If you get a spike of data that flows in, they will not stick it to you or charge you for that. They are very fair about that."
"Be cautious of metadata inclusion for log types in pricing, as there are some "gotchas" with that."
"Security Onion is a free solution."
"It is an open-source solution."
"Security Onion is an open-source solution."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
17%
Computer Software Company
15%
Government
8%
University
8%
Computer Software Company
12%
University
11%
Government
11%
Comms Service Provider
11%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
No data available
 

Questions from the Community

What do you like most about Devo?
Devo has a really good website for creating custom configurations.
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Devo?
Compared to Splunk or SentinelOne, it is really expensive. I rate the product’s pricing a nine out of ten, where one is cheap and ten is expensive.
What needs improvement with Devo?
They can improve their AI capabilities. If you look at some integrations like XDR or AI, which add to the platform to correlate situations in events, there are areas for enhancement. For instance, ...
What do you like most about Security Onion?
The most valuable feature of Security Onion for security monitoring is its ability to find infected ports.
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Security Onion?
Security Onion is an open-source solution. On a scale from one to ten, where ten is expensive and one is cheap, I rate the solution's pricing a six out of ten.
What needs improvement with Security Onion?
The initial setup of the solution is a little bit difficult.
 

Comparisons

 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

United States Air Force, Rubrik, SentinelOne, Critical Start, NHL, Panda Security, Telefonica, CaixaBank, OpenText, IGT, OneMain Financial, SurveyMonkey, FanDuel, H&R Block, Ulta Beauty, Manulife, Moneylion, Chime Bank, Magna International, American Express Global Business Travel
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Find out what your peers are saying about Devo vs. Security Onion and other solutions. Updated: April 2025.
847,646 professionals have used our research since 2012.