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ACF2 vs Oracle Audit Vault comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Apr 6, 2025

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

ACF2
Ranking in Database Security
13th
Average Rating
9.0
Reviews Sentiment
7.8
Number of Reviews
6
Ranking in other categories
Mainframe Security (4th)
Oracle Audit Vault
Ranking in Database Security
3rd
Average Rating
8.0
Reviews Sentiment
6.5
Number of Reviews
30
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
 

Mindshare comparison

As of August 2026, in the Database Security category, the mindshare of ACF2 is 2.1%, up from 1.0% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Oracle Audit Vault is 8.2%, down from 16.5% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Database Security Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
Oracle Audit Vault8.2%
ACF22.1%
Other89.7%
Database Security
 

Featured Reviews

reviewer1077621 - PeerSpot reviewer
IT Examiner at a financial services firm with 10,001+ employees
A reliable, scalable product for security and auditing of our mainframe environment
It is a good product. It has been used for years. As long as it is configured correctly, it is a very stable product. It depends on how an institution or a company configures it. It depends on an institution's risk appetite. You need to make sure it is configured as per the concept of least privilege, and the logging features, detection and control mechanism, and other things like that are enabled. If you configure it to give access to the public, then there could be compromises. You should also have someone who independently checks it to make sure that it is configured keeping security in mind. If it has been configured for a while, when there are enhancements to the product or when you enhance it, you need to make sure that security is also looked at, and it is configured according to an institution's security policies. I would rate it a nine out of 10.
Tapas Karmakar - PeerSpot reviewer
Oracle Technology Artchitect And Specialist at Wizertech
Auditing has become tamper-proof and now secures sensitive financial transaction data
The most useful feature of Oracle Audit Vault is its ability to ensure that audits are immutable, as mandated by the Ministry of Corporate Affairs guidelines whenever an audit is happening for a single transaction, mainly for financial transactions. It separates the Oracle databases' information that is being audited and stores it in a separate location where no user has access, including the Oracle Audit Vault admin, ensuring that no one can change or modify that particular record, providing utmost security. User activity reports in Oracle Audit Vault are fantastic, informative, and specific. When a user makes any changes, both the pre-change values and the post-change values are captured and presented to the auditors perfectly, showing what the particular column had before and after the update, along with the user who made the change and the time of the change. Regarding automated policy enforcement in Oracle Audit Vault, I have experience with it, and I find it very important. Oracle Audit Vault fully supports compliance management for companies, with no doubt about its capability to maintain compliance from both audit and security threat perspectives. The correlation engine in Oracle Audit Vault is effective. It includes a data firewall as part of its features, so the threat mechanism allows users to block, snip, and capture all threats happening in the network.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"Without the product, extracting this information may take us as much as several days; instead, we can get it in real time."
"I am deeply impressed with the quality and depth and breadth of security and functionality in CA’s ACF2 and Top Secret products."
"Logging and monitoring are most valuable. It is for the mainframe environment, and it is at the forefront for security and resilience."
"We use this tool to quickly assign privileges to different users as soon as they come in."
"Excellent real-time reporting that saves time and resources."
"The most valuable feature is strict and reliable access control to CICS Resources."
"By providing a high level of access control to the z/OS systems, ACF2 allows us to maintain tight controls on dataset and system access and helps us keep unauthorized users from accessing PHI or PII data."
"It is a good product."
"Reports and alerts are most valuable to us."
"One of the most valuable features is the ability to audit database use."
"It has reduced the stress of collecting database event logs in silos from each database."
"Oracle Audit Vault has a lot of great features, but what I find most valuable is the database firewall."
"Oracle Audit Vault's best feature, if configured well and used effectively, includes the blocking and Database Firewall part that makes an impact because it allows you to filter SQLs on the fly and have more control over database access."
"All of the other components that make up the infrastructure in the environment including the operating system are also quite valuable."
"Our clients can see all of their past actions or the wrong activity done on the network. We can load the diagnostics for the business."
"By integrating two major functions (auditing and database firewall) into a single product, it became easier to use and the scope is really wide."
 

Cons

"They can work on its ability to work in a distributed environment."
"The user access review could also be improved. It produces a lot of false positives."
"Reporting can sometimes include false positives."
"It needs longer rules. The max rule is 32K."
"Initial setup could be complex if you rely on contractors to help with implementation."
"I would like my team and me to be able to use simple browsers, like Chrome, to be able to access mainframe data and provision users using the browser.​"
"They can work on its ability to work in a distributed environment. It's a mainframe product. As many companies move to the cloud, depending on what cloud models they choose, such as a public, hybrid, or private cloud, it should be deployable. I am not sure if it can be deployed on those platforms. It has been there since the '50s or '60s, and it's still scalable. It has survived all these years, and it's scalable to many platforms, but I don't know about the cloud."
"According to Oracle, the best practice is that Audit Vault Server and DB Firewall should be deployed on different boxes (servers). There is no option to co-locate them together."
"Stability could be improved, we have had some challenges."
"I hear from many people that say IBM Guardian is better than Oracle Audit Vault when it comes to performance. IBM Guardian works transparently in the database, but Oracle Audit Vault consumes some ratios on the server."
"We did encounter some stability issues."
"Oracle Audit Vault is very stable, with the exception of some certificate issues that disrupted the environment for up to a month."
"In the previous version, when the aud$ and fga_log$ tables reached a certain size, the collectors sometimes shut down and it took too long to get reports from the AV console, so it was not working in a stable manner."
"The product monitors only the database and not the operating systems."
"This product is not stable for large environments with more than 50 targets."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

Information not available
"For the bank, the license was $48,000 last time. That was the licensing for the bank on just one license."
"The licensing cost is about $360,000, annually."
"Oracle can be an expensive solution depending on the options and user needs."
"This solution is definitely not expensive, and it is a small fraction of the overall database licensing costs."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
19%
Educational Organization
10%
Manufacturing Company
9%
Outsourcing Company
8%
Financial Services Firm
25%
Manufacturing Company
8%
Construction Company
7%
Retailer
7%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business2
Midsize Enterprise1
Large Enterprise4
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business15
Midsize Enterprise6
Large Enterprise11
 

Questions from the Community

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What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Oracle Audit Vault?
I don't know anything about the pricing aspect, as that is usually handled by my boss, Eric. Mr. Eric handles all procurement, licensing, and agreements with the clients.
What needs improvement with Oracle Audit Vault?
In terms of potential areas of improvement for Oracle Audit Vault, I have raised two observations to Oracle. One observation concerns the alert mechanism that sometimes sends false alerts, such as ...
What is your primary use case for Oracle Audit Vault?
My team and I have handled projects for banks and production companies, where security concerns were major. We implemented Oracle Audit Vault where auditing the infrastructure data was required, al...
 

Also Known As

CA ACF2
Audit Vault
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Sky, Rogers Communications
Abu Dhabi Department of Finance, Kingdom of Saudi Arabia Ministry of Health, Educational Testing Service, Ryohin Keikaku Co. Ltd., SPC Brasil, REDISA, Qatar Olympic Committee, Seneca College, Hunan Social Insurance Management and Service Bureau,
Find out what your peers are saying about ACF2 vs. Oracle Audit Vault and other solutions. Updated: August 2026.
909,725 professionals have used our research since 2012.