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Akamai Guardicore Segmentation vs Vectra AI comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive Summary

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

Akamai Guardicore Segmentation
Average Rating
8.2
Reviews Sentiment
7.0
Number of Reviews
18
Ranking in other categories
Cloud and Data Center Security (1st), Cloud Workload Protection Platforms (CWPP) (11th), Breach and Attack Simulation (BAS) (6th), Microsegmentation Software (3rd)
Vectra AI
Average Rating
8.6
Reviews Sentiment
7.1
Number of Reviews
45
Ranking in other categories
Intrusion Detection and Prevention Software (IDPS) (5th), Network Detection and Response (NDR) (2nd), Extended Detection and Response (XDR) (18th), Identity Threat Detection and Response (ITDR) (10th), AI-Powered Cybersecurity Platforms (6th)
 

Mindshare comparison

While both are Network Security Systems solutions, they serve different purposes. Akamai Guardicore Segmentation is designed for Microsegmentation Software and holds a mindshare of 26.9%, up 25.7% compared to last year.
Vectra AI, on the other hand, focuses on Intrusion Detection and Prevention Software (IDPS), holds 8.1% mindshare, up 7.4% since last year.
Microsegmentation Software Market Share Distribution
ProductMarket Share (%)
Akamai Guardicore Segmentation26.9%
Illumio29.5%
VMware NSX16.3%
Other27.299999999999997%
Microsegmentation Software
Intrusion Detection and Prevention Software (IDPS) Market Share Distribution
ProductMarket Share (%)
Vectra AI8.1%
Fortinet FortiGate17.1%
Darktrace13.7%
Other61.099999999999994%
Intrusion Detection and Prevention Software (IDPS)
 

Featured Reviews

Uday Varma - PeerSpot reviewer
Offers granular control and ease of policy creation with features like telemetry and micro-segmentation but incident tagging is missing
Our customers use the solution for micro-segmentation within the data center or cloud environments. One customer uses it for their on-premises infrastructure, deployed at the code level across their massive network. Another customer uses it in a data center to monitor microsegmentation for their 500-node workload. Moreover, Akamai Guardicore Segmentation has helped our customers manage and secure traffic between different applications or workloads. Earlier, they were using VMware NSX-v, which offered good logging for distributed services on an analytical level. However, Akamai Guardicore Segmentation provides them with better overall visibility and granular control over-segmentation, even for inter-application and inter-routing traffic.
Mohammad Alkurdi - PeerSpot reviewer
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.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"Application Ring-Fencing and Deception Server, which is basically like a honeypot, are pretty useful features."
"The most valuable feature is the visibility of processes and connections."
"From day one, you get threat intelligence. It will immediately block active threats, which has been useful."
"Guardicore Centra offers the best coverage specifically in backward compatibility with legacy operating systems."
"The label-based segmentation is the most valuable feature."
"We like the centralized management of the firewalls. Until we installed Guardicore Centra, we managed all our firewalls individually, so making changes was complicated, difficult, and time-consuming."
"The interface and dashboard are amazing."
"Guardicore makes its own rule set automatically, so we can work fast when creating a rule set."
"Vectra AI can bring the ability to detect intrusion on the network more so than legacy IDS tools."
"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."
"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."
"Vectra AI helped our team be more productive and save time. We have less work thanks to it."
"We particularly like the user experience around the dashboard, which we find to be much more straightforward than the dashboard of some of the competitive products... Vectra is a really easy system to understand and use to prioritize where we need to focus our security resources."
"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."
"The most valuable feature for Cognito Detect, the main solution, is that external IDS's create a lot of alerts. When I say a lot of alerts I really mean a lot of alerts. Vectra, on the other hand, contextualizes everything, reducing the number of alerts and pinpointing only the things of interest. This is a key feature for me. Because of this, a non-trained analyst can use it almost right away."
"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."
 

Cons

"Incident tagging could be improved. Other vendors offer semi-automatic tagging, which Guardicore doesn't yet have."
"Guardicore Centra should incorporate automation so that we don't require to write custom scripts and APIs. The tool also has limitations on rules where it allows only sixty thousand rules. Our clients have also commented that there are too many manual clicks and effort to do changes. I think that the incorporation of automation can help our clients make changes with confidence and without the possibility of human error."
"The maps could go a bit faster. They are useful but slightly slow."
"They can maybe improve their customer service just because they are kind of a small organization, and customer service isn't as big as others such as VMware."
"Kubernetes is not installed in the way we need it."
"The product needs a few features like enhanced user policies and payload-level inspection to improve the offering."
"Clients would like to see that the security policies of GuardiCore can continue to be comparable to all the major firewall players out there."
"Sometimes, the speed needs improvement, especially when it comes to the generation of maps, where it can be a bit slow."
"Multiple appliances are required for Vectra AI, making it less convenient compared to competitors."
"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."
"In education as a sector, we are looking at AI a lot in terms of how it can be used as part of the teaching and learning side of things. It would be great to have Vectra AI look at a better way to enhance the security posture related to the AI tools in our portfolio."
"The rules for threats are not always precise and Vectra AI should improve this."
"The advantages of the integration are not entirely out-of-the-box. You have to do it manually."
"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."
"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."
"I would like more integrations with IOCs and threats currently on the Internet. I would also like to know which threats are based on zero-day attacks, current botnets, etc. Therefore, I would like more information on external threats."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"GuardiCore has made some new changes to the license now. We've seen monthly and annual licenses based on a subscription. We have a few clients that pay anywhere from $25,000 a year."
"Akamai Guardicore Segmentation is expensive."
"The pricing is too high."
"The solution is reasonably priced and I would rate it a six out of ten. The tool's licensing costs are yearly."
"This is not a cheap solution but you have to consider the bigger picture, which is what it is giving you."
"Compared to the pricing we were seeing from both Illumio and Edgewise, Guardicore was very competitive."
"The price is the same as other products in the market. There's no price argument to choose one or the other product, it will cost the customer approximately the same."
"Guardicore Centra provides better value for money than NSX, was the other solution that we looked at, which was too expensive for what it does."
"Vectra AI's pricing is cheaper than that of Darktrace."
"The license is based on the concurrent IP addresses that it's investigating. We have 9,800 to 10,000 IP addresses."
"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 very good. It's less expensive than many of the tools out there."
"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."
"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."
"There are additional features that can be purchased in addition to the standard licensing fee, such as Cognito Recall and Stream."
"Their licensing model is antiquated. I'm not a fan of their licensing model. We have to pay for licensing based on four different things. You have to pay based on the number of unique IPs, the number of logs that we send through Recall and Stream, and the size of our environment. They need to simplify their licensing down to just one thing. It should be based on the amount of data, the number of devices, or something else, but there should be just one thing for everything. That's what they need to base their licensing on. Cost-wise, they're not cheap. They were definitely the most expensive option, but you get what you pay for. They're not the cheapest option."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
17%
Computer Software Company
15%
Manufacturing Company
7%
Insurance Company
7%
Financial Services Firm
12%
Computer Software Company
11%
Manufacturing Company
8%
Government
7%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business6
Midsize Enterprise3
Large Enterprise9
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business8
Midsize Enterprise10
Large Enterprise27
 

Questions from the Community

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Guardicore Centra?
I would rate the pricing a six out of ten, where one is cheap and ten is expensive. I know other micro-segmentation tools like Cisco or Illumio, and so I think they are in the middle.
What do you like most about Guardicore Infection Monkey?
Initially, I liked the telemetry part. But later, we used the microsegmentation features that we were able to deploy and found that they really stood out from other vendors. It allows us to see mi...
What needs improvement with Guardicore Infection Monkey?
When we have more than one interface, we can only have one policy for both interfaces. Normally, you have assets with a production interface and a server interface that are only for management. But...
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.
 

Also Known As

Guardicore Centra, GuardiCore
Vectra Networks, Vectra AI NDR
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Santander, Frontier Airlines, OpenLink, Intermountain Healthcare, Cellcom, BancoBASE
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 VMware, Illumio, Akamai and others in Microsegmentation Software. Updated: August 2025.
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