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AlienVault OSSIM vs Netsurion comparison

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Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Sep 18, 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

AlienVault OSSIM
Ranking in Security Information and Event Management (SIEM)
25th
Average Rating
7.4
Reviews Sentiment
7.1
Number of Reviews
31
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
Netsurion
Ranking in Security Information and Event Management (SIEM)
49th
Average Rating
8.4
Reviews Sentiment
7.1
Number of Reviews
24
Ranking in other categories
Managed Security Services Providers (MSSP) (20th), SOC as a Service (8th), Managed Detection and Response (MDR) (30th), Extended Detection and Response (XDR) (44th)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of October 2026, in the Security Information and Event Management (SIEM) category, the mindshare of AlienVault OSSIM is 1.2%, down from 2.9% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Netsurion is 0.9%, up from 0.6% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Security Information and Event Management (SIEM) Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
AlienVault OSSIM1.2%
Netsurion0.9%
Other97.9%
Security Information and Event Management (SIEM)
 

Featured Reviews

BP
Independent Contractor at a comms service provider with 5,001-10,000 employees
Enables cost-effective security management for small businesses
Scaling for USM is always challenging for any product unless it is purpose-built or overbuilt at the front end. They will use Palo Alto and its competitors, and LevelBlue will manage that implementation. The main area where the AlienVault product was lacking around the 2018 timeframe was in its ability to scale. By pushing it to a cloud-based system, they've largely alleviated scale issues. It's native in Amazon but will also run in Azure. They have worked with cloud service providers to offer enough throughput at a cost reasonable for a corporation. Scaling was their biggest problem, and they've largely conquered those issues.
John-Berry - PeerSpot reviewer
Information Technology Manager at ProfitSolv
The SOC center monitors, hunts, and notifies us of threats around the clock
I know they are working to resolve this issue, but Netsurion is currently unable to retrieve logs from S3 buckets. We use WP Engine for a lot of web hosting as well as AWS, and both of these platforms use S3 buckets. I would like Netsurion to be able to pull logs from Linux devices. We have some of that capability, and I believe they can do it. However, the way it works with Amazon is strange and glitchy. Therefore, working something out with Amazon would be great. Netsurion's SOC can be a bit too aggressive at times. We have asked them to adjust their playbook because I am tired of being notified about the same issue multiple times a day. I am aware of the issue, and it is not a cause for concern. Let's only take action on this issue if we see an actual problem.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"You pay monthly for the solution. I think it's one of the best products. If you compare with other companies, like LogRhythm, etc., the top 8 or 10 CMs, I think Alien Vault has the best price-performance ratio."
"The product is majorly used for threat detection of the agents on servers and endpoints."
"Better than other SIEM solutions because almost everything can be integrated."
"This solution is very stable; it runs on a Linux box, you only interface with it through the GUI, it works behind the scenes, and it has never crashed in the time that I have used it."
"Network traffic analysis is highly efficient."
"A very good feature of AlienVault OSSIM is that it has many domains that can be integrated from different solutions."
"AlienVault OSSIM's GUI is very user-friendly."
"The initial setup is straightforward."
"When it comes to threat detection and response, it does a very good job detecting and blocking on its own. And the SOC is a nice added value because they're doing analysis on things that aren't as obvious, on things that you can't just detect with a signature or behavior. Also, any SIEM will come with a lot of noise, so having them do a lot of the initial analysis to find out what's critical and what issues are false alarms is very good."
"What I like most about Netsurion is the level of visibility and reporting."
"EventTracker has increased productivity and saved us time, absolutely."
"Netsurion's 24/7 monitoring has enhanced the overall security of the company."
"The managed service is great value which saves you a full-time employee on your staff by being able to outsource it to EventTracker to review all the logs and cull through the data to make recommendations and identify threats, then how to remediate them."
"Netsurion has its own security operations center, where it tracks information that comes across our telemetry."
"The most valuable feature is definitely real-time alerting, especially in situations where someone might attempt to exploit or hack into our network."
"They have what they call Elasticsearch which is very quick, although that's only available for the last seven days' worth of data. It used to be that, if I wanted to do a search from three days ago, it might take me 10 to 15 minutes because it had to actually unzip some archive files. So I really like that feature. It's almost instantaneous for anything within the last seven days."
 

Cons

"The incidence reporting could be better."
"I would like the solution to be able to integrate with my firewall, my IDS and my Honeypot solutions so that it can provide real-time reporting as things occur and then have alert sent to me on my phone when suspicious activity is happening."
"The log collection is okay, but tracing the logs or tracing the events is a bit difficult."
"I suggest more in-built rules based on modern threats and environments to make it a more competitive solution."
"AlienVault OSSIM could improve by having better integration with some of the newer tools."
"AlienVault OSSIM on-premise version is more difficult to implement than the cloud version. Additionally, they should add integration between several different environments at once and improve their online knowledge base."
"The solution needs more integration with cyber intelligence systems. Our customers want to use a single tool for managing cybersecurity."
"The correlation engine needs to be improved."
"The system requirements are very, very high. So I need a pretty powerful server to run. If they could lighten that load so that the on-premise part of their product didn't impact my systems as much that would be ideal."
"Using Netsurion has not meant we have consolidated cybersecurity technologies."
"Their SOC team can't understand our network because they haven't worked in the actual company. This does negatively affect security posture, e.g., if you don't have knowledge about the network, then you will miss things."
"I would like to see a faster response when we see things like 15,000 lockouts."
"The MITRE ATT&CK framework could be faster when identifying and understanding sophisticated threats. Whenever something happens, we usually get notified a couple hours later."
"The threat detection and response is passive. We have asked if there were options for taking action, and we have not gotten any feedback on that, which would be useful to know. Depending on the situation and threat, some actions may not be possible, but we haven't gotten any feedback on what options could be directed and actionable with the understanding that it may have an extra cost. It would be nice to know or find out if it is actually possible to take actions by a SIEM service or a SIEM agent."
"The onboarding process was complex, there was quite a learning curve, and few of our technical staff knew what they were talking about on the Netsurion side, but we were expected to do all the work."
"I would like to see the dashboard come up more quickly."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"I used the paid version of the tool and found it to be expensive. It has been a while since I changed to Securonix. I will have to check whether AlienVault charges per device, user, or log."
"AlienVault OSSIM is an open-source solution."
"OSSIM is free."
"AlienVault pricing is the best. Whatever cost you are paying, you are getting a return on every penny... It's not like your IBM, your QRadar, or Splunk, where the cost is too high."
"The tool's licensing costs are yearly."
"The price of AlienVault OSSIM is too high sometimes for us to present to our customers. The price should be lower. We are on a three-year license to use the solution. We had to pay extra for the support."
"We are using a free version of the solution. If you purchase a license there are more features available but the price is a little high. The solution should be cheaper to allow more customers to be able to afford it."
"The licensing fees for the non-community edition are paid on an annual basis, and there are no costs in addition to this."
"It is a bit expensive as compared to some of the other products that have come out in recent years. Expense-wise, the only downside is that it is not cheap."
"Our budget follows the calendar year. We just started a new budget year at the beginning of the month. We did budget for an increase in our threat management system selection. Therefore, we have the budget to implement and accommodate a threat management system change, including an increase for the quoted actions that we received to improve EventTracker. We are just waiting on our council to approve that budget, which might not be for a little while. Hopefully, when they do, we will be able to jump on doing something."
"Licensing is very easy. Our CIO takes care of the billing, but in terms of price point, he hasn't complained, so it must be good."
"I don't know if the pricing is by the seat but we're paying about $20,000 to 25,000 a year. On top of that, we pay for the managed support services. That runs us about another $35,000 or $40,000 a year."
"Our pricing for Netsurion last year was US $52,000 per year."
"The solution is fairly expensive, but in my experience, all of the SIEM applications that I've evaluated or looked at cost about the same."
"We have seen time and cost savings. It prevents us from having to hire specialized people for this type of work. We would need to hire six staff members to accommodate the same service."
"We put together the package of what we needed. It was based pretty much on the number of agents that we were deploying. If we needed to manage logging from certain specific applications, like Active Directory and SQL Server, there has been no additional cost for that. We had agents deployed for those specific servers and the applications were included, then there was just an additional installation that they had to do for us."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Comms Service Provider
14%
Manufacturing Company
9%
Financial Services Firm
8%
University
8%
Outsourcing Company
19%
Construction Company
12%
Manufacturing Company
9%
Performing Arts
8%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business18
Midsize Enterprise9
Large Enterprise8
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business10
Midsize Enterprise7
Large Enterprise7
 

Questions from the Community

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for AlienVault OSSIM?
It depends. I would need to review their cost models, but generally, they are on a scaled basis based on throughput usage. Because it's a software as a service solution for their core product for U...
What needs improvement with AlienVault OSSIM?
Scaling for USM is always challenging for any product unless it is purpose-built or overbuilt at the front end. They will use Palo Alto and its competitors, and LevelBlue will manage that implement...
What is your primary use case for AlienVault OSSIM?
This solution is very similar to most of the other MSSPs that you would find out there. When I look at use cases, AlienVault was initially aimed at small to medium businesses. It grew, and that was...
Ask a question
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Also Known As

OSSIM
Netsurion Managed Threat Protection, Netsurion EventTracker
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Council Rock School District
The Salvation Army, The FRESH Market, Pacific Western Bank, NASA, American Academy of Orthopaedic Surgeons (AAOS), and Talbot’s Stores
Find out what your peers are saying about AlienVault OSSIM vs. Netsurion and other solutions. Updated: September 2026.
915,287 professionals have used our research since 2012.