AlienVault OSSIM vs Netsurion comparison

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AlienVault OSSIM

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Executive SummaryUpdated on Sep 18, 2024

AlienVault OSSIM and Netsurion are two prominent cybersecurity solutions. Netsurion appears to have the upper hand due to its comprehensive feature set and higher perceived value.

Features: AlienVault OSSIM is valued for its threat detection and response capabilities, easy log management, and wide integration options. Netsurion is praised for its extensive security features, managed firewall, and SIEM capabilities. Netsurion's broader feature set makes it appealing to users seeking an all-in-one solution.

Room for Improvement: Users highlight AlienVault OSSIM's need for better scalability and enhanced threat intelligence updates. For Netsurion, reviewers suggest improving reporting functionalities and the complexity of initial configuration. This indicates AlienVault OSSIM could benefit from technical upgrades, while Netsurion needs better usability enhancements.

Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: AlienVault OSSIM is often complimented for its straightforward deployment, but its customer service receives mixed reviews. Netsurion is viewed as more complex to deploy but benefits from stronger customer support. Hence, Netsurion may offer better post-deployment support, despite a tougher initial setup.

Pricing and ROI: AlienVault OSSIM is generally perceived as cost-effective with a quicker ROI. Netsurion, despite being pricier, is seen as delivering good value due to its extensive features and reliable managed services. Users accept Netsurion's higher cost owing to its significant return on investment.

To learn more, read our detailed AlienVault OSSIM vs. Netsurion Report (Updated: July 2025).

AlienVault OSSIM vs. Netsurion

July 2025

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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)

11th

Average Rating

7.4

Reviews Sentiment

7.1

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

No ranking in other categories

Netsurion

Ranking in Security Information and Event Management (SIEM)

17th

Average Rating

8.4

Reviews Sentiment

7.1

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

Managed Security Services Providers (MSSP) (4th), SOC as a Service (3rd), Managed Detection and Response (MDR) (15th), Extended Detection and Response (XDR) (20th)

Mindshare comparison

As of August 2025, in the Security Information and Event Management (SIEM) category, the mindshare of AlienVault OSSIM is 3.2%, down from 4.3% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Netsurion is 0.5%, up from 0.3% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.

Security Information and Event Management (SIEM)

Featured Reviews

HarshBhardiya

SOC Engineer at Just Dial Limited

An open-source solution that provide good detection and more visibility

The solution is not scalable. It impacts so hard. In the initial stages, AlienVault OSSIM can be suitable for small environments. There may be limitations if the customer expresses a desire to expand and add more devices. In such cases, we would need to either explore additional solutions or work within the constraints of the existing setup. We have set up alerts and configured everything in AlienVault OSSIM. It actively monitors for any security incidents. It provides us with regular updates and notifications about any ongoing activities. Only one person is using the solution. It is the perfect solution for small businesses. I rate the solution’s scalability a three out of ten.

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John-Berry

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.

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Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"With AlienVault you get everything in one box."

"Its user-friendliness is the most valuable. It is very easy to use and explore. The dashboard is very well packaged and integrated. You don't have to spend a lot of time in configuring it and checking out the RPM etc. It is also free and very powerful."

"The solution is free to use."

"The threat policies of the solution are always very advanced and the best in the market. They are very persistent in terms of keeping up with security protocols."

"The most valuable features of this solution are the data correlation and vulnerability assessment."

"The paid version of the solution has reporting and better scalability options."

"The threat alerts it gives me from time to time on harmful code within the network, or if they are generating any network traffic, are very useful."

"The solution is very stable. Compared to Qradar and Splunk, it's very stable."

More AlienVault OSSIM pros

"We have also integrated our endpoint security into the Netsurion SIEM. That's important because we have all the events in one place; we don't have to manage them in multiple places. In addition, the embedded MITRE ATT&CK Framework was paramount in our decision to choose Managed Threat Protection because the MITRE Framework is the industry standard for threats."

"Netsurion's 24/7 monitoring has enhanced the overall security of the company. They have someone looking at the data 24/7 who will call us as needed. If their team spots a malicious process after hours, they notify the appropriate person by phone. We get a lot of actionable threat intelligence from Netsurion. For example, if a user clicks on a malicious link in a web page and starts an unusual process that isn't on the white-list, Netsurion's team can detect it and prevent it from executing. Afterward, they'll notify us by telephone, so we can respond and clean up whatever damage has occurred."

"The real-time alerting for things such as people getting dropped into a VPN group or the domain admin group — things like that which really shouldn't happen without proper change management, but we all know the reality, they do from time to time — gives me real-time visibility into what's going on."

"If I were to look at logs manually, there's no way I could do that. As an example, they are 48 million logs processed a day. There is no way I could look at all 48 million of those. So, it gives me a good structure to be able to look at the different incidents which are created and do different searches."

"Their SOC team manages vulnerability management and IOC reviews. They stop bad processes when they happen. The best thing is their weekly reviews of what has been going on in the infrastructure as well as the things that they see and what we should look out for."

"I like EventTracker's dashboard. I see it every time I log in because it's the first thing you get to. We have our own widgets that we use. For the sake of transparency, there are a few widgets that we look at there and then we move out from there... Among the particularly helpful widgets, the not-reporting widget is a big one. The number-of-logs-processed is also a good one."

"When I looked last week, we probably averaged about 20 million log entries a day. So, we certainly can't individually manage that. Just looking at the reports, then trying to go back and find anything that was questionable, was a challenge. Therefore, the managed service has been invaluable to us in terms of being able to narrow the scope of what really needs to be looked at and bringing those things to our attention to be dealt with."

"The most valuable feature is that we get the events: the alerts about disk space and the security reports that we get once a day, including user lockouts and the like."

More Netsurion pros

Cons

"Lacking in depth of reporting."

"They can add more compliance templates."

"The solution needs more integration with cyber intelligence systems."

"The initial setup was a bit complex. You've got to do a lot of reading. It's not an intuitive implementation."

"There are somewhat more false positives with the user behavior analytics, which could benefit from an additional machine learning model to detect user patterns more rapidly."

"AlienVault OSSIM gives unwanted notifications."

"AlienVault OSSIM’s configuration and integration could be a little easier."

"AlienVault OSSIM failed to provide our company a full insight, while also giving out a lot of false positives."

More AlienVault OSSIM cons

"Everything that I've wanted has been added in. EDR was added, and MITRE was added. Those were two big ones that we didn't even have to push for."

"They have their programs and tools that you have to put into your own environment. We basically ingest all the log data and then push it out to them. I wish it was a little bit different than that where we just push directly towards them. I do not know if that is a function that they thought would be better in terms of security, but I wish that instead of doing that, it should go from the device to them and not from the device to another system and then out to them. There seem to be some drawbacks to doing that."

"The agents on the endpoints seem to fail quite a bit, requiring manual involvement from the local administrators. I would like to see their product be much more ad hoc and update automatically."

"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."

"Communication is always something that can be improved, but I feel that any time we've had a communication issue, it's quickly addressed when we bring those up at the monthly meetings. Usually, it's an individual that wasn't clear in the communication, it's not the process per se. You always have to be able to segregate if the process didn't work or an individual either didn't say the right thing or my people didn't understand what they were being told."

"The weekly reporting could use some improvement. For example, when we handed them our landscape document, it took longer than I would have liked for those details to become noticeable within the reports."

"We get a report generated on a particular day of the week and we go through it, trying to mitigate problems and make sure we're seeing everything that's happening. It would be helpful if the SOC spent a little more time with us going through some of those reports."

"The solution's dashboard is okay. The one thing that we ran into are issues when we upgraded to the newer version. It uses Elasticsearch for the different dashboard entries. So, we were running on spinning disks, and Elasticsearch didn't work that well. A number of the different dashboards, like my dashboard or different things like that, pull from Elasticsearch. Since Elasticsearch really wasn't working, we were having some issues with that, but we just migrated."

More Netsurion cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The tool's licensing costs are yearly."

"OSSIM is free."

"The licensing fees for the non-community edition are paid on an annual basis, and there are no costs in addition to this."

"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."

"AlienVault OSSIM is expensive compared to its competitors."

"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."

"When comparing AlienVault OSSIM to Microsoft Sentinel, AlienVault OSSIM incurs additional costs due to its licensing price structure. If you are using AlienVault for security purposes at a certain level it can have a higher price point than the current pricing of Microsoft Sentinel."

"AlienVault OSSIM is free."

More AlienVault OSSIM pricing and cost advice

"EventTracker's subscription-based model is interesting as far as yearly license type stuff. It's nice because you know what it's going to be next year. We haven't really looked at any other solutions. The pricing at the time compared to the other solutions was a lot less. A couple of years ago, we actually looked at Splunk. The amount in Splunk's licensing model is based on 20 gigs a day, or something like that. Based on our number of logs and stuff that we were already generating, the costs would be substantially more for the amount of logs that we would be getting."

"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."

"You are paying for different levels, especially as far as the monitoring goes and how often you review it with the team. The other factor that figures in is how many nodes are on your network, such as clients, network equipment, servers, etc. There are some additional pieces on top of that, but it's laid out pretty simply, as far as how much you're going to pay for a node."

"Our pricing for Netsurion last year was US $52,000 per year."

"When we first got the EventTracker product, we were using SIEM Simplified. At the time they didn't call it that, but it was more of a service thing. So, there was a bit more hand-holding and getting stuff set up, along with failure reports, that they did during the first one to two years. Then, we decided that the the additional money to have someone do these daily reports wasn't terribly useful, so we discontinued that service."

"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."

"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."

"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."

More Netsurion pricing and cost advice

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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Computer Software Company

15%

Comms Service Provider

11%

University

Educational Organization

Computer Software Company

25%

Performing Arts

Government

Manufacturing Company

Company Size

By reviewers

Large Enterprise

Midsize Enterprise

Small Business

Questions from the Community

What do you like most about AlienVault OSSIM?

Asset discovery is good.

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 do you like most about Netsurion Managed Threat Protection?

Expediting incident response is really great.

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Netsurion Managed Threat Protection?

Their pricing is high. I don't know if it's a barrier. The quality speaks to the price. The price is the price. They provide what they promise. From a purchasing perspective, I just have to come ba...

What needs improvement with Netsurion Managed Threat Protection?

There is one area that needs improvement and that is with the agents and the server that's on-site. The system requirements are very, very high. So I need a pretty powerful server to run. If they c...

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Compared 4% of the time

Splunk Enterprise Security vs AlienVault OSSIM

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Compared 21% of the time

Fortinet FortiSIEM vs Netsurion

Compared 18% of the time

IBM Security QRadar vs Netsurion

Compared 15% of the time

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Product Reports

Download AlienVault OSSIM product report

AlienVault OSSIM

August 2025

Download Netsurion product report

August 2025

Also Known As

OSSIM

Netsurion Managed Threat Protection, Netsurion EventTracker

Overview

AlienVault OSSIM, Open Source Security Information and Event Management (SIEM), provides you with a feature-rich open source SIEM complete with event collection, normalization and correlation. Launched by security engineers because of the lack of available open source products, AlienVault OSSIM was created specifically to address the reality many security professionals face: A SIEM, whether it is open source or commercial, is virtually useless without the basic security controls necessary for security visibility.

AT&T

Netsurion offers a comprehensive solution for centralized log management, SIEM, and managed services, ensuring continuous monitoring and security event analysis for diverse organizations, enhancing IT security and compliance.

Netsurion centralizes event management through SIEM and managed services. Organizations leverage it for vulnerability assessment and intrusion detection, integrating logs from Windows, Linux, and network devices. Its SOC provides 24/7 monitoring, ensuring compliance with PCI and audit standards. Real-time alerts and efficient log data aggregation enhance threat identification and response. Weekly reports and insights into user lockouts contribute to robust security management, beneficial for firms with constrained resources.

What are some key features of Netsurion?

SIEM Integration: Centralizes security event data for easier management.
Managed Services: Provides 24/7 SOC monitoring and support.
Real-TIme Alerts: Notifies of unusual security events promptly.
Threat Intelligence: Delivers actionable insights for proactive defense.
Seamless Platform Integration: Compatible with Office 365, firewalls, and other platforms.

How can companies benefit from using Netsurion?

Enhanced Security Management: Real-time monitoring and alerts streamline threat response.
PCI Compliance: Supports meeting audit and regulatory requirements efficiently.
Resource Optimization: Weekly reports and detailed insights aid decision-making for limited-resource organizations.
Improved Threat Detection: Consolidating logs and real-time intelligence helps in identifying threats swiftly.

Netsurion is implemented across industries like finance, healthcare, and retail, where security is crucial. These sectors require robust monitoring and compliance solutions, utilizing Netsurion's seamless integration with their existing infrastructure to manage security operations effectively, addressing both regulatory needs and threat management.

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