Cisco NGIPS vs Vectra AI comparison

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Comparison Buyer's Guide
Executive Summary

We performed a comparison between Cisco NGIPS and Vectra AI based on real PeerSpot user reviews.

Find out in this report how the two Intrusion Detection and Prevention Software (IDPS) solutions compare in terms of features, pricing, service and support, easy of deployment, and ROI.
To learn more, read our detailed Cisco NGIPS vs. Vectra AI Report (Updated: March 2024).
765,234 professionals have used our research since 2012.
Featured Review
Quotes From Members
We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use.
Here are some excerpts of what they said:
Pros
"We have found the IPS detection to be a very valuable feature of this solution. It is easy to use to stop policy violations.""The tracking intelligence feature is very good. This solution provides us with the opportunity to detect threats in real-time.""I like Firepower's automation, and the security intelligence is a powerful feature.""IPS is a valuable function, because they update the signatures all the time and it's very granular.""The initial setup wasn't complex or complicated.""It is salable and technically sound.""Good IPS and VirtualBox features.""I think their fingerprints are good in terms of how they whitelist and blacklist."

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"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.""It provides various dashboards that facilitate the identification of connections and can detect data exfiltration, meaning data sent from your environment to another.""One of the core features is that Vectra AI triages threats and correlates them with compromised host devices. From a visibility perspective, we can better track the threat across the network. Instead of us potentially finding one device that has been impacted without Vectra AI, it will give us the visibility of everywhere that threat went. Therefore, visibility has increased for us.""One of the most valuable features is all the correlation that it does using AI and machine learning. An example would be alerting on a host and then alerting on other things, like abnormal behavior, that it has noticed coming from the same host. It's valuable because we're a very lean team.""Vectra AI is the best. It is a major product in our cybersecurity.""The administrative privilege detection feature is the most valuable feature. The admin accounts are often highly accessible to the high-risk component of the environment. If those accounts are compromised or are being used in a suspicious manner, that's high-fidelity events for us to look into.""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.""It gives you access, with Recall, to instant visibility into your network through something like a SIEM solution. For us, being able to correlate all of this network data without having to manage it, has provided immediate value. It gives us the ability to really work on the stuff where I and my team have expertise, instead of having to manage a SIEM solution..."

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Cons
"Our customers are still facing many bugs on the system. It has matured noticeably, but we are still facing multiple stability issues on Firepower. There are more than 80 or 90 bugs for each release node. It's a considerable number of bugs.""The CLI, the console line interface, of the FTD could be improved. It's very complex, so without a GUI, it doesn't work well. I would like it to be more simple.""The solution would be better if it offered customers more integrations and more signatures.""I think that some initiation scripts might be helpful because they would make the configuration easier and more user-friendly for customers.""I would like to see a more user-friendly interface.""The price could be improved.""I would like to see the sanctions lifted so we could use the full solution and have the speed increased.""They could provide one solution to fit all the use cases."

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"The solution's marketing is not good.""Integration with other security components needs improvement. It should have true integration as opposed to just being a separate pane of glass.""We would like to see more information with the syslogs. The syslogs that they send to our SIEM are a bit short compared to what you can see. It would be helpful if they send us more data that we can incorporate into our SIEM, then can correlate with other events.""One area where there's room for improvement is the absence of a comprehensive TCP recording and replay feature.""The solution has not reduced the security analyst workload in our organization because we still need to SIEM. Unfortunately, while Vectra, for us, is a brilliant tool for network investigations, giving wonderful visibility, it doesn't go the whole way to replace our SIEM that is needed for compliance. So, I still have the same amount of alerting and logging that I did before. It gives us more defined ability to see incidents, but it doesn't give us enough information to satisfy a PCI or 27001 audit.""The rules for threats are not always precise and Vectra AI should improve this.""The main improvement I can see would be to integrate with more external solutions.""What is most important for us is to have one place where we can manage a few brains because we are based on a zero-trust network. As a result, each customer needs to have a separate brain. For the SOC team, we need to have one place where the SOC analyst can go to visit the website and from that site manage all of the customers. Right now, Vectra AI doesn't have this capability, and I would really like to have this feature."

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Pricing and Cost Advice
  • "We buy the licensing on a yearly basis, when we renew our contract. It is around $14,000."
  • "The price for additional throughput is the highest in the industry."
  • "Licensing fees for this solution are $3,500 USD, and there are no additional costs."
  • "Cisco products are always expensive, but if you can afford the price then it's a great solution."
  • "Pricing depends on negotiation with the vendor, although I can say that it is moderate."
  • "The cost of the license depends on the level of support that you have with Cisco."
  • "This is an expensive product, with the biggest cost being the license that keeps the service going."
  • "There are licensing fees depending on the features that you are using."
  • More Cisco NGIPS Pricing and Cost Advice →

  • "We are running at about 90,000 pounds per year. The solution is a licensed cost. The hardware that they gave us was pretty much next to nothing. It is the license that we're paying for."
  • "The license is based on the concurrent IP addresses that it's investigating. We have 9,800 to 10,000 IP addresses."
  • "There are additional features that can be purchased in addition to the standard licensing fee, such as Cognito Recall and Stream."
  • "We have a desire to increase our use. However, it all comes down to budget. It's a very expensive tool that is very difficult to prove business support for. We would like to have two separate networks. We have our corporate network and PCI network, which is segregated due to payment processing. We don't have it for deployed in the PCI network. It would be good to have it fully deployed there to provide us with additional monitoring and control, but the cost associated with their licensing model makes it prohibitively expensive to deploy."
  • "At the time of purchase, we found the pricing acceptable. We had an urgency to get something in place because we had a minor breach that occurred at the tail end of 2016 to the beginning of 2017. This indicated we had a lack of ability to detect things on the network. Hence, why we moved quickly to get into the tool in place. We found things like Bitcoin mining and botnets which we closed quickly. In that regard, it was worth the money."
  • "The pricing is very good. It's less expensive than many of the tools out there."
  • "The pricing is high."
  • "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."
  • More Vectra AI Pricing and Cost Advice →

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    Questions from the Community
    Top Answer:The product's initial setup phase was easy.
    Top Answer:My company does not use the URL filtering capabilities offered by Cisco NGIPS. My company prefers to use the URL filtering feature offered by a brand other than Cisco since other tools provide an… more »
    Top Answer: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… more »
    Top Answer:Vectra AI generates relevant information.
    Top Answer:It's relatively on the pricier side, but when compared to other solutions. It's not the most budget-friendly option, but it can be considered somewhat more cost-effective in comparison to other… more »
    Ranking
    Views
    3,001
    Comparisons
    1,836
    Reviews
    25
    Average Words per Review
    329
    Rating
    8.2
    Views
    7,589
    Comparisons
    3,567
    Reviews
    20
    Average Words per Review
    772
    Rating
    8.3
    Comparisons
    Also Known As
    Sourcefire NGIPS, Firepower NGIPS
    Vectra Networks, Vectra AI NDR
    Learn More
    Overview

    Cisco NGIPS (Next-Generation IPS) is a highly effective intrusion detection and prevention solution. It is designed to secure a user’s system from end to end and ensure that users are equipped to handle even the most sophisticated threats by offering them a high level of network visibility, threat intelligence, and security automation. Organizations across a wide variety of industries trust IPS to help them prevent unwanted intrusions from harming their networks.

    Cisco NGIPS Benefits

    Some of the ways that organizations can benefit by choosing to deploy Cisco NGIPS include:

    • Increased visibility. Cisco NGIPS enables users to gain a real-time view of all of the events that are taking place in their network. It gathers data from all corners of the network and uses it to provide organizations with context that can aid them in both proactively keeping themselves safe from harm and reactively addressing potential issues.
    • Increased threat protection. NGIPS’ backbone is the core open Snort technology. This is the most widely used intrusion prevention software on the planet. It leverages this software to search for and detect vulnerabilities and anomalies that might otherwise go unnoticed. IPS is 99.7% effective at stopping threats.
    • Flexibility. NGIPS can be customized so as to fit an organization’s specific security needs. Users can set the system so that it recognizes and seeks out threats that the organization defines as being of the highest level of concern.

    Cisco NGIPS Features

    • Security automation. NGIPS offers users a variety of powerful automation tools that can be leveraged to maximize a network’s protection. Analytics tools automatically examine intrusions and correlate them with known vulnerabilities in a user’s network.
    • Integration suite. NGIPS enables users to integrate their security with many different cloud and application security services. Organizations can seamlessly combine the features that NGIPS offers with other platforms to bolster their effectiveness. This gives users the option to plug any feature hole that they might perceive.
    • URL filter. NGIPS comes with a built-in filter that allows businesses to specify sources that the system should flag and block. This prevents known threats from causing significant harm to an organization’s network.

    Reviews from Real Users

    Cisco NGIPS is a highly effective solution that stands out when compared to many of its competitors. Two major advantages are its easy-to-use GUI interface and the highly effective technical support that it offers users.

    Aankit G., a consultant at Pi DATACENTERS, said, “The FTD has a GUI interface, which is very easy to work around with all the configurations. It is a client-based software based on Java. Now we have the GUI web interface, and it's very interactive and easy to navigate.”

    Gebremichael T., a networking and security engineer at IE Network Solutions PLC, says, “The other aspect that I like is the technical support, who are highly capable. They were very good to us during the times that we used them and they tend to reply immediately to queries, even though you might not get the right engineer to help you right away. Tickets are usually assigned to junior staff at first but they do have escalation procedures, so if the support member can't solve the issue then they will immediately escalate it to higher management.”

    Vectra threat detection and response is a complete cybersecurity platform that collects, detects, and prioritizes security alerts. The Cognito platform for Network Detection and Response (NDR) detects and responds to attacks inside cloud, data center, Internet of Things, and enterprise networks. The platform also provides automated response capabilities for low-level threats and escalates more severe anomalies to security personnel.

    Cognito captures data for multiple relevant sources and enriches it with context and security insights. It starts by deploying sensors across different networks in datacenters, IoT, or enterprise networks. The algorithm extracts relevant metadata from network and cloud traffic. The information can also be non-security information that can help investigation. 

    The data is enriched with security context to support critical use cases, such as threat detection, investigation, hunting and compliance. The platform is machine learning-based, which enables it to adapt to any new and current threat scenario. It detects, clusters, prioritizes, and anticipates attacks by using identity and host-level enforcement. 

    With the Vectra platform, a person can investigate 50 threats in just two hours. By prioritizing alerts and leveraging threat intelligence, it provides faster results.Vectra solves today’s security challenges for network detection and response. 

    One of Vectra’s best features is the emphasis they put in pairing research and data science for security insights. It offers behavior codification with unsupervised, supervised, and deep learning models. 

    The pricing is according to a subscription model with a free trial available.Vectra is available for Office 365, Azure AD and AWS Brain.

    Features of Vectra AI

    • AI-based threat detection and response. 
    • Detects attacks in real time with behavior-based threat detection. 
    • Consolidates and correlates thousands of events, detecting threats. 
    • Enriches threat investigation with a chain of evidence and data science security insights. 
    • Machine learning techniques, including deep learning and neural networks. 
    • Gives visibility into cyberattackers and analyzes all network traffic. 
    • Continuous updates with new threat detection algorithms. 
    • Provides encryption at rest and in transit. For the AWS version, it offers AES-256 encryption via AWS Key Management Service. 
    • Guaranteed availability according to the SLA of the service selected. 
    • Does not connect to public sector networks. 

    Benefits of Vectra AI

    • Behavioral models use AI to find unknown attackers. 
    • Context increases the accuracy of threat hunting. 
    • Allows for proactive action by prioritizing the most relevant information. 
    • Provides a clear picture and extensive context for investigations. 
    • Aids decision-making in the incident response process. 
    • Helps working with large datasets by capturing metadata at scale. 
    • Automates time-consuming analysis. 
    • Reduces the security analysts’ workloads on threat investigations. 

    Other advantages of Vectra services include that they can be deployed in the public, private, or hybrid cloud. Support is available via email or online ticketing with an average of 4 hours of response. Phone support is available 24/7. 

    Vectra provides full on-site and online training and documentation. Regarding the user interface, it supports several types of web browsers, such as Internet Explorer, Microsoft Edge, Firefox, Chrome, Safari and Opera. However, it is not available for mobile devices.

    Reviews from Real Users

    Here’s what PeerSpot users of Vectra AI have to say about it:

    "One of the core features is that Vectra AI triages threats and correlates them with compromised host devices. From a visibility perspective, we can better track the threat across the network. Instead of us potentially finding one device that has been impacted without Vectra AI, it will give us the visibility of everywhere that threat went. Therefore, visibility has increased for us." - Dave W., Operations Manager at a healthcare company

    "It does a reliable job of parsing out the logs of all the network traffic so that we can ingest them into our SIEM and utilize them for threat hunting and case investigations. It is pretty robust and reliable. The administration time that we spend maintaining it or troubleshooting it is very low.” - T.S., Senior Security Engineer at a manufacturing company

    Sample Customers
    American Electric Power, Huntington Bank, Keycorp, Nationwide, Transunion, Marriott, Inova Health, Ford, Thomson Reuters, Dow Chemical, Equifax, Chevron, Walmart, Coca Cola
    Tribune Media Group, Barry University, Aruba Networks, Good Technology, Riverbed, Santa Clara University, Securities Exchange, Tri-State Generation and Transmission Association
    Top Industries
    REVIEWERS
    Financial Services Firm19%
    Computer Software Company14%
    Government11%
    Comms Service Provider8%
    VISITORS READING REVIEWS
    Computer Software Company19%
    University10%
    Government9%
    Financial Services Firm9%
    REVIEWERS
    Financial Services Firm17%
    Manufacturing Company11%
    University11%
    Mining And Metals Company9%
    VISITORS READING REVIEWS
    Computer Software Company16%
    Financial Services Firm12%
    Government8%
    Manufacturing Company6%
    Company Size
    REVIEWERS
    Small Business38%
    Midsize Enterprise27%
    Large Enterprise35%
    VISITORS READING REVIEWS
    Small Business20%
    Midsize Enterprise17%
    Large Enterprise64%
    REVIEWERS
    Small Business13%
    Midsize Enterprise23%
    Large Enterprise64%
    VISITORS READING REVIEWS
    Small Business21%
    Midsize Enterprise14%
    Large Enterprise65%
    Buyer's Guide
    Cisco NGIPS vs. Vectra AI
    March 2024
    Find out what your peers are saying about Cisco NGIPS vs. Vectra AI and other solutions. Updated: March 2024.
    765,234 professionals have used our research since 2012.

    Cisco NGIPS is ranked 5th in Intrusion Detection and Prevention Software (IDPS) with 62 reviews while Vectra AI is ranked 2nd in Intrusion Detection and Prevention Software (IDPS) with 39 reviews. Cisco NGIPS is rated 8.2, while Vectra AI is rated 8.6. The top reviewer of Cisco NGIPS writes "Very effective for malware and signature-based anomalies but stability needs improvement". On the other hand, the top reviewer of Vectra AI writes "Integrates well with other security solutions and provides good technical support". Cisco NGIPS is most compared with Check Point IPS, Fortinet FortiGate IPS, Trend Micro TippingPoint Threat Protection System, Cisco Sourcefire SNORT and Palo Alto Networks Advanced Threat Prevention, whereas Vectra AI is most compared with Darktrace, ExtraHop Reveal(x), Cisco Secure Network Analytics, Arista NDR and Trend Micro Deep Discovery. See our Cisco NGIPS vs. Vectra AI report.

    See our list of best Intrusion Detection and Prevention Software (IDPS) vendors.

    We monitor all Intrusion Detection and Prevention Software (IDPS) reviews to prevent fraudulent reviews and keep review quality high. We do not post reviews by company employees or direct competitors. We validate each review for authenticity via cross-reference with LinkedIn, and personal follow-up with the reviewer when necessary.