Cisco Secure Cloud Analytics [EOL] vs Vectra AI comparison

Cisco Secure Cloud Analytic...

Read 45 Vectra AI reviews

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Executive Summary

We performed a comparison between Cisco Secure Cloud Analytics [EOL] and Vectra AI based on real PeerSpot user reviews.

Find out what your peers are saying about Darktrace, Check Point Software Technologies, Fortinet and others in Intrusion Detection and Prevention Software (IDPS).

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Intrusion Detection and Prevention Software (IDPS)

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

Cisco Secure Cloud Analytic...

Average Rating

8.6

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

No ranking in other categories

Vectra AI

Average Rating

8.6

Reviews Sentiment

7.1

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

Intrusion Detection and Prevention Software (IDPS) (4th), Network Detection and Response (NDR) (2nd), Extended Detection and Response (XDR) (19th), Identity Threat Detection and Response (ITDR) (10th), AI-Powered Cybersecurity Platforms (6th)

Featured Reviews

Olivier CHAMBELANT

Global Network and Telecommunication Manager at Nemera Development S.A.

Beneficial cloud deployment

Opening a ticket with support can be difficult but once it is open the support does a good job. They want us to provide a lot of information, such as the order number and when it was bought. It takes a long time, they can improve by having a faster response time.

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Mohammad Alkurdi

Owner at Fortibits

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.

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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

"It tells you if there is any communication going to command and control servers, or if there is any traffic that violates your internal policy, or if any data hoarding is happening where data is being dumped from your machine to outside of the environment. It provides all such meaningful reports to help you understand what's happening."

"Cisco Stealthwatch Cloud is scalable because it is on the cloud."

"The tool's best feature is its ability to monitor network traffic. It will also inform users whether the traffic generated by a network is legitimate. The tool helps to capture and analyze the network traffic."

"The logs in Cisco Stealthwatch Cloud are very good when doing the API integration in the team. It is able to give you important information for the correlations."

"The product helps me to see malware."

"Monitoring the traffic, making sure you have the visibility."

"When it comes to scalability, there's no size limit. It varies based on licenses and requirements."

"We discovered a lot of things in our network and are correcting several misconfigurations. We are learning how some apps work together and how some things shouldn't happen. It's also easier for us to identify the source of a brute force, whereas before, we didn't even know we had a brute force."

"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."

"Most of their use cases, including deployment, are managed by the tool itself, requiring less manual input from our team."

"It's easy to manage, and I love the UX. It's very well designed. When we are looking for something, it's quite easy to find it."

"The packet-capturing feature is very useful."

"The solution's ability to reduce alerts, by rolling up numerous alerts to create a single incident or campaign, helps in that it collapses all the events to a particular host, or a particular detection to a set of hosts. So it doesn't generate too many alerts. By and large, whatever alerts it generates are actionable, and actionable within the day."

"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."

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Cons

"The initial setup is a bit complex in terms of deployment and configuration"

"Cisco Stealthwatch Cloud could improve the graphical user interface. It could be a more user-friendly graphical user interface. so that. Not everybody's a cyber security professional, most of the customers that I deal with are not very skilled. The terms that they use in the solution are quite understandable for a normal CIO."

"If we migrate these things to an event or send us an email if there is any critical event, I would like to configure these things on the initial launch. Because if a system is compromised, there will be a lot of data movement from one post to another post to the outside. Then, we should also get an alert on email as well. We have since we have integrated these things. But a direct email for critical alerts should be there. So, I would like to enhance the critical event configuration."

"The product needs to improve its user-friendliness. It is very tricky and you need to study it before using the standard functionalities."

"When I used to work on it, I just didn't see anything new happening for about a year and a half. Providing newer data and newer reports constantly would help. There should be more classifications and more interesting data."

"The initial setup of Cisco Stealthwatch Cloud is complex."

"The product's price is high."

"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."

"I think Vectra AI's automation, reporting, and integration could be improved."

"We are using SMB 3.0, which is an encrypted protocol. When we get some alerts or something, we cannot go deep into the protocol to see what's wrong because it's encrypted. We need to decrypt the protocol in another way, which is quite difficult. We might go back to SMB 2.0 just for this reason, but that's not a good solution."

"If you hit a certain number of rules, triage filters, or groups, the UX responds more slowly. However, we have a complex network and a lot of rules. So, our setup might not be a typical implementation example. We even had UX engineers onsite, and they looked at issues, improvements, and user feedback. Since then, it has gotten a lot better, they even built in features that we specifically requested for our company."

"In comparison with a lot of systems I used in the past, the false positives are really a burden because they are taking a lot of time at this moment."

"The solution's marketing is not good."

"Multiple appliances are required for Vectra AI, making it less convenient compared to competitors."

"We had another product with Vectra AI and used the MDR solution as an add-on. Initially, it wasn't fully appropriately configured, so we didn't get the expected results. Even once configured correctly, we weren't fully satisfied with its response. The issue was both with their service response and the product's capabilities."

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Pricing and Cost Advice

"The solution is quite expensive."

"The price of Cisco Stealthwatch Cloud is expensive."

"Cisco Stealthwatch Cloud is an expensive enterprise solution."

"Its cost is too much. It's an investment that we can afford. It's a lot, but it's worth it."

"The pricing is high."

"Vectra is a bit on the higher side in terms of price, but they have always been transparent. The reason that they are this good is that they invest, so they need to charge accordingly."

"From a licensing perspective, the Vectra detect platform is pretty doable. Also, the hardware prices are nothing that we're not used to. The stream part is a little overpriced compared to the detect part. The reason is that you need to stream data to detect events anyway, so the data is in there. The only thing that's not available is the UI to be able to look at the stream data, which is also on the appliances but is just not activated. That's mainly the thing that we want to improve on."

"There are additional features that can be purchased in addition to the standard licensing fee, such as Cognito Recall and Stream."

"The license is based on the concurrent IP addresses that it's investigating. We have 9,800 to 10,000 IP addresses."

"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."

"Vectra's pricing is too high. All schools will not be able to afford it. Vectra will only end up targeting higher education and higher value independence purely because of the price. A lot of schools would love to have a product like Vectra AI, but they simply can't because they struggle to even pay the high E5 licensing from Microsoft. When you're up against that, Vectra AI is never going to be within the sector's price range."

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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Computer Software Company

37%

Government

University

Manufacturing Company

Financial Services Firm

13%

Computer Software Company

11%

Manufacturing Company

Government

Company Size

By reviewers

Large Enterprise

Midsize Enterprise

Small Business

Questions from the Community

What do you like most about Cisco Stealthwatch Cloud?

When it comes to scalability, there's no size limit. It varies based on licenses and requirements.

What needs improvement with Cisco Stealthwatch Cloud?

There are two areas of improvement. Firstly, extend the log retrieval limit to at least three months. For example, there is a limit on the number of log messages that can be received. So, I would l...

What is your primary use case for Cisco Stealthwatch Cloud?

We are using Cisco Secure Cloud Analytics, also known as Cisco's WatchCloud, to monitor user activity in the cloud. Specifically, we are looking for users who are uploading or downloading data beyo...

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.

ExtraHop Reveal(x) vs Vectra AI

Comparisons

No data available

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Compared 28% of the time

Compared 11% of the time

Corelight vs Vectra AI

Compared 7% of the time

Cisco Secure Network Analytics vs Vectra AI

Compared 5% of the time

Arista NDR vs Vectra AI

Compared 4% of the time

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Product Reports

Cisco Secure Cloud Analytics [EOL]

August 2025

Cisco Secure Cloud Analytics [EOL] report

Download Cisco Secure Cloud Analytics [EOL] product report

Download Vectra AI product report

July 2025

Also Known As

Cisco Stealthwatch Cloud, Observable Networks

Vectra Networks, Vectra AI NDR

Overview

Cisco Secure Cloud Analytics is a cloud-based security solution that provides visibility and threat detection for cloud environments. It offers software mapping and automation for incident response, forensic analysis, and segmentation of IT architecture. The solution can be used on-premise or on the cloud and is used in various sectors such as insurance and government.

The logs in Cisco Secure Cloud Analytics are valuable for API integration in a team as they provide important information for correlations. The solution also offers automated incident response and integration with next-generation firewalls and antivirus solutions."

Cisco

Vectra AI is used for detecting network anomalies and potential malicious activities, providing visibility into network traffic and enhancing threat detection across environments.

Organizations deploy Vectra AI mainly on-premises with additional cloud components. It helps with compliance, incident response, security monitoring, detecting insider threats, and correlating network events. Vectra AI captures and enriches network metadata, provides detailed dashboards, reduces false positives, and supports cross-environment behavioral analysis to enhance threat detection and prioritization. While valued for its high accuracy and alert aggregation, it has room for improvement in UI/UX, packet management, and integration with SIEMs and other tools. It is noted for expensive pricing and limited proactive threat response features.

What are Vectra AI's most valuable features?

High accuracy in identifying threat locations
Aggregation of alerts into single incidents
24/7 threat detection
Visibility into the entire attack lifecycle
Risk score aggregation
Effective triaging of alerts
Integration with other tools

What benefits or ROI should users look for?

Enhanced threat detection and prioritization
Comprehensive network visibility
Reduction in false positives
Better incident response capabilities
Improved compliance monitoring

In specific industries, Vectra AI is deployed to monitor complex networks and alleviate challenges in threat detection. It is particularly effective in sectors requiring stringent compliance and security measures, offering insights and capabilities crucial for protecting sensitive data and maintaining operational integrity.

Sample Customers

Options, Schneider Electric, Washington University in St Louis, Gotcha, Kraft Kennedy, PartnerRe, Sumologic, Veterans United, AFGE, Agraform, Artesys, Dynamic Ideas Financials, Department of Agriculture and Commerce

Tribune Media Group, Barry University, Aruba Networks, Good Technology, Riverbed, Santa Clara University, Securities Exchange, Tri-State Generation and Transmission Association