Cisco Sourcefire SNORT vs Threat Stack Cloud Security Platform [EOL] comparison

Cisco and F5 are both solutions in the Intrusion Detection and Prevention Software (IDPS) category. Additionally, 95% of Cisco users are willing to recommend the solution, compared to 88% of F5 users who would recommend it.

Cisco Sourcefire SNORT

Read 19 Cisco Sourcefire SNORT reviews

1,096 Views
921 Comparison Views

95% willing to recommend

Threat Stack Cloud Security...

Read 8 Threat Stack Cloud Security Platform [EOL] reviews

88% willing to recommend

Cisco Sourcefire SNORT

Threat Stack Cloud Security...

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Download the report

Executive SummaryUpdated on Aug 10, 2025

Cisco Sourcefire SNORT and Threat Stack Cloud Security Platform [EOL] compete in the security sector. Cisco Sourcefire SNORT has the upper hand due to its robust pricing and support, although Threat Stack Cloud Security Platform [EOL] is preferred for cloud-native features.

Features: Cisco Sourcefire SNORT offers reliable intrusion detection and prevention, advanced malware protection, and high availability in a single solution. Threat Stack Cloud Security Platform [EOL] excels in cloud security monitoring, compliance features, and automatic learning of traffic patterns.

Room for Improvement: Cisco Sourcefire SNORT could enhance ease of deployment, simplify the integration process, and improve user-friendliness. Threat Stack Cloud Security Platform [EOL] can benefit from expanding container support, strengthening endpoint security, and fine-tuning alert customization capabilities.

Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: Cisco Sourcefire SNORT requires skilled IT support for complex network integration, with effective customer service backing. Threat Stack Cloud Security Platform [EOL] provides an easier cloud-based deployment process, adapting to dynamic environments with responsive customer support.

Pricing and ROI: Cisco Sourcefire SNORT is competitively priced with lower setup costs and delivers ROI through efficient intrusion detection. Threat Stack Cloud Security Platform [EOL] requires a higher upfront investment but offers superior ROI via advanced cloud security and compliance benefits.

To learn more, read our detailed Intrusion Detection and Prevention Software (IDPS) Report (Updated: October 2025).

Buyer's Guide

Intrusion Detection and Prevention Software (IDPS)

October 2025

Download the complete report

Helped 871,469 peers since 2012

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 Sourcefire SNORT

Average Rating

7.6

Reviews Sentiment

6.8

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

Intrusion Detection and Prevention Software (IDPS) (16th)

Threat Stack Cloud Security...

Average Rating

8.2

Reviews Sentiment

7.1

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

No ranking in other categories

Featured Reviews

Jack Poon

Treasury Specialist at Dah Sing Bank

Offers ease of setup and good documentation

When it comes to the product's deployment phase, we have a lot of vendor support. We have a lot of skills here in Hong Kong. Our company doesn't find any problem deploying Cisco solutions. The solution is deployed on an on-premises version. Speaking about the time required to deploy the solution, I would say that we have quite a lot of previous experience with deploying Cisco products. We have our company's standard design document, which we need to follow. We have a standard testing procedure for all those features. We just take out some appropriate parts and then compile them into one document for an individual project. It is actually quite easy for us to do the documentation, so it just takes one or two hours, and we can do the implementation because all the materials and testing procedures are already in our company standard documents, so it is not that difficult for us.

Read full review

Skyler Cain

Software Development Manager at Rent Dynamics

SecOps program for us, as a smaller company, is amazing; they know what to look for

They could give a few more insights into security groups and recommendations on how to be more effective. That's getting more into the AWS environment, specifically. I'm not sure if that's Threat Stack's plan or not, but I would like them to help us be efficient about how we're setting up security groups. They could recommend separation of VPCs and the like - really dig into our architecture. I haven't seen a whole lot of that and I think that's something that, right off the bat, could have made us smarter. Even as part of the SecOps Program, that could be helpful; a quick analysis. They're analyzing our whole infrastructure and saying, "You have one VPC and that doesn't make a lot of sense, that should be multiple VPCs and here's why." The architecture of the servers in whatever cloud-hosting provider you're on could be helpful. Other than that, they should continue to expand on their notifications and on what's a vulnerability. They do a great job of that and we want them to continue to do that. It would be cool, since the agent is already deployed and they know about the server, they know the IP address, and they know what vulnerability is there, for them to test the vulnerability and see if they can actually exploit it. Or, once we patch it, they could double-check that it can't be. I don't know how hard that would be to build. Thinking on it off the top off my head, it could be a little challenging but it could also be highly interesting. It would also be great if we could test a couple of other features like hammering a server with 100 login attempts and see what happens. Real test scenarios could be really helpful. That is probably more something close to what they do with the SOC 2 audit or the report. But more visualization of that, being able to test things out on our infrastructure to make sure we can or can't hit this box could be interesting.

Read full review

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"Cisco technical support is unbeatable. It offers a premium service every time."

"Cisco Sourcefire SNORT is easy to configure and the reporting is great. It's also very user-friendly."

"It is quite an intelligent product."

"The most valuable feature is the visibility that we have across the virtual environment."

"The solution is rather easy to use."

"The most valuable feature of this solution is the filtering."

"The whole solution is very good, and stable."

"In general, the features are all great. However, if I need to take hardware for ASA, because they need to upgrade to Firepower, we want to create rules. For that, most of the time we go to the command line. Right now Firepower is working really hard on the grid. You can apply all those rules to the grid. Even if you want to monitor the logs, for example, the activity will tell you which particular user has been blocked because of that rule. Firepower's monitoring interface is very good, because you can see each and every piece. ASA also had it, but there you needed to type the command and be under the server to see all that stuff. In Firepower you have the possibility to go directly to the firewall. The way the monitoring is displayed is also very nice. The feature I appreciate most in Firepower is actually the grid. The grid has worked very well."

More Cisco Sourcefire SNORT pros

"It is scalable. It deploys easily with curl and yum."

"Technical support is very helpful."

"There has been a measurable decrease in the meantime to remediation... because we have so many different tech verticals already collated in one place, our ability to respond is drastically different than it used to be."

"Threat Stack has connectivity."

"The rules are really great. They give us more visibility and control over what's being triggered. There's a large set of rules that come out-of-the-box. We can customize them and we can create our own rules based on the traffic patterns that we see."

"With Threat Stack, we quickly identified some AWS accounts which had services that would potentially be exposed and were able to remediate them prior to release of products."

"We're using it on container to see when activity involving executables happens, and that's great."

"We like the ability of the host security module to monitor the processes running on our servers to help us monitor activity."

More Threat Stack Cloud Security Platform [EOL] pros

Cons

"I don't think this solution is a time-based control system, because one cannot filter traffic based on time."

"The pricing needs to be improved. We have lots of low-budget clients around us. Budget constraints are always a deterrent in our market."

"The initial setup is a little difficult compared to other products in the market. It depends on the environment. If we are doing any migration, it might take months in a brown-field environment."

"While the alerts they offer are good, it could improve it in the sense that they should be more detailed to make the alerts more useful to us in general. Sometimes the solution will offer up false positives. Due to the fact that the alerts aren't detailed, we have to go dig around to see why is it being blocked. The solution would be infinitely better if there was just a bit more detail in the alert information and logging we receive."

"Integration with other components — even Cisco's own products — can be enhanced to improve administrative experience."

"The main dashboard of Cisco Sourcefire SNORT could improve."

"I did not experience any pain points that required improvement. Maybe a couple of false-positives, but that's about it."

"The implementation could be a bit easier."

More Cisco Sourcefire SNORT cons

"The one thing that we know they're working on, but we don't have through the tool, is the application layer. As we move to a serverless environment, with AWS Fargate or direct Lambda, that's where Threat Stack does not have the capacity to provide feed. Those are areas that it's blind to now..."

"The compliance and governance need improvement."

"The solution’s ability to consume alerts and data in third-party tools (via APIs and export into S3 buckets) is moderate. They have some work to do in that area... The API does not mimic the features of the UI as far as reporting and pulling data out go. There's a big discrepancy there."

"The API - which has grown quite a bit, so we're still learning it and I can't say whether it still needs improvement - was an area that had been needing it."

"Some features do not work as expected."

"I would like further support of Windows endpoint agents or the introduction of support for Windows endpoint agents."

"They could give a few more insights into security groups and recommendations on how to be more effective. That's getting more into the AWS environment, specifically. I'm not sure if that's Threat Stack's plan or not, but I would like them to help us be efficient about how we're setting up security groups. They could recommend separation of VPCs and the like - really dig into our architecture. I haven't seen a whole lot of that and I think that's something that, right off the bat, could have made us smarter."

"The user interface can be a little bit clunky at times... There's a lot of information that needs to be waded through, and the UI just isn't great."

More Threat Stack Cloud Security Platform [EOL] cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

"We have a three-year license for this solution."

"I don't know the exact amount, but most of the time when I go to a company with a proposition, they will say, "This thing that you are selling is good, but it's expensive. Why don't you propose something like FortiGate, Check Point, or Palo Alto?" Cisco device are expensive compared to other devices."

"Licensing for this solution is paid on a yearly basis."

"If one is an extremely expensive product, and ten is cheap, I rate the tool's price as a five."

"The cost is per port and can be expensive but it does include training and support for three years."

"It came in cheaper than Trend Micro when we purchased it a few years ago."

"We find the licensing and pricing very easy to understand and a good value for the services provided."

"Pricing seems to be in line with the market structure. It's fine."

"I'm happy with the amount that we spend for the product that we get and the overall service that we get. It's not cheap, but I'm still happy with the spend."

"It is very expensive compared to some other products. The pricing is definitely high."

"It is a cost-effective choice versus other solutions on the market."

"What we're paying now is somewhere around $15 to $20 per agent per month, if I recall correctly. The other cost we have is SecOps."

See which vendors are best for you

Use our free recommendation engine to learn which Intrusion Detection and Prevention Software (IDPS) solutions are best for your needs.

See recommendations

871,469 professionals have used our research since 2012.

Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Computer Software Company

10%

Financial Services Firm

10%

University

10%

Manufacturing Company

Performing Arts

14%

Manufacturing Company

11%

Comms Service Provider

Non Profit

Company Size

By reviewers

Large Enterprise

Midsize Enterprise

Small Business

By reviewers
Company Size	Count
Small Business	5
Midsize Enterprise	8
Large Enterprise	7

By reviewers
Company Size	Count
Small Business	2
Midsize Enterprise	5
Large Enterprise	2

Questions from the Community

What do you like most about Cisco Sourcefire SNORT?

The product is inexpensive compared to leading brands such as Palo Alto or Fortinet.

See all answers

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Cisco Sourcefire SNORT?

If one is an extremely expensive product, and ten is cheap, I rate the tool's price as a five. There are some other tools in the market that are more expensive than Cisco. There are no additional c...

See all answers

What needs improvement with Cisco Sourcefire SNORT?

Cisco offers the Cisco DNA Center, which is a source that provides crucial information for us to monitor performance, and see whether there is any trouble. We are using Cisco DNA center, but again,...

See all answers

Ask a question

Earn 20 points

Comparisons

Fortinet FortiGate vs Cisco Sourcefire SNORT

Compared 18% of the time

Cisco Secure IPS (NGIPS) vs Cisco Sourcefire SNORT

Compared 18% of the time

Palo Alto Networks Advanced Threat Prevention vs Cisco Sourcefire SNORT

Compared 17% of the time

ExtremeCloud IQ vs Cisco Sourcefire SNORT

Compared 9% of the time

Zscaler Cloud IPS vs Cisco Sourcefire SNORT

Compared 8% of the time

More Cisco Sourcefire SNORT Competitors

BMC Helix Cloud Security vs Threat Stack Cloud Security Platform [EOL]

Compared 29% of the time

Microsoft Defender for Cloud Apps vs Threat Stack Cloud Security Platform [EOL]

Compared 22% of the time

Check Point CloudGuard CNAPP vs Threat Stack Cloud Security Platform [EOL]

Compared 17% of the time

Netskope vs Threat Stack Cloud Security Platform [EOL]

Compared 17% of the time

Lacework FortiCNAPP vs Threat Stack Cloud Security Platform [EOL]

Compared 15% of the time

More Threat Stack Cloud Security Platform [EOL] Competitors

Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

Cisco Sourcefire SNORT

October 2025

Download Cisco Sourcefire SNORT product report

Buyer's Guide

Threat Stack Cloud Security Platform [EOL]

September 2025

Threat Stack Cloud Security Platform [EOL] report

Download Threat Stack Cloud Security Platform [EOL] product report

Also Known As

Sourcefire SNORT

Threat Stack, CSP,

Overview

Snort is an open-source, rule-based, intrusion detection and prevention system. It combines the benefits of signature-, protocol-, and anomaly-based inspection methods to deliver flexible protection from malware attacks. Snort gained notoriety for being able to accurately detect threats at high speeds.

Cisco

Threat Stack Cloud Security Platform [EOL] offers robust security features including endpoint monitoring, rule customization, and integration capabilities, with easy connectivity to cloud services like Docker and AWS.

Threat Stack Cloud Security Platform [EOL] provides tools for enhancing security visibility across cloud infrastructure. It supports AWS and Docker integration, facilitating efficient threat detection and management. Users appreciate its capability to configure customizable alerts and monitor endpoints, sessions, API interactions, and cloud services. However, there are areas needing improvement, such as better serverless environment support and reduced alert frequency. The platform services smaller organizations by compensating for limited security resources with its comprehensive monitoring and auditing tools.

What are the key features?

Easy Cloud Service Integration: Streamlined connectivity with Docker and AWS for efficient monitoring.
Customizable Rule Sets: Tailor security rules to meet specific organizational needs.
Email Alerts: Receive timely notifications about security events and threats.
Interactive Session Monitoring: Track live sessions for suspicious activities.
API Integration: Connect effortlessly with third-party tools for an enhanced security posture.
SecOps Support: Assistance for organizations lacking dedicated security teams.

What are the benefits and ROI features?

Streamlined Threat Detection: Effective process monitoring to identify potential threats.
Cost Efficiency: Serves companies with limited resources by providing essential security functions.
Comprehensive Audits: Helps in regular examinations of cloud infrastructure, enhancing compliance.
Visibility into Cloud Operations: Offers a detailed dashboard for threat visibility and monthly vulnerability assessments.

In specific industries, Threat Stack Cloud Security Platform [EOL] is utilized for its strength in monitoring cloud infrastructure and preventing unauthorized access. Organizations in fields where cloud operations are critical use it for regular audits and monitoring. Its capabilities in threat management are leveraged to maintain secure operations and compliance, especially where there is no dedicated security team.

Sample Customers

CareCore, City of Biel, Dimension Data, LightEdge, Lone Star College System, National Rugby League, Port Aventura, Smart City Networks, Telecom Italia, The Department of Education in Western Australia

StatusPage.io, Walkbase, Spanning, DNAnexus, Jobcase, Nextcapital, Smartling, Veracode, 6sense

Buyer's Guide

Intrusion Detection and Prevention Software (IDPS)

October 2025

Download Free Report

Find out what your peers are saying about Fortinet, Darktrace, Check Point Software Technologies and others in Intrusion Detection and Prevention Software (IDPS). Updated: October 2025.

DOWNLOAD NOW

871,469 professionals have used our research since 2012.

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.