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Cisco XDR vs Vectra AI comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive Summary

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 XDR
Ranking in Extended Detection and Response (XDR)
14th
Average Rating
8.4
Reviews Sentiment
6.3
Number of Reviews
8
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
Vectra AI
Ranking in Extended Detection and Response (XDR)
16th
Average Rating
8.6
Reviews Sentiment
7.0
Number of Reviews
47
Ranking in other categories
Intrusion Detection and Prevention Software (IDPS) (5th), Network Detection and Response (NDR) (2nd), Identity Threat Detection and Response (ITDR) (11th), AI-Powered Cybersecurity Platforms (6th)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of December 2025, in the Extended Detection and Response (XDR) category, the mindshare of Cisco XDR is 2.0%, up from 0.9% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Vectra AI is 3.1%, up from 3.0% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Extended Detection and Response (XDR) Market Share Distribution
ProductMarket Share (%)
Cisco XDR2.0%
Vectra AI3.1%
Other94.9%
Extended Detection and Response (XDR)
 

Featured Reviews

Joseph Houghes - PeerSpot reviewer
Cloud Architect at Pure Storage
flexible reporting and analytics boost data-driven security responses
The feature I appreciate the most about Cisco XDR is the flexibility for a user to be able to create their own reporting and dashboards. I would say I got to stop beta testing myself. I am testing what can be customized the most with it. Being able to ingest all the analytics and make it something that's either meaningful to them or to their own leadership is a big plus. It's not just what the product is at launch; you have the ability to customize and make it useful to your business to actually get real, purposeful information out of just a swamp of data. The features of Cisco XDR have actually benefited the organization significantly by allowing us to do the outputs of specific data and even filtered subsets of the data. We can do the same reporting but only deliver in either reports or dashboards the information about the systems that a specific team is responsible for, or the larger teams that multiple departments or IT silos roll up into. We're basically able to just modify the filters and have the same reports in the same dashboards where it's all the same; 99% of the work is the same.
RR
Consultant at a retailer with 5,001-10,000 employees
Threat detection has improved and malicious emails are now identified quickly
Vectra AI offers artificial intelligence capabilities with visibility that can be integrated into our day-to-day operations and other tools, including malware detection tools and cyber threat tools. Vectra AI has positively impacted my organization. Last year while using it, we received many malicious email threats and virus incidents, including a trojan virus that had reportedly been deployed by someone. Our company used Vectra AI to detect the malicious threats and viruses before they could cause more damage, and we successfully stopped the threats. Using Vectra AI, I notice that server downtime has decreased significantly. We now experience only two to three hours of downtime, whereas without Vectra AI and other tools, our downtime would exceed 48 to 72 hours.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"Cisco XDR is built primarily for enterprise endpoint security, integrated onto endpoints with logs integrated into SIEM, and it is used for security investigations, malware impact investigation, and tracking particular security incidents through integration of different logs, where endpoint logs are very important, providing detail about processes run by potential malware and any call-outs made to command and control."
"Cisco XDR offers threat intelligence and links with the Firewall."
"The feature I appreciate the most about Cisco XDR is the flexibility for a user to be able to create their own reporting and dashboards, ingest all the analytics, and make it something meaningful to their business to actually get real, purposeful information out of just a swamp of data."
"One of my favorite features of Cisco XDR is the automation tool, which saves a lot of time because we can craft these automations and workflows."
"The feature I appreciate the most about Cisco XDR is the reliability."
"The features of Cisco XDR benefit my company since time is money. When outages happen and when a customer can't reach the internet, they get agitated. Therefore, the quicker we can mitigate an issue, our customers get happier in a quicker fashion."
"Technical support from Cisco is good and very helpful."
"My advice for other organizations considering Cisco XDR is that it offers proactive security measures that are really very helpful."
"One of the most valuable features of the platform is its ability to provide you with aggregated risk scores based on impact and certainty of threats being detected. This is both applied to individual and host detections. This is important because it enables us to use this platform to prioritize the most likely imminent threats. So, it reduces alert fatigue follow ups for security operation center analysts. It also provides us with an ability to prioritize limited resources."
"Some valuable features of Vectra AI are that it is very intuitive and that there are only a small amount of false positives. Therefore, it's an effective solution."
"There are many detection features available."
"Our company used Vectra AI to detect the malicious threats and viruses before they could cause more damage, and we successfully stopped the threats."
"Vectra AI generates relevant information."
"We often use the new feature to create PCAP files from the whole data traffic. It makes it much easier to find network problems such as whether the server is responding to a request. It has nothing to do with security, but it helps a lot to find other problems."
"The automatic filtering that they provide is valuable. The logic inside that makes some detections instead of us is very useful. We are confident that if we are just looking into it and there is nothing, nothing could happen."
"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."
 

Cons

"They need to provide better pricing and bundle XDR licenses with products like Meraki solutions or Firepower Threat Defense."
"Regarding the pricing aspect of Cisco XDR, I think the price is a bit expensive."
"When we first started with Cisco XDR in August, everybody was having issues. There were three people in our organization, including me, who couldn't even log in to Cisco XDR."
"My only complaint about Cisco XDR is related to licensing, which is complicated."
"One area that needs improvement is the limited visibility due to the licensing structure. For more visibility, customers need the advantage or premier licensing, which involves additional costs."
"Cisco XDR can be improved by addressing the upfront cost. Everything matters for us since we're small, mom and pop, so every dollar counts."
"If we have a list of domains we need to block, such as 4,000 domains, I can only block 100 domains at a time because if I put in more than 100 domains, I hit that 2,000 character max and can't continue with an investigation. Being able to put in all 4,000 domains, without a character limit or observable limit, would make doing those case books a whole lot easier and blocking those domains a whole lot easier too."
"I would say I got to stop beta testing myself."
"The advantages of the integration are not entirely out-of-the-box. You have to do it manually."
"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."
"Some of their integrations with other sources of data, like external threat feeds, took a bit more work than I had hoped to get integrated."
"Vectra is still limited to packet management. It's only monitoring packet exchanges. While it can see a lot of things, it can't see everything, depending on where it's deployed. It has its limits and that's why I still have my SIEM."
"Some of the customization could be improved. Everything is provided for you as an easy solution to use, but working with it and doing specific development could be worked on a bit more in the scope of an incident response team."
"They use a proprietary logging format that is probably 90% similar to Bro Logs. Their biggest area of improvement is finishing out the remaining 10%. That 10% might not be beneficial to their ML engine, but that's fine. The industry standard is Zeek Logs or Bro Logs, or Bro or Zeek, depending on how old you are. While they have 90% of those fields, they're still missing some fields. In very rare instances, some community rules do not have the fields that they need, and we had to modify community rules for our logs. So, their biggest area of improvement would be to just finish their matching of the Zeek standard."
"The reporting from Cognito Detect is very limited and doesn't give you too many options. If I want to prepare a customized report on a particular host, even though I see the data, I have to manually prepare the report. The reporting features that are built into the tool are not very helpful."
"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."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The licensing of Cisco XDR is a bit complicated. The cost can depend on what it is, and the process can be a little complicated."
"The license is based on the concurrent IP addresses that it's investigating. We have 9,800 to 10,000 IP addresses."
"The pricing is high."
"The pricing and licensing are quite straightforward because they're based on the IP licenses. As a result, they are easy to count."
"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."
"The solution is low-cost and affordable."
"Vectra's licensing model could scale to our research network, which has multiple, 100-gigabit links."
"Its cost is too much. It's an investment that we can afford. It's a lot, but it's worth it."
"Vectra AI is not a cheap solution."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Computer Software Company
11%
Manufacturing Company
10%
Government
9%
University
7%
Computer Software Company
11%
Financial Services Firm
10%
Manufacturing Company
8%
Government
7%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business3
Midsize Enterprise4
Large Enterprise2
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business9
Midsize Enterprise10
Large Enterprise29
 

Questions from the Community

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Cisco XDR?
My experience with pricing, setup costs, and licensing has been intriguing. I used to work for a Cisco partner, and I still have friends there with whom I discuss comparisons regarding some hardwar...
What needs improvement with Cisco XDR?
To improve Cisco XDR, I can't think of anything super meaningful because a couple of features I'm interested in are actually ones that integrate with Duo, but that's not widely used. I'm fine with ...
What is your primary use case for Cisco XDR?
My primary use case for Cisco XDR is log review from devices, and then doing analytics for quicker responses in the future to security incidents.
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.
 

Also Known As

No data available
Vectra Networks, Vectra AI NDR
 

Interactive Demo

Demo not available
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Information Not Available
Tribune Media Group, Barry University, Aruba Networks, Good Technology, Riverbed, Santa Clara University, Securities Exchange, Tri-State Generation and Transmission Association
Find out what your peers are saying about Cisco XDR vs. Vectra AI and other solutions. Updated: December 2025.
879,310 professionals have used our research since 2012.