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Corelight Open NDR vs Darktrace comparison

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Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Jun 3, 2026

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

Cortex XDR by Palo Alto Net...
Sponsored
Average Rating
8.4
Reviews Sentiment
6.7
Number of Reviews
118
Ranking in other categories
Endpoint Protection Platform (EPP) (4th), Endpoint Detection and Response (EDR) (5th), Extended Detection and Response (XDR) (4th), Ransomware Protection (2nd), AI-Powered Cybersecurity Platforms (1st)
Corelight Open NDR
Average Rating
8.8
Reviews Sentiment
7.6
Number of Reviews
7
Ranking in other categories
Network Traffic Analysis (NTA) (4th), Network Detection and Response (NDR) (7th)
Darktrace
Average Rating
8.2
Reviews Sentiment
7.1
Number of Reviews
84
Ranking in other categories
Email Security (10th), Intrusion Detection and Prevention Software (IDPS) (2nd), Network Traffic Analysis (NTA) (1st), Network Detection and Response (NDR) (1st), Extended Detection and Response (XDR) (6th), Cloud Security Posture Management (CSPM) (11th), Cloud-Native Application Protection Platforms (CNAPP) (10th), Attack Surface Management (ASM) (4th), AI-Powered Cybersecurity Platforms (4th), AI Observability (7th)
 

Featured Reviews

ABHISHEK_SINGH - PeerSpot reviewer
Senior Process Expert at A.P. Moller - Maersk
Gained full visibility and streamlined threat detection through behavior-based insights and AI integration
Initially, we got to have a lot of false positives when we onboarded, but nowadays it's quite smooth. We have fine-tuned our security policies and allowed different levels of policies to get rid of those false positives. Currently, we are getting a fairly good amount of incidents that are not false positives or benign, but actionable items. The process is streamlined. In the initial days, the operations used to get involved in a lot of benign and other activities, but now the process is streamlined. We are leveraging the auto-detection and remediation plans. The operations teams are now more involved in other business roles as well, not just looking into the logs and fetching out what's happening there. They have fixed a lot of things. Initially, they didn't have IAC code drift detection, cloud posture management, or security posture management, but they have those now. They purchased different vendors and did a merger with that. They have now Prisma Cloud that gets integrated and now they are working with Cortex Cloud. Everything that was negative has now been addressed, and the product altogether looks to be in a very better and mature shape now. Currently, it's more or less detecting the workloads with AI-based best practices. Since most organizations are consuming AI agents and other things, we are looking forward to seeing what other feature enhancements Palo Alto can support in that.
reviewer2834367 - PeerSpot reviewer
Growth And Strategy Lead at a computer software company with 51-200 employees
Network visibility has transformed how we detect nation state threats and protect critical industry
Before Corelight recently started pushing some of the agentic features, querying at times could be a little difficult, depending on your mastery of log scale. However, I think with a lot of the artificial intelligence that they are building in, it is getting a lot easier to query in the platform. I would definitely encourage them to continue down that path where anybody can hop into the platform and start running queries, whether it is a simple instruction like I want this, and an artificial intelligence process can actually build the query and do it. I think that would be super powerful. Cyber skill sets are in high demand, and there is a huge backlog in cyber talent. We cannot fill all the positions we need. The easier we can make these cyber systems for people to pick up and be effective on, I think is really key. Explainability of data is hyper important. In the past few artificial intelligence related updates we have gotten from Corelight, that has been one of the first questions our team has asked every time or that I have asked: show me what the model is doing, show me how it came to this analysis. Within Investigator platform, they are able to walk through and see exactly what data the artificial intelligence pulled from where and why it did what it did as far as making its suggestions. They have definitely built their system with artificial intelligence in mind up front, and having that openness as one of the key features of any of their artificial intelligence and machine learning processes in the platform is important. The issue with black boxes is obviously hallucinations from artificial intelligence and just not being able to trace to ground truth. When we are talking about these cyber incidents and being able to do forensics, you need to be able to pinpoint and tie everything together, and black boxes really obscure that and prevent you from doing so. Corelight has done a really good job of making sure that everything is explainable and everything is mapped when it comes to leveraging any of their artificial intelligence features.
Pasan Jayarathna - PeerSpot reviewer
Network Security Engineer at Cyberwell Solution
Monitoring has improved data loss detection and now spots abnormal internal file transfers quickly
In my understanding, the best feature Darktrace offers is the identification of copying files, which acts as a DLP, and it is a main concern for companies because users sometimes copy data outside without knowing, especially those without a technical background. When I mention the DLP-like feature and file copying detection, the alerts have been very timely, as we get an alert within a couple of minutes, which is excellent. Even if some developers are working after hours and copying files, our SOC team detects this, and most of the time they call us so we can identify the users. The alerts are quite accurate and proactive.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"The product has an intuitive dashboard."
"Their XDR agent and their behavioral indicators of compromise (BIOC) are pretty nice. Their managed threat hunting is also pretty nice. They also have WildFire, which is a service for actively looking for malware. It's quite useful."
"The information the dashboard provides is very clear."
"Cortex XDR is a simple platform that's easy for administrators and users. You have a lot of flexibility to change or customize the features."
"From the Palo Alto side, whatever they buy, they integrate that really well into their integration suite, and that makes a massive difference."
"Stability-wise, it is good; I did not hear about any issues in terms of stability, and Cortex XDR by Palo Alto Networks can be trusted completely."
"It has a higher cost than other solutions, like CrowdStrike or Microsoft’s EDR tools, but it reduces the cost of our operations because it’s a new generation antivirus tool."
"After installing this solution, it identified, blocked, and provided the complete attack chain, which was very helpful."
"Our company has seen massive improvements in cybersecurity position for our clients."
"Corelight makes much easier the remediation of cyber attacks; instead of facing a chaotic amount of logs, Corelight provides correlated metrics that allow pivoting to find, in seconds, all the data related to an alert, detection, or asset."
"The most valuable feature is the embedded IDS from Suricata."
"It's easy to create additional dashboards specific to supporting specific tasks."
"Corelight is easy to use."
"Technical support seems to be good."
"It is easy to deploy and easy to handle."
"Corelight Open NDR has had a positive impact on my company, providing visibility as the Suricata engine can scan huge volumes of traffic, including north-south and east-west, revealing signatures and exposures I was not expecting and enabling me to catch them with Suricata alerts."
"The main valuable feature is that we don't need a lot of analysts. With few analysts, we have all the network monitored, 24/7."
"The most valuable feature is the endpoint protection."
"Darktrace provides better visibility into network risks, allowing you to take preemptive action against risky user behavior."
"Implementing this solution has given us confidence that we are secure."
"The ability to see what we have not seen before is most valuable. It is very interesting to find out the most vulnerable devices in our network."
"I have found the most valuable features to be artificial intelligence for cybersecurity, advanced machine learning capabilities, enterprise Immune System, Antigena Network, and Antigena Email. The way the solution detects the threat over the network before it spreads is very good. It notifies you of what the threat is exactly doing and gives you all the details about the execution of that application that had created the threat over your network."
"The Antigena feature is most valuable. Once it learns your environment, Antigena can step in and block a denial of service attack, a ransomware attack, or just about anything that doesn't belong in the environment. It can detect any type of attack that hits the environment because it understands what normal looks like for the network. It is very useful for an autonomous response."
"Darktrace played an important role in the security detection strategy by reducing the time lost in detecting, analyzing, and incident resolving."
 

Cons

"In terms of areas of improvement, we have not completed our review of the product. We're also looking at other products. So, it's a little bit hard to tell what could be different because we have not completed the review of this product, but based on our experience so far, its implementation is quite complex."
"The product's pricing could be better."
"The encryption is not up to the mark."
"They have the worst support, as a company, that I have ever worked with, as they are difficult to get a hold of and keep on the phone. They don't know what they are talking about when you get them on the phone. They don't like to respond to messages when you send them to them. They like to "research problems" for weeks on end, then pass you off to somebody else."
"Cortex XDR should have a lightweight agent, and the agent size should not be heavy."
"There are some false positives."
"It would be good if they could make an exception for applications. Sometimes, it can be a bit of a challenge to make exceptions for certain applications that have been used as rogue."
"For working with the solution, you only really need a web browser, however, we've found that working on Chrome, for example, is horrible."
"Before Corelight recently started pushing some of the agentic features, querying at times could be a little difficult, depending on your mastery of log scale."
"In the next release, building a graphical user interface would be helpful."
"They can enhance the interface of the product. They can make it more interactive and also easier to use for feature access."
"Machine learning could be a good improvement, but it's very costly."
"Corelight hasn’t added features in a long time."
"The solution’s architecture is complex and difficult to understand. There are multiple machines and VMs."
"It's an expensive solution and the price could be reduced."
"The solution could have better integration capabilities."
"This product needs more in terms of prevention. The detection capabilities work well but once a threat has been detected, Darktrace should work to prevent it from doing anything malicious."
"Darktrace needs significant improvement in its notification capabilities."
"The Darktrace Mobile app needs improvement as it's currently limited in functionality, and the learning AI takes a while to adapt to new devices, flagging new users as threats for up to a month before recognizing them as regular network users."
"This product needs more in terms of prevention."
"It could build in integrations for some complementary products, but it has an assistant plugin so this is not really a big deal."
"In the next version, I'd like to see penetration testing."
"This is quite an expensive product so the pricing is something that can be improved."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"It has a higher cost than other solutions, like CrowdStrike or Microsoft’s EDR tools, but it reduces the cost of our operations because it’s a new generation antivirus tool."
"When we first bought it, it was a bit expensive, but it was worth it. The licensing was straightforward."
"Every customer has to pay for a license because it doesn't work with what you get from a managed services provider."
"The solution has one subscription for endpoint protection and one subscription for detection and response. The two licenses combined give you the BRO version."
"I don't like that they have different types of licenses."
"The pricing seems fair, and I do like the licensing model. You use wherever they are, and it is elastic."
"It's the most expensive solution, but features-wise, it's quite strong. It's very good for protection, so the results are very good in the case of protection. I would rate it a two out of ten in terms of pricing."
"This is an expensive solution."
"It's a yearly fee and depends on what you are looking for."
"The solution is about $6,000 per quarter."
"All of the other modules, such as the licensing modules, are on par. It's one for one."
"The cost of the solution can be reduced to make it more appealing to customers."
"We had an issue with pricing initially and had to cancel some of the features of the projects to fit the budget. I would like to see pricing that is not broken up into parts so that we can buy the whole package once. Darktrace is more expensive than an average solution, but it's functionality won't match that of an average solution."
"The price of the solution is not cheap. It is not a one-time purchase, there is a subscription that needs to be paid every one to five years depending on your choice. It is expensive but you can reduce the price by only using the services that you want."
"I am using a demo of Darktrace for deployment and testing which is free."
"They are too expensive compared with other vendors."
"If you consider the features and the cost of market leaders, we are satisfied with the pricing."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Outsourcing Company
12%
Comms Service Provider
12%
Construction Company
11%
Financial Services Firm
9%
Financial Services Firm
11%
Government
10%
Real Estate/Law Firm
8%
Computer Software Company
7%
Manufacturing Company
10%
Financial Services Firm
9%
Comms Service Provider
8%
Computer Software Company
7%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business47
Midsize Enterprise21
Large Enterprise55
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business4
Midsize Enterprise2
Large Enterprise1
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business44
Midsize Enterprise20
Large Enterprise29
 

Questions from the Community

Cortex XDR by Palo Alto vs. Sentinel One
Cortex XDR by Palo Alto vs. SentinelOne SentinelOne offers very detailed specifics with regard to risks or attacks. ...
Comparing CrowdStrike Falcon to Cortex XDR (Palo Alto)
Cortex XDR by Palo Alto vs. CrowdStrike Falcon Both Cortex XDR and Crowd Strike Falcon offer cloud-based solutions th...
How is Cortex XDR compared with Microsoft Defender?
Microsoft Defender for Endpoint is a cloud-delivered endpoint security solution. The tool reduces the attack surface,...
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Corelight?
I have a fortunate experience with pricing, setup costs, and licensing of Corelight Open NDR, as being a principal ar...
What needs improvement with Corelight?
Corelight Open NDR does not need any improvements or additional features in the next releases. The product is excelle...
What is your primary use case for Corelight?
I have been using Corelight Open NDR solution for approximately three years. I leverage the Suricata engine heavily f...
How does Crowdstrike Falcon compare with Darktrace?
Both of these products perform similarly and have many outstanding attributes. CrowdStrike Falcon offers an amazing u...
Which is better - SentinelOne or Darktrace?
Which solution is better depends on which is more suitable specifically for your company. Darktrace, for example, is ...
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Darktrace?
Concerning pricing for the product, I would say it is somewhat expensive.
 

Also Known As

Cyvera, Cortex XDR, Palo Alto Networks Traps
Corelight Open NDR
No data available
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

CBI Health Group, University Honda, VakifBank
CarrefourEdnonGrand Canyon EducationSektorCERTTietoevryVolkswagen Financial Services
Irwin Mitchell, Open Energi, Wellcome Trust, FirstGroup plc, Virgin Trains, Drax, QUI! Group, DNK, CreaCard, Macrosynergy, Sisley, William Hill plc, Toyota Canada, Royal British Legion, Vitol, Allianz, KKR, AIRBUS, dpd, Billabong, Mclaren Group.
Find out what your peers are saying about Corelight Open NDR vs. Darktrace and other solutions. Updated: September 2026.
913,806 professionals have used our research since 2012.