Corelight vs Vectra AI comparison

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Corelight

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Executive SummaryUpdated on Nov 6, 2024

Vectra AI and Corelight are contenders in the network security solutions space. Vectra AI seems to have the upper hand due to its advanced AI-driven alert management capabilities.

Features: Vectra AI offers capabilities like advanced alert management that consolidates alerts into manageable incidents, captures network metadata at scale for enhanced context, and provides functionalities like Cognito Recall and Cognito Detect for improved visibility. Corelight integrates with Zeek for robust open-source traffic analysis, facilitates easy deployment, and enables detailed traffic insights.

Room for Improvement: Vectra AI needs improvements in integrating with external solutions and enhancing its user interface for better engagement. Users seek better logging and visibility on host-driven attacks. Corelight, despite its open-source strengths, requires additional feature development and ease of use improvements. Its complexity can overwhelm and complicate pricing.

Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: Vectra AI is mainly deployed on-premises with hybrid options, boasting strong technical support that enhances customer satisfaction. Corelight, also primarily on-premises, benefits from excellent technical support due to its smaller size, although its scalability might face challenges as demand grows.

Pricing and ROI: Vectra AI's high pricing reflects its comprehensive offerings, delivering a good ROI by reducing attack response time. However, it is less accessible for smaller budgets. In contrast, Corelight's pricing is more affordable and open-source, appealing to technically adept users, though additional investments may be required to maximize its value.

To learn more, read our detailed Corelight vs. Vectra AI Report (Updated: July 2025).

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Corelight vs. Vectra AI

July 2025

Helped 867,497 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

Corelight

Ranking in Network Detection and Response (NDR)

13th

Average Rating

9.0

Reviews Sentiment

7.6

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

Network Traffic Analysis (NTA) (6th)

Vectra AI

Ranking in Network Detection and Response (NDR)

2nd

Average Rating

8.6

Reviews Sentiment

7.1

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

Intrusion Detection and Prevention Software (IDPS) (5th), Extended Detection and Response (XDR) (18th), Identity Threat Detection and Response (ITDR) (10th), AI-Powered Cybersecurity Platforms (6th)

Mindshare comparison

As of September 2025, in the Network Detection and Response (NDR) category, the mindshare of Corelight is 4.4%, down from 5.4% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Vectra AI is 15.6%, down from 17.4% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.

Network Detection and Response (NDR) Market Share Distribution
Product	Market Share (%)
Vectra AI	15.6%
Corelight	4.4%
Other	80.0%

Network Detection and Response (NDR)

Q&A Highlights

Mazin Al-Shuaili

Head Of Retail Operations at a financial services firm with 201-500 employees

Jun 09, 2020

What is the biggest difference between Corelight and Vectra AI?

Corelight is a Zeek based solution for network behavior analysis and Vectra AI is a User Behavior based solution. If you are comparing these 2 systems you are comparing apples to oranges. You shouldn't be evaluating these products against each other as they address different use cases for your network. My guess is you are either looking for better network visibility and possibly network detection or you need to understand insider threats (User Behavior). If you need both then you need both tools.

An expensive solution to monitor internet traffic with multiple dashboards

Featured Reviews

HamadaElewa

Technical Sales Manager at Spire Solutions

The huge library especially the open source link, makes it the main engine for Corelight with some enhancements in the commercial version. It has a very powerful level, such as signature-based attacks or behavioral attacks, with enhancements in the design. It is very flexible for intelligent implementations like IPs, especially between big companies and banks. Corelight is easy to understand and monitor what is going on behind the team. The solution is already integrated with other systems like Suricata, Elastic, and Microsoft tools. It's very easy to integrate signature-based or behavior-based engines. You can use Elastic for the dashboards to get it from Corelight, along with all the benefits and expandability.

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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.

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

"The most valuable feature is the embedded IDS from Suricata."

"It is easy to deploy and easy to handle."

"It's an easy way for us to get visibility in a client's environment."

"It's easy to create additional dashboards specific to supporting specific tasks."

"Corelight is easy to use."

"What I like best about Vectra AI is that it alerts you about suspicious activities."

"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."

"Using this tool for automation has provided more benefits to our processes."

"The UI is easy to use and when we send detection to everybody, they easily understand what we are asking at the time."

"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."

"The most useful feature is the anomaly detection because it's not signature-based. It picks up the initial part of any attack, like the recon and those aspects of the kill chain, very well."

"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."

"The core product provides excellent visibility, but my favorite feature is Vectra Recall."

More Vectra AI pros

Cons

"They can enhance the interface of the product. They can make it more interactive and also easier to use for feature access."

"In the next release, building a graphical user interface would be helpful."

"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."

"One of the things that we are missing a bit is the capability to add our own rules to it. At the moment, the tech engine does its thing, but we have some cool ideas to make additional rules. There should be an option in the platform to add custom rules, or there should be some kind of user group where we can suggest them for the roadmap and see if they get evaluated and get transparent communication on whether they will be implemented in the product or not."

"One of the things I am not so happy about when it comes to Vectra is the scoring board."

"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."

"The main improvement I can see would be to integrate with more external solutions."

"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."

"ExtraHop has better features that seem more advantageous when compared to Vectra."

"I would like more integrations with IOCs and threats currently on the Internet. I would also like to know which threats are based on zero-day attacks, current botnets, etc. Therefore, I would like more information on external threats."

"We have had a few issues with the integration of Vectra AI with EDR. Some filters have not been working. We've also had issues with the brain not being powerful enough."

More Vectra AI cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

"It's a yearly fee and depends on what you are looking for."

"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 licensing is on an annual basis."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"Vectra AI is not a cheap solution."

"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."

"My company pays for the Vectra AI licensing fee yearly. I know the figure because my company recently renewed the license, and it's okay, at least for the financial sector."

More Vectra AI pricing and cost advice

See which vendors are best for you

Use our free recommendation engine to learn which Network Detection and Response (NDR) solutions are best for your needs.

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Answers from the Community

Mazin Al-Shuaili

Head Of Retail Operations at a financial services firm with 201-500 employees

Jun 9, 2020

What is the biggest difference between Corelight and Vectra AI?

2 out of 5 answers

JJennifer Geisler

Chief Marketing Officer at Vectra

Feb 13, 2020

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 data lake. You then rely on an open-source community for things like detections. Vectra not only does that – but also enriches the underlying data. It is also delivered as an investigative workbench that includes out-of-box detections that highlight and prioritize attacker behaviors and campaigns. Perhaps just as importantly, Corelight has few integrations whereas Vectra natively integrates with parts of infrastructure like EDR, orchestration and network security products.

Read full answer

OseremeOsobase

Director at Baverianvine

Feb 13, 2020

I would recommend you look at Darktrace instead. Extrahop and the new kid on the block, Awake security are also recommended.

Read full answer

See all 5 answers

Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Financial Services Firm

14%

Government

12%

Computer Software Company

11%

Manufacturing Company

Financial Services Firm

12%

Computer Software Company

11%

Manufacturing Company

Government

Company Size

By reviewers

Large Enterprise

Midsize Enterprise

Small Business

No data available

By reviewers
Company Size	Count
Small Business	8
Midsize Enterprise	10
Large Enterprise	27

Questions from the Community

What is the biggest difference between Corelight and Vectra AI?

What do you like most about Corelight?

It's easy to create additional dashboards specific to supporting specific tasks.

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Corelight?

The solution is too expensive compared to others. If you have the technical knowledge, it's good. Corelight is a very big gap between you and others if you’re new.

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.

What needs improvement with Vectra AI?

There are several features found in ExtraHop that are not present in Vectra AI. These include the ability to view graphs of endpoints contacting other endpoints and the bandwidth utilization in the...

ExtraHop Reveal(x) vs Corelight

Comparisons

Darktrace vs Corelight

Compared 25% of the time

Compared 22% of the time

Cisco Secure Network Analytics vs Corelight

Compared 6% of the time

ExtraHop Reveal(x) 360 vs Corelight

Compared 6% of the time

NetWitness NDR vs Corelight

Compared 5% of the time

More Corelight Competitors

Darktrace vs Vectra AI

Compared 29% of the time

ExtraHop Reveal(x) vs Vectra AI

Compared 11% of the time

Cisco Secure Network Analytics vs Vectra AI

Compared 5% of the time

Arista NDR vs Vectra AI

Compared 5% of the time

Fortinet FortiNDR vs Vectra AI

Compared 4% of the time

More Vectra AI Competitors

Product Reports

Network Detection and Response (NDR)

August 2025

Download Corelight product report

Download Vectra AI product report

August 2025

Also Known As

No data available

Vectra Networks, Vectra AI NDR

Overview

Corelight is the most powerful network visibility solution for information security professionals. We provide real-time data that organizations use to understand, detect, and prevent cyber attacks. Our solution is built on Zeek, the powerful and widely-used open source monitoring framework.

Corelight

Vectra AI enhances security operations by pinpointing attack locations, correlating alerts, and providing in-depth visibility across attack lifecycles, ultimately prioritizing threats and improving incident responses.

Vectra AI integrates AI and machine learning to detect anomalies early and supports proactive threat response. Its features like risk scoring, alert correlation, and streamlined SOC efficiency are supplemented by integration with tools like Office 365. Users highlight integration, reporting, and customization challenges, alongside limitations in syslog data and false positive management. They seek enhancements in visualization, UI, TCP replay, endpoint visibility, and tool orchestration, with requests for improved documentation, licensing, and cloud processing innovation.

What are the key features of Vectra AI?

Attack Location Identification: Pinpoints specific locations of security breaches.
Alert Correlation: Combines multiple alerts into a single incident for efficiency.
Visibility Across Attack Lifecycle: Offers detailed insight through different attack stages.
Risk Scoring: Aggregates risk scores to prioritize imminent threats.
AI and Machine Learning: Detects anomalies early to aid in proactive threat response.
Integration with Office 365: Seamlessly consolidates data for enriched investigations.

What benefits should users look for?

Enhanced SOC Efficiency: Reduces alert fatigue and improves operational efficiency.
Threat Prioritization: Focuses on the most critical threats with risk scoring.
Proactive Threat Response: Early anomaly detection aids in swift response.
Operational Overhead Reduction: Seamless integration minimizes extra workload.
Compliance and Policy Support: Assists in adhering to policies and regulations.

In industries like finance, healthcare, and critical infrastructure, Vectra AI is crucial for threat detection and network monitoring. Entities use it for identifying anomalous behaviors and enhancing cybersecurity by responding to network activities and analyzing traffic for potential breaches. It operates on-premises and in hybrid cloud settings, enabling threat detection without endpoint agents and supporting compliance and policy enforcement.

Sample Customers

Education First

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