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Darktrace Logo
49,506 views|31,006 comparisons
Vectra AI Logo
14,761 views|7,255 comparisons
Comparison Buyer's Guide
Executive Summary
Updated on Jul 13, 2022

We performed a comparison between Darktrace vs Vectra AI based on our users’ reviews in five categories. After reading all of the collected data, you can find our conclusion below.

  • Ease of Deployment: Users of both solutions say the deployment is straightforward and simple.
  • Features: Users of both solutions are happy with the products’ stability and scalability.

    Darktrace users like the solution’s AI feature and that it is easy to use and has a great interface. They would like to see some endpoint protection for remote workers and more accurate alerts.

    Vectra AI users like the solution’s Cognito Detect feature and its administrative privilege detection feature. Users mention that integration with other security components needs improvement and that they would also like to have granular reports.
  • Pricing: Darktrace users consider the solution to be expensive. Some users of Vectra AI say the price is competitive while others feel it is costly.
  • Service and Support: Users of both solutions find the technical support to be good.
  • ROI: Darktrace users do not mention an ROI. In contrast, users of Vectra AI are very satisfied with the ROI, mentioning that the solution saves time and increases efficiency.

Comparison Results: Vectra AI seems to be the more favorable solution because of the ROI it yields.

To learn more, read our detailed Darktrace vs. Vectra AI Report (Updated: March 2023).
687,256 professionals have used our research since 2012.
Q&A Highlights
Question: I'm building a next-gen AI powered threat intelligence platform. What's missing from existing solutions?
Answer: I that feel there are two old problems still there in the market: 1-Vendors don't talk to each other. 2-Whoever is focusing on endpoint is missing the network and human side and the opposite is also true. I love, for example, what Darktrace is doing in the network side and the playback option to know what happened in my network during a long holiday, for example, things will never be caught by a second-generation AV but I need to have a solid 2nd gen. AV besides the total high cost of Darktrace which by the way is worth it for IT pros but not for business owners. We need to have something like virus total but for risks and threats beyond viruses where all vendors work on this and all endpoint customers with different vendors connect to it to be secured.
Featured Review
Quotes From Members
We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use.
Here are some excerpts of what they said:
Pros
"We liked their approach to identifying intrusions or network anomalies using AI.""The ability to detect activity on the network is very useful to us. Even if it's not necessarily an illegal activity, if it is abnormal activity, it is able to detect it and notify us.""It's a very stable product.""Darktrace is very useful for us because it has a large number of models for detecting threats.""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.""The initial setup is simple.""It is autonomous. So, it learns. It uses algorithms and AI to learn the common behavioral patterns on the network, and it is able to identify threats based on abnormal patterns.""The platform has many modules, and each module examines a different situation in the behavior."

More Darktrace Pros →

"Vectra AI helped our team be more productive and save time. We have less work thanks to it.""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.""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.""It keeps up with the network traffic, which is a good thing. It provides more context to plain alerts compared to using an older system. So, it helps an analyst reduce the information overload.""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.""Vectra AI is the best. It is a major product in our cybersecurity.""It does a reliable job of parsing out the logs of all the network traffic so that we can ingest them into our SIEM and utilize them for threat hunting and case investigations. It is pretty robust and reliable. The administration time that we spend maintaining it or troubleshooting it is very low. So, the labor hour overhead is probably our largest benefit from it. We spend 99% of our time in Vectra investigating cases, responding to incidents, or hunting, and only around 1% of our time is spent patching, troubleshooting, or doing anything else. That's our largest benefit from Vectra.""One of the core features is that Vectra AI triages threats and correlates them with compromised host devices. From a visibility perspective, we can better track the threat across the network. Instead of us potentially finding one device that has been impacted without Vectra AI, it will give us the visibility of everywhere that threat went. Therefore, visibility has increased for us."

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Cons
"The price point for the product was too high for what our possible use case could be.""I would like to see some additional enhancements.""Darktrace requires numerous configurations. It would be beneficial if the configuration could be made simpler.""The module can improve so that every time it's more intelligent.""In an upcoming release, there could be more customizable playbooks or a library of playbooks to choose from.""The interface is too mathematical and it should be simplified.""The level of tracking within the network from the transmission level up to the machine level can use improvement.""The cost is a bit on the higher side."

More Darktrace Cons →

"For S&D account scans, it would be easier if Vectra AI could triage with users. If a client uses a lot of accounts, then it could indicate that these accounts are benign, for example. That would help a lot.""The rules for threats are not always precise and Vectra AI should improve this.""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.""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.""Integration with other security components needs improvement. It should have true integration as opposed to just being a separate pane of glass.""In education as a sector, we are looking at AI a lot in terms of how it can be used as part of the teaching and learning side of things. It would be great to have Vectra AI look at a better way to enhance the security posture related to the AI tools in our portfolio.""The UI/UX and detection could be improved. More detections of specific security events could be useful. We've had a few incidents that were not detected by Vectra. The teams are working on it right now, but more detection is always better.""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
  • "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."
  • "It was $3,600 a month or $2,000 plus or so. I am not sure. Its licensing is pretty simple."
  • "It's an expensive solution."
  • "It is pretty expensive, but it is worth it. Its licensing is yearly."
  • "The cost of the solution is expensive for smaller businesses. They will not be able to afford it or might not need this type of security solution."
  • "If you consider the features and the cost of market leaders, we are satisfied with the pricing."
  • "All of the other modules, such as the licensing modules, are on par. It's one for one."
  • "The pricing is expensive. It costs over $100,000 a year."
  • More Darktrace Pricing and Cost Advice →

  • "Their licensing model is antiquated. I'm not a fan of their licensing model. We have to pay for licensing based on four different things. You have to pay based on the number of unique IPs, the number of logs that we send through Recall and Stream, and the size of our environment. They need to simplify their licensing down to just one thing. It should be based on the amount of data, the number of devices, or something else, but there should be just one thing for everything. That's what they need to base their licensing on. Cost-wise, they're not cheap. They were definitely the most expensive option, but you get what you pay for. They're not the cheapest option."
  • "From a pricing perspective, they are very commercially competitive. From a licensing perspective, just be conscious that some of their future cloud solutions come with additional subscriptions. Also, if you're outside of the US, you will get charged freight for the device back to your country."
  • "Cost is a big factor, as always. However, I think we have a very good price–performance ratio."
  • "Vectra's licensing model could scale to our research network, which has multiple, 100-gigabit links."
  • "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."
  • "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."
  • "Vectra AI is not a cheap solution."
  • "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."
  • More Vectra AI Pricing and Cost Advice →

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    Answers from the Community
    Cara Wolf
    C.J. Oosthuizen - PeerSpot reviewerC.J. Oosthuizen
    Real User

    CylancePROTECT is AI-powered endpoint protection that will scan your endpoint devices with AI and Machine Learning security. It does not work with traditional signature-based protection and will cover your endpoints against the latest malware and event Potential Unwanted Programs. We are also a Darktrace partner and if interested we can demo both Cyber Security solutions to your company. If you are interested in more information about CylancePROTECT and Darktrace and would like to run a free POC, please contact me at cj@groveis.com.

    reviewer973458 - PeerSpot reviewerreviewer973458 (CEO & Founder at a tech services company with 1-10 employees)
    Real User

    Raffael Marty, Vice President, Forcepoint Research and Intelligence, said: "There is no artificial intelligence in the field of information security, and it is unlikely to be developed in 2019." Most of unsupervised machine learning-based network anomaly detection solution does not provide why the anomaly has been aroused and whether the anomaly is malicious or not. Most of such solution's pricing model is based on number of endpoints but I prefer to have flat fee subscription-based.

    Jürgen Weiss - PeerSpot reviewerJürgen Weiss
    User

    The most important thing to get traction is your business approach and some kind of openness for 3rd parties. NOBODY needs "fancy Dashboards"!

    Most of the known vendors like Darktrace is extremely "sales offensive" and they don't have a clear sales strategy (direct or channel). A free POV (30days) is a common approach to attract new customers, but the outcome is not really important. It says nothing about the PAINS on the customer site.

    Know your competitors!!!! There are many AI CyberSec Startups and Technologies - 99% are using "Machine Learning" what needs more time to the realtime reaction in critical phases. Preferred is Deep Learning like DeepInstinct offers.

    Pricing Model per IP´s is pretty usual - but you need flexibility.

    Cara Wolf - PeerSpot reviewerCara Wolf
    User

    Thank you I’m not really interested in being sold to. I’m asking about what works, what doesn’t and pricing models. I don’t want any demos.

    Cara Wolf - PeerSpot reviewerCara Wolf
    User

    Thank you for your comments...what if the malware does not present as anomalous?

    MarkBarrett - PeerSpot reviewerMarkBarrett
    User

    We are an Endpoint focused firm represented a Pyramid of EP based protection services (email & web filter, coupled with EP protection, cyber insurance and dark web monitoring). Our key AI product offering is Cylance, world class in it's ability to protect you where over 95% of all hacks occur, the End Point. Cylance is typically sold as a manged service due to some of the complexities of tailoring the product to fit your business needs. Typically the service is price per EP, per month.

    Cara Wolf - PeerSpot reviewerCara Wolf
    User

    Thank you, I am familiar with Darktrace and really like the product. I'd like to know your thoughts on additional features and pricing preferences.

    Gerald Ostrofsky - PeerSpot reviewerGerald Ostrofsky
    MSP

    In my opinion, the best response always comes from the source. I have many contacts at Darktrace that can precisely answer these and other questions. Please let me know if you would like me to arrange for a scheduled call.

    Questions from the Community
    Top Answer:Both of these products perform similarly and have many outstanding attributes. CrowdStrike Falcon offers an amazing user interface that makes setup easy and seamless. CrowdStrike Falcon offers a… more »
    Top Answer:Which solution is better depends on which is more suitable specifically for your company. Darktrace, for example, is meant for smaller to medium-sized businesses. It is also a good option for… more »
    Top Answer:I have found the automation and AI features to be valuable. If someone were to come in to the office at midnight and log in, Darktrace would flag it.
    Top Answer: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… more »
    Top Answer:What I like best about Vectra AI is that it alerts you about suspicious activities.
    Top Answer: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.
    Ranking
    Views
    49,506
    Comparisons
    31,006
    Reviews
    31
    Average Words per Review
    428
    Rating
    8.5
    Views
    14,761
    Comparisons
    7,255
    Reviews
    7
    Average Words per Review
    1,852
    Rating
    9.1
    Comparisons
    Also Known As
    Vectra Networks, Vectra AI NDR
    Learn More
    Overview

    Darktrace is a world leader in Autonomous Cyber AI and offers several different desirable tools available to provide a wide array of outstanding support and superior threat security. Darktrace works with many different popular solutions, such as Microsoft 365, Azure, AWS, and many more.

    Darktrace offers many different products to keep every type of business enterprise safe.

    Darktrace’s Enterprise Immune System is uniquely designed to learn the status quo of your operating system and is thereby quickly able to discover any anomalies, abusive behavior, and potential cyber threats and stop them immediately before there is any threat to your organization. With Darktrace’s Enterprise Immune System, you have complete transparency across your entire operational system. Darktrace utilizes intuitive self-learning to discover potential new known attacks externally and also locate any internal threats. Darktrace is intuitively self-adapting and will quickly learn the best way to keep your critical systems safe at all times, even as your business changes and grows.

    Darktrace offers an Industrial Immune System, which is specifically designed to understand the unique technologies of industrial systems and aggressively protect the integrity and durability of those ecosystems. You will get full transparency of OT, IT, and industrial IoT.

    Darktrace Antigena combines the best of the Autonomous Response technology to keep your enterprise ecosystems safe at all times. Darktrace Antigena has the decision-making ability to easily identify suspicious behavior and can stop in-progress threats such as cyber-attacks, ransomware, and threats to your cloud or proprietary infrastructure. Darktrace Antigena will provide protection to keep your systems safe and avoid any downtime or negative impact on your organization's productivity.

    Darktrace Cyber AI Analyst works as an investigative solution that instantly rates, interprets, and reports on the entire range of potential security threats. Darktrace Cyber AI Analyst uses an intuitive analysis process to investigate 100% of all potential threats. Each and every threat is rated and a response plan is created to direct your teams on the best possible course of action needed to immediately resolve the issue. Darktrace AI Analyst also handles Zero-day malware and ransomware. The automated threat investigation can work faster to develop a plan, follow issues, and investigate than any human component. Darktrace AI will save time and money by adding an additional supplemental layer of security to your organization.

    Darktrace provides outstanding enterprise-wide cyber defense to more than 5,500 organizations worldwide that rely on Darktrace daily to keep their business ecosystems running at maximum efficiency and productivity without any unplanned downtime within the overall business operation. Darktrace has a super-fast, machine-speed defense supported by the unique Autonomous Response that can take some of the pressure off of your security team and at the same time mount an aggressive fightback continuing to develop a safer defense every day.

    Reviews from Real Users

    Imad A., Group IT Manager at a manufacturing company, says, “"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."

    A Security Engineer at a real estate/law firm states, "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."







    Vectra threat detection and response is a complete cybersecurity platform that collects, detects, and prioritizes security alerts. The Cognito platform for Network Detection and Response (NDR) detects and responds to attacks inside cloud, data center, Internet of Things, and enterprise networks. The platform also provides automated response capabilities for low-level threats and escalates more severe anomalies to security personnel.

    Cognito captures data for multiple relevant sources and enriches it with context and security insights. It starts by deploying sensors across different networks in datacenters, IoT, or enterprise networks. The algorithm extracts relevant metadata from network and cloud traffic. The information can also be non-security information that can help investigation. 

    The data is enriched with security context to support critical use cases, such as threat detection, investigation, hunting and compliance. The platform is machine learning-based, which enables it to adapt to any new and current threat scenario. It detects, clusters, prioritizes, and anticipates attacks by using identity and host-level enforcement. 

    With the Vectra platform, a person can investigate 50 threats in just two hours. By prioritizing alerts and leveraging threat intelligence, it provides faster results.Vectra solves today’s security challenges for network detection and response. 

    One of Vectra’s best features is the emphasis they put in pairing research and data science for security insights. It offers behavior codification with unsupervised, supervised, and deep learning models. 

    The pricing is according to a subscription model with a free trial available.Vectra is available for Office 365, Azure AD and AWS Brain.

    Features of Vectra AI

    • AI-based threat detection and response. 
    • Detects attacks in real time with behavior-based threat detection. 
    • Consolidates and correlates thousands of events, detecting threats. 
    • Enriches threat investigation with a chain of evidence and data science security insights. 
    • Machine learning techniques, including deep learning and neural networks. 
    • Gives visibility into cyberattackers and analyzes all network traffic. 
    • Continuous updates with new threat detection algorithms. 
    • Provides encryption at rest and in transit. For the AWS version, it offers AES-256 encryption via AWS Key Management Service. 
    • Guaranteed availability according to the SLA of the service selected. 
    • Does not connect to public sector networks. 

    Benefits of Vectra AI

    • Behavioral models use AI to find unknown attackers. 
    • Context increases the accuracy of threat hunting. 
    • Allows for proactive action by prioritizing the most relevant information. 
    • Provides a clear picture and extensive context for investigations. 
    • Aids decision-making in the incident response process. 
    • Helps working with large datasets by capturing metadata at scale. 
    • Automates time-consuming analysis. 
    • Reduces the security analysts’ workloads on threat investigations. 

    Other advantages of Vectra services include that they can be deployed in the public, private, or hybrid cloud. Support is available via email or online ticketing with an average of 4 hours of response. Phone support is available 24/7. 

    Vectra provides full on-site and online training and documentation. Regarding the user interface, it supports several types of web browsers, such as Internet Explorer, Microsoft Edge, Firefox, Chrome, Safari and Opera. However, it is not available for mobile devices.

    Reviews from Real Users

    Here’s what PeerSpot users of Vectra AI have to say about it:

    "One of the core features is that Vectra AI triages threats and correlates them with compromised host devices. From a visibility perspective, we can better track the threat across the network. Instead of us potentially finding one device that has been impacted without Vectra AI, it will give us the visibility of everywhere that threat went. Therefore, visibility has increased for us." - Dave W., Operations Manager at a healthcare company

    "It does a reliable job of parsing out the logs of all the network traffic so that we can ingest them into our SIEM and utilize them for threat hunting and case investigations. It is pretty robust and reliable. The administration time that we spend maintaining it or troubleshooting it is very low.” - T.S., Senior Security Engineer at a manufacturing company

    Offer
    Learn more about Darktrace
    Learn more about Vectra AI
    Sample Customers
    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
    Tribune Media Group, Barry University, Aruba Networks, Good Technology, Riverbed, Santa Clara University, Securities Exchange, Tri-State Generation and Transmission Association
    Top Industries
    REVIEWERS
    Financial Services Firm17%
    Computer Software Company15%
    Healthcare Company7%
    Government5%
    VISITORS READING REVIEWS
    Computer Software Company17%
    Comms Service Provider11%
    Government7%
    Financial Services Firm7%
    REVIEWERS
    Financial Services Firm19%
    Manufacturing Company13%
    University13%
    Mining And Metals Company10%
    VISITORS READING REVIEWS
    Computer Software Company20%
    Comms Service Provider12%
    Financial Services Firm9%
    Government8%
    Company Size
    REVIEWERS
    Small Business49%
    Midsize Enterprise21%
    Large Enterprise30%
    VISITORS READING REVIEWS
    Small Business29%
    Midsize Enterprise19%
    Large Enterprise52%
    REVIEWERS
    Small Business9%
    Midsize Enterprise21%
    Large Enterprise71%
    VISITORS READING REVIEWS
    Small Business23%
    Midsize Enterprise14%
    Large Enterprise63%
    Buyer's Guide
    Darktrace vs. Vectra AI
    March 2023
    Find out what your peers are saying about Darktrace vs. Vectra AI and other solutions. Updated: March 2023.
    687,256 professionals have used our research since 2012.

    Darktrace is ranked 1st in Intrusion Detection and Prevention Software (IDPS) with 34 reviews while Vectra AI is ranked 5th in Intrusion Detection and Prevention Software (IDPS) with 22 reviews. Darktrace is rated 8.4, while Vectra AI is rated 8.6. The top reviewer of Darktrace writes "Advanced Cybersecurity Artificial Intelligence, plenty of features, and impressive threat detection". On the other hand, the top reviewer of Vectra AI writes "Gives us a greater level of confidence that we will be able to detect threats more quickly". Darktrace is most compared with CrowdStrike Falcon, SentinelOne Singularity Complete, Cisco Secure Network Analytics, Cortex XDR by Palo Alto Networks and ExtraHop Reveal(x), whereas Vectra AI is most compared with ExtraHop Reveal(x), Cisco Secure Network Analytics, Corelight, Arista NDR and Rapid7 InsightIDR. See our Darktrace vs. Vectra AI report.

    See our list of best Intrusion Detection and Prevention Software (IDPS) vendors, best Network Traffic Analysis (NTA) vendors, and best Network Detection and Response (NDR) 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.