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Flowmon vs Vectra AI comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Nov 6, 2024

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

Flowmon
Ranking in Network Detection and Response (NDR)
15th
Average Rating
8.6
Reviews Sentiment
7.5
Number of Reviews
4
Ranking in other categories
Network Monitoring Software (41st)
Vectra AI
Ranking in Network Detection and Response (NDR)
2nd
Average Rating
8.6
Reviews Sentiment
7.1
Number of Reviews
45
Ranking in other categories
Intrusion Detection and Prevention Software (IDPS) (4th), Extended Detection and Response (XDR) (14th), Identity Threat Detection and Response (ITDR) (10th), AI-Powered Cybersecurity Platforms (6th)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of June 2025, in the Network Detection and Response (NDR) category, the mindshare of Flowmon is 1.9%, up from 1.4% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Vectra AI is 16.2%, down from 17.9% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Network Detection and Response (NDR)
 

Featured Reviews

Pifu Lin - PeerSpot reviewer
Quick identification of network issues enhances performance monitoring
We will try to Proof of Concept (POC) to a client in Taiwan. We just use the features for the Network Performance Monitor (NPM) Flowmon is more easy to understand and helps find network issues more quickly. We need this solution to monitor the network performance. We started using it three…
Mohammad Alkurdi - PeerSpot reviewer
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.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"It is an open platform, so in terms of integration, we are quite happy. We can integrate it with other SNMP solutions. We can also integrate it with security solutions, such as a SIEM solution."
"The solution is stable."
"Flowmon is more easy to understand and helps find network issues more quickly."
"Flowmon is more easy to understand and helps find network issues more quickly."
"The artificial intelligence and automatic detection system in Flowmon Solution are perfect for every, type of customer, such as government and commerce."
"Cognito Streams gives you a detailed view of what happens in the network in the form of rich metadata. It is just a super easy way to capture network traffic for important protocols, giving us an advantage. This is very helpful on a day-to-day basis."
"The solution is currently used as a central threat detection and response system."
"Vectra AI generates relevant information."
"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."
"The fact that we get the visualization of what's happening on our network, which is a way of improving our security in-depth is most valuable."
"It has reduced the time it takes to respond to attacks. That comes back to the proactive point. It makes us able to lower down in the kill chain, we can react now, rather than reacting to incidents that happened, we can see an instant, in some cases, as it's being implemented, or as it's being launched."
"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."
"It's important for us that the user interface is easy to understand and that is the biggest benefit we see from Vectra AI."
 

Cons

"It would be helpful to have more details about the monitoring of the infrastructure. It should have support for SNMP. This is something that is currently not there in the product."
"I do not know the detailed pricing."
"If there was better visualization in Flowmon Solution it would be good."
"The licensing price could be better."
"You are always limited with visibility on the host due to the fact that it is a network based tool. It gives you visibility on certain elements of the attack path, but it doesn't necessarily give you visibility on everything. Specifically, the initial intrusion side of things that doesn't necessarily see the initial compromise. It doesn't see stuff that goes on the host, such as where scripts are run. Even though you are seeing traffic, it doesn't necessarily see the malicious payload. Therefore, it's very difficult for it to identify these type of host-driven complex attacks."
"The solution needs to become more proactive. When Vectra AI is the primary solution in an environment - like it is in our case - you must work on response time. We have a small team so response time at endpoint level is vital."
"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 main improvement I can see would be to integrate with more external solutions."
"Neither Vectra nor Darktrace have a function like a status health check on my log sources and traffic sources."
"Other alternatives, like Darktrace, have a fancier UI."
"One area where there's room for improvement is the absence of a comprehensive TCP recording and replay feature."
"ExtraHop has better features that seem more advantageous when compared to Vectra."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The licensing fee accrues only once, but that of support is annual."
"It works with a permanent license, and then you can pay for the support. For the gold support, you need to pay yearly."
"The price of the solution could be better."
"Its cost is too much. It's an investment that we can afford. It's a lot, but it's worth it."
"The solution is low-cost and affordable."
"The pricing is high."
"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."
"There are additional features that can be purchased in addition to the standard licensing fee, such as Cognito Recall and Stream."
"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."
"The solution's pricing was 50 percent lower than the other vendors shortlisted."
"Vectra's licensing model could scale to our research network, which has multiple, 100-gigabit links."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Computer Software Company
17%
Financial Services Firm
11%
Manufacturing Company
9%
Educational Organization
6%
Financial Services Firm
13%
Computer Software Company
13%
Manufacturing Company
8%
Government
7%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
No data available
 

Questions from the Community

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Flowmon Anomaly Detection System?
I don't understand the price. I am in deployment, so I do not know the detailed pricing.
What is your primary use case for Flowmon Anomaly Detection System?
We will try to Proof of Concept (POC) to a client in Taiwan. We just use the features for the Network Performance Monitor (NPM).
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.
 

Comparisons

 

Also Known As

Flowmon Anomaly Detection System
Vectra Networks, Vectra AI NDR
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

SEGA
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 Flowmon vs. Vectra AI and other solutions. Updated: June 2025.
856,873 professionals have used our research since 2012.