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IronNet Collective Defense Platform 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

IronNet Collective Defense ...
Ranking in Network Detection and Response (NDR)
24th
Average Rating
0.0
Reviews Sentiment
6.8
Number of Reviews
1
Ranking in other categories
Network Traffic Analysis (NTA) (16th)
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) (5th), Extended Detection and Response (XDR) (16th), Identity Threat Detection and Response (ITDR) (9th), AI-Powered Cybersecurity Platforms (6th)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of October 2025, in the Network Detection and Response (NDR) category, the mindshare of IronNet Collective Defense Platform is 0.3%, down from 0.4% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Vectra AI is 15.6%, down from 17.2% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Network Detection and Response (NDR) Market Share Distribution
ProductMarket Share (%)
Vectra AI15.6%
IronNet Collective Defense Platform0.3%
Other84.1%
Network Detection and Response (NDR)
 

Featured Reviews

reviewer1468230 - PeerSpot reviewer
Easy to use, stable, and easy to install
We use this solution for the Ministry of Defense and the special agencies It adds value to our existing platform, and therefore our system becomes more important for the customer. The most valuable feature is the ease of use and the full reach of services. It's pretty decent, and I don't see…
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

"The most valuable feature is the ease of use and the full reach of services."
"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."
"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."
"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."
"It's easy to manage, and I love the UX. It's very well designed. When we are looking for something, it's quite easy to find it."
"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."
"The solution is currently used as a central threat detection and response system."
"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."
 

Cons

"I would like to see it integrate with third-party systems."
"The advantages of the integration are not entirely out-of-the-box. You have to do it manually."
"Neither Vectra nor Darktrace have a function like a status health check on my log sources and traffic sources."
"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."
"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."
"I'd like to be able to get granular reports and to be able to output them into formats that are customizable and more useful. The reporting GUI is lacking."
"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."
"One of the things I am not so happy about when it comes to Vectra is the scoring board."
"One thing which I have found where there could be improvement is with regard to the architecture, a little bit: how the brains and sensors function. It needs more flexibility with regard to the brain. If there were some flexibility in that regard, that would be helpful, because changing the mode of the brain is complex. In some cases, the change is permanent. You cannot revert it."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"Licensing costs are yearly."
"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."
"The solution is low-cost and affordable."
"Vectra AI is not a cheap solution."
"Vectra's licensing model could scale to our research network, which has multiple, 100-gigabit links."
"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 very good. It's less expensive than many of the tools out there."
"There are additional features that can be purchased in addition to the standard licensing fee, such as Cognito Recall and Stream."
"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."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
No data available
Financial Services Firm
11%
Computer Software Company
11%
Manufacturing Company
8%
Government
7%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
No data available
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business9
Midsize Enterprise10
Large Enterprise27
 

Questions from the Community

Ask a question
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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

No data available
 

Also Known As

IronDefense, Iron Dome, Cyber Operations Center
Vectra Networks, Vectra AI NDR
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Thomson Reuters
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 Darktrace, Vectra AI, Trend Micro and others in Network Detection and Response (NDR). Updated: October 2025.
870,697 professionals have used our research since 2012.