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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)
25th
Average Rating
0.0
Reviews Sentiment
6.8
Number of Reviews
1
Ranking in other categories
Network Traffic Analysis (NTA) (14th)
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 July 2025, in the Network Detection and Response (NDR) category, the mindshare of IronNet Collective Defense Platform is 0.2%, down from 0.5% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Vectra AI is 16.2%, down from 17.3% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
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."
"The solution's ability to reduce alerts, by rolling up numerous alerts to create a single incident or campaign, helps in that it collapses all the events to a particular host, or a particular detection to a set of hosts. So it doesn't generate too many alerts. By and large, whatever alerts it generates are actionable, and actionable within the day."
"It gives you access, with Recall, to instant visibility into your network through something like a SIEM solution. For us, being able to correlate all of this network data without having to manage it, has provided immediate value. It gives us the ability to really work on the stuff where I and my team have expertise, instead of having to manage a SIEM solution..."
"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."
"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."
"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."
"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."
"The automatic filtering that they provide is valuable. The logic inside that makes some detections instead of us is very useful. We are confident that if we are just looking into it and there is nothing, nothing could happen."
"Scalability wise, we have many sensors, and Vectra AI seems to handle them all very well."
 

Cons

"I would like to see it integrate with third-party systems."
"Neither Vectra nor Darktrace have a function like a status health check on my log sources and traffic sources."
"The main improvement I can see would be to integrate with more external solutions."
"If you hit a certain number of rules, triage filters, or groups, the UX responds more slowly. However, we have a complex network and a lot of rules. So, our setup might not be a typical implementation example. We even had UX engineers onsite, and they looked at issues, improvements, and user feedback. Since then, it has gotten a lot better, they even built in features that we specifically requested for our company."
"A blind spot that I have is around the ease with which you can automate threat intervention."
"Neither Vectra nor Darktrace have a function like a status health check on my log sources and traffic sources."
"One of the things I am not so happy about when it comes to Vectra is the scoring board."
"ExtraHop has better features that seem more advantageous when compared to Vectra."
"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."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"Licensing costs are yearly."
"There are additional features that can be purchased in addition to the standard licensing fee, such as Cognito Recall and Stream."
"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."
"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."
"Vectra's licensing model could scale to our research network, which has multiple, 100-gigabit links."
"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."
"Vectra AI's pricing is cheaper than that of Darktrace."
"Cost is a big factor, as always. However, I think we have a very good price–performance ratio."
"The solution is low-cost and affordable."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
17%
Computer Software Company
11%
Comms Service Provider
9%
Energy/Utilities Company
7%
Financial Services Firm
14%
Computer Software Company
12%
Manufacturing Company
8%
Government
7%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
No data available
 

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: June 2025.
861,524 professionals have used our research since 2012.