Palo Alto Networks Advanced Threat Prevention vs Vectra AI comparison

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Executive SummaryUpdated on Dec 19, 2024

Vectra AI and Palo Alto Networks Advanced Threat Prevention are leaders in cybersecurity solutions. Palo Alto Networks seems to have an advantage with its comprehensive integration capabilities and user appreciation for its protective features.

Features: Vectra AI uses AI and machine learning to reduce alerts and correlate threats with hosts, providing deep security insights with network metadata capture. It assists in risk score aggregation, helping SOC analysts prioritize threats. Palo Alto Networks Advanced Threat Prevention offers integration with other Palo Alto tools, enhancing malware detection, traffic inspection, and application behavior checking with signature-based prevention.

Room for Improvement: Vectra AI experiences integration challenges with third-party systems, such as SIEM, and requires better management of false positives and threat context. Palo Alto Networks can improve its IPS capabilities and simplify its complex licensing models, as well as expanding email protection features.

Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: Vectra AI offers flexible deployment across on-premises, cloud, and hybrid environments, receiving praise for its responsive technical support, albeit with reliance on specific key personnel. Palo Alto Networks provides similar deployment options and is recognized for its robust customer service, characterized by quick responses and problem-solving.

Pricing and ROI: Vectra AI, while costly, provides value by reducing threat response times, offering ROI as efficient security operations. Its pricing can be prohibitive for some. Palo Alto is also expensive, but its extensive capabilities and scalability cater well to larger enterprises, with ROI seen in preempting attacks and optimizing security measures.

To learn more, read our detailed Palo Alto Networks Advanced Threat Prevention vs. Vectra AI Report (Updated: April 2025).

Palo Alto Networks Advanced Threat Prevention vs. Vectra AI

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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

Palo Alto Networks Advanced...

Ranking in Intrusion Detection and Prevention Software (IDPS)

6th

Average Rating

8.6

Reviews Sentiment

6.9

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

No ranking in other categories

Vectra AI

Ranking in Intrusion Detection and Prevention Software (IDPS)

3rd

Average Rating

8.6

Reviews Sentiment

7.1

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

Network Detection and Response (NDR) (2nd), Extended Detection and Response (XDR) (15th), Identity Threat Detection and Response (ITDR) (10th), AI-Powered Cybersecurity Platforms (6th)

Mindshare comparison

As of May 2025, in the Intrusion Detection and Prevention Software (IDPS) category, the mindshare of Palo Alto Networks Advanced Threat Prevention is 7.4%, down from 8.0% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Vectra AI is 11.3%, up from 11.0% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.

Intrusion Detection and Prevention Software (IDPS)

Featured Reviews

Carlos Bracamonte

Senior Network Support Engineer at Amadeus

Robust, reliable, simple to install and good technical support

We are attempting to improve the use of URL filtering beyond threat protection. I'm not sure what the remaining threat protection features are off the top of my head. But beyond that, we use URL filtering. We have three approved cases for using external dynamic lists that are stored in a bucket repository. Then, for each URL site that needs to be whitelisted, we add it to the external dynamic list in order to gain access to this email. I would like Wildfire to be implemented. We use the equivalent in Cisco is the integration policies. We have the Wildfire but we are not currently implementing it. We don't have the license to use it, but we are not currently implementing it until we present the use cases that the company gives some value to and they approve the use of it.

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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.

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Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"The user interface is a bit more professional than some free products."

"We are currently using the URL filtering feature, which is the most popular."

"It's very easy to use and configure. What is nice about Palo Alto is that even if you don't understand how to use it, you can just click on upload and upload everything that needs to be blocked."

"One of the most valuable features is the anti-malware protection."

"I find the malware protection very handy."

"For those who want a next-gen firewall that's easy to configure and easy to operate, I think you should go for Palo Alto."

"I like the solution's interface."

"The most valuable features are the simplicity, transparency, and overall ease of management."

More Palo Alto Networks Advanced Threat Prevention pros

"We discovered a lot of things in our network and are correcting several misconfigurations. We are learning how some apps work together and how some things shouldn't happen. It's also easier for us to identify the source of a brute force, whereas before, we didn't even know we had a brute force."

"Vectra is very compatible with various cloud providers, such as Amazon and Azure AD. This is helpful as customers often migrate their network infrastructure to the cloud."

"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."

"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."

"Vectra produces actionable data using automation. That has helped us. It's less manpower now to look at incidents, which has definitely increased efficiency. Right now, in a lot of cases, our mean time to detection is within zero days. This tells me by the time something happened, and we were able to detect it, it was within the same day."

"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."

"One of the things that we didn't expect to happen was that our network team also jumped on it faster than we thought. In most cases, if it's a security tool that's working on the network part, they can also use it to find out certain flaws that have been in the system. Certain flaws, related to some legacy stuff, were already there for quite a few years, which they couldn't explain at first, but we could explain them based on the timing of certain things."

"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."

More Vectra AI pros

Cons

"The installation was complicated."

"The documentation needs to be improved. I need better information about how to configure it and what the best practices are."

"The technology firewall anomaly network could stand improvement."

"The solution needs to improve its local technical support services. There is no premium support offered in our market."

"There is a potential drawback with the lack of support for the ICAP protocol."

"Sometimes when you want to group a set of ports, and communicate with Palo Alto, you cannot group TCP and UDP ports together. This needs to be adjusted."

"Right now we are focusing on email. If Palo Alto can increase the features related to email filtering and the new malware, it would help us protect our systems."

"The pricing has improved with the newer generation of their Firewalls, but the price could always be lower. In comparison with other solutions, I believe they're quite competitive."

More Palo Alto Networks Advanced Threat Prevention cons

"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."

"An area for improvement in Vectra AI is reporting because it currently needs some details. For example, when you download a report from Vectra AI, you won't see complete information about the alerts or triggers. Another area for improvement in the tool is that sometimes, an alert has high severity, yet it's marked as low severity. Vectra AI should have a mechanism to change the severity level from low to high or critical."

"Vectra Recall could be utilized much more, and I'm seeing some indications of that today with the investigative components. I use the Visualize feature to visualize components and dashboards a lot. I'm interested in new ways to build automated searches or having them leveraged already from Vectra."

"Integration with other security components needs improvement. It should have true integration as opposed to just being a separate pane of glass."

"Neither Vectra nor Darktrace have a function like a status health check on my log sources and traffic sources."

"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."

"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."

"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 pricing has improved with the newer generation of their Firewalls, but the price could always be lower."

"The product’s pricing is expensive for small companies."

"The cost involves the price of the hardware, which is expensive. However, most of the Palo Alto solutions are expensive."

"It's not too expensive."

"The pricing could be lower."

"If you want to have all of the good features then you have to pay extra for licensing."

"The pricing and the licensing are pretty competitive at this stage. As a reseller, I would like to see the price come down a little bit so I can compete better against other firewalls because we do that all the time."

"From one to ten, with one being the most expensive, I would rate the pricing of Palo Alto Networks Threat Prevention a one out of ten. It is my understanding that Palo Alto Networks Threat Prevention is the most expensive one."

More Palo Alto Networks Advanced Threat Prevention pricing and cost advice

"The pricing and licensing are quite straightforward because they're based on the IP licenses. As a result, they are easy to count."

"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."

"It's relatively on the pricier side, but when compared to other solutions. It's not the most budget-friendly option, but it can be considered somewhat more cost-effective in comparison to other alternatives."

"The solution's pricing was 50 percent lower than the other vendors shortlisted."

"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."

"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."

"The upfront pricing model that we have would have been more beneficial if it had been a recurring license fee, but that wasn't a massive issue for us. It's fairly priced."

More Vectra AI pricing and cost advice

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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Computer Software Company

17%

Financial Services Firm

10%

Manufacturing Company

10%

Government

Financial Services Firm

13%

Computer Software Company

13%

Manufacturing Company

Government

Company Size

By reviewers

Large Enterprise

Midsize Enterprise

Small Business

Questions from the Community

Which is the best DDoS protection solution for a big ISP for monitoring and mitigating?

Arbor would be the best bid, apart from Arbor, Palo Alto and Fortinet have good solutions. As this is an ISP, I would prefer Arbor.

What do you like most about Palo Alto Networks Threat Prevention?

It is a stable product.

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Palo Alto Networks Threat Prevention?

The pricing is competitive, and with current campaigns and discounts, it provides an excellent device for a reasonable price.

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.

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Compared 31% of the time

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Compared 11% of the time

Corelight vs Vectra AI

Compared 7% of the time

Cisco Secure Network Analytics vs Vectra AI

Compared 6% of the time

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Compared 2% of the time

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Product Reports

Palo Alto Networks Advanced Threat Prevention

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Palo Alto Networks Advanced Threat Prevention report

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Also Known As

No data available

Vectra Networks, Vectra AI NDR

Overview

Palo Alto Networks Advanced Threat Prevention is a cloud-based security service that combines cutting-edge technologies, including machine learning, artificial intelligence, and expert human monitoring, to effectively thwart advanced threats like malware, zero-day attacks, and command-and-control threats. It offers inline protection, scrutinizing all network traffic irrespective of port, protocol, or encryption. An integral component of Palo Alto Networks' security platform, it enjoys widespread adoption across diverse organizations. With its robust security capabilities, it's an ideal choice for entities of all sizes, particularly those in high-risk sectors such as finance, healthcare, and government agencies, seeking to safeguard their networks from a broad spectrum of advanced threats.

Palo Alto Networks

Vectra AI is used for detecting network anomalies and potential malicious activities, providing visibility into network traffic and enhancing threat detection across environments.

Organizations deploy Vectra AI mainly on-premises with additional cloud components. It helps with compliance, incident response, security monitoring, detecting insider threats, and correlating network events. Vectra AI captures and enriches network metadata, provides detailed dashboards, reduces false positives, and supports cross-environment behavioral analysis to enhance threat detection and prioritization. While valued for its high accuracy and alert aggregation, it has room for improvement in UI/UX, packet management, and integration with SIEMs and other tools. It is noted for expensive pricing and limited proactive threat response features.

What are Vectra AI's most valuable features?

High accuracy in identifying threat locations
Aggregation of alerts into single incidents
24/7 threat detection
Visibility into the entire attack lifecycle
Risk score aggregation
Effective triaging of alerts
Integration with other tools

What benefits or ROI should users look for?

Enhanced threat detection and prioritization
Comprehensive network visibility
Reduction in false positives
Better incident response capabilities
Improved compliance monitoring

In specific industries, Vectra AI is deployed to monitor complex networks and alleviate challenges in threat detection. It is particularly effective in sectors requiring stringent compliance and security measures, offering insights and capabilities crucial for protecting sensitive data and maintaining operational integrity.

Sample Customers

University of Arkansas, JBG SMITH, SkiStar AB, TRI-AD, Temple University, Telkom Indonesia

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

Palo Alto Networks Advanced Threat Prevention vs. Vectra AI