Sophos Central vs Vectra AI comparison

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Sophos Central

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Executive Summary

We performed a comparison between Sophos Central and Vectra AI based on real PeerSpot user reviews.

Find out in this report how the two AI-Powered Cybersecurity Platforms solutions compare in terms of features, pricing, service and support, easy of deployment, and ROI.

To learn more, read our detailed Sophos Central vs. Vectra AI Report (Updated: September 2025).

Sophos Central vs. Vectra AI

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Helped 869,202 peers since 2012

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

Sophos Central

Ranking in AI-Powered Cybersecurity Platforms

8th

Average Rating

8.4

Reviews Sentiment

5.7

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

No ranking in other categories

Vectra AI

Ranking in AI-Powered Cybersecurity Platforms

6th

Average Rating

8.6

Reviews Sentiment

7.1

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

Intrusion Detection and Prevention Software (IDPS) (5th), Network Detection and Response (NDR) (2nd), Extended Detection and Response (XDR) (16th), Identity Threat Detection and Response (ITDR) (9th)

Mindshare comparison

As of October 2025, in the AI-Powered Cybersecurity Platforms category, the mindshare of Sophos Central is 0.0%. The mindshare of Vectra AI is 10.7%, up from 10.1% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.

AI-Powered Cybersecurity Platforms Market Share Distribution
Product	Market Share (%)
Vectra AI	10.7%
Sophos Central	0.0%
Other	89.3%

AI-Powered Cybersecurity Platforms

Featured Reviews

Sandeepraj Gatla

SOC Analyst at Wydur

Cost-effective security management with a user-friendly interface, efficient resource utilization, and rapid response capabilities

While Sophos Central has demonstrated commendable functionality, there is room for improvement in the realm of automation. Specifically, addressing ransomware attacks often requires leveraging external tools, deploying virtual machines, and utilizing supplementary tools like Caliper Analytics for operations and security communication. The integration of these essential functionalities directly into the software would represent a significant enhancement, streamlining the incident response process and bolstering the platform's comprehensive threat mitigation capabilities. Furthermore, a valuable addition to future releases could involve augmenting the new screen component with advanced capabilities such as XML utilization and rule integration. This enhancement, especially pertinent to tools involved in sandboxing and virtual machines within the investigation process, would greatly streamline the analysis of logs and reports. This would prove particularly beneficial in the context of email analysis, spam attack detection, and other critical security aspects. By incorporating these features, Sophos Central could further elevate its utility in facilitating in-depth security analyses and response strategies.

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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 product has valuable rules and policies and user-friendly dashboard features."

"It is easy to save time using the Sophos Central centralized dashboard. It's definitely easier because you're in one place with all the products."

"It is very useful to deploy policies centrally and monitor the status of our appliances, especially given that we are the main branches. With Sophos Central, you can centrally manage and deploy security policies and updates, saving time and eliminating the need for the technical team to travel to each branch individually."

"Sophos Central is a good and easy-to-manage product."

"Sophos Central is good. It's also free for all those firewalls because, from Sophos Central, we manage the firewalls and push the policies to the firewall."

"The advantage of central management, particularly in antivirus management, is that I don't need to go to each user individually."

"The product's installation phase was easy."

"The interface, especially when using the software center, is quite user-friendly and easy to navigate."

More Sophos Central pros

"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."

"Using this tool for automation has provided more benefits to our processes."

"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."

"The administrative privilege detection feature is the most valuable feature. The admin accounts are often highly accessible to the high-risk component of the environment. If those accounts are compromised or are being used in a suspicious manner, that's high-fidelity events for us to look into."

"Vectra AI helped our team be more productive and save time. We have less work thanks to 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."

"Scalability wise, we have many sensors, and Vectra AI seems to handle them all very well."

"We particularly like the user experience around the dashboard, which we find to be much more straightforward than the dashboard of some of the competitive products... Vectra is a really easy system to understand and use to prioritize where we need to focus our security resources."

More Vectra AI pros

Cons

"The product does not have a dedicated MFA."

"Sophos Central must incorporate a diagrammatic graphical user interface for its practices and compliances."

"The user interface could be more intuitive and user-friendly."

"The main drawback lies in the weak after-sales support system."

"Pushing global rules and policies to all devices from Central isn't easy. You can do it for all endpoints, which is fine. But you can't do the same with firewalls. Firewall management with Central is very limited. You can connect one firewall to another and tell it, "I want one policy for all my customer's firewalls," but that's not possible. For a customer with multiple firewalls, you can't say, "This works for France, Great Britain, Canada," and push it. It's not possible."

"Sophos Central is not available in small packages in Indonesia."

"There were challenges we faced with generating reports for the physical firewall in certain instances."

"Whenever a customer installs a Sophos Central agent on the end-user system, their system becomes slow."

More Sophos Central cons

"The main improvement I can see would be to integrate with more external solutions."

"I would like to see a bit more strategic metrics instead of technical data. Information that I could show to my executive management team or board would be valuable."

"The solution has not reduced the security analyst workload in our organization because we still need to SIEM. Unfortunately, while Vectra, for us, is a brilliant tool for network investigations, giving wonderful visibility, it doesn't go the whole way to replace our SIEM that is needed for compliance. So, I still have the same amount of alerting and logging that I did before. It gives us more defined ability to see incidents, but it doesn't give us enough information to satisfy a PCI or 27001 audit."

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

"I would like to see data processed onshore. Right now, the cloud components, like Office 365, must be processed on servers outside of Australia. I would like to see a future adoption of onshore processing."

"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."

"We had another product with Vectra AI and used the MDR solution as an add-on. Initially, it wasn't fully appropriately configured, so we didn't get the expected results. Even once configured correctly, we weren't fully satisfied with its response. The issue was both with their service response and the product's capabilities."

"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."

More Vectra AI cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

"It is an affordable solution."

"The product is expensive compared to other products like Fortinet and Microsoft Defender."

"The tool is a little more expensive than other solutions."

"The pricing is very competitive. When compared to other vendors like Fortinet, Sophos stands out, especially in terms of firewall and endpoint pricing."

"It's not considered a cheap solution and falls more in the moderate pricing category."

"The product is not expensive."

"It is an expensive tool."

"The cost is quite affordable."

More Sophos Central pricing and cost advice

"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."

"The license is based on the concurrent IP addresses that it's investigating. We have 9,800 to 10,000 IP addresses."

"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."

"The solution is low-cost and affordable."

"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."

"It is an expensive solution, but it's not the most expensive we've seen. We also know how much we're going to pay, unlike with some other providers where all of a sudden our license explodes."

"Cost is a big factor, as always. However, I think we have a very good price–performance ratio."

"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."

More Vectra AI pricing and cost advice

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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Manufacturing Company

17%

Comms Service Provider

11%

Computer Software Company

10%

Financial Services Firm

10%

Financial Services Firm

11%

Computer Software Company

11%

Manufacturing Company

Government

Company Size

By reviewers

Large Enterprise

Midsize Enterprise

Small Business

By reviewers
Company Size	Count
Small Business	27
Midsize Enterprise	8
Large Enterprise	6

By reviewers
Company Size	Count
Small Business	9
Midsize Enterprise	10
Large Enterprise	27

Questions from the Community

What do you like most about Sophos Central?

One of the significant advantages of Sophos is its affordability compared to other technologies like Check Point and Fortinet.

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Sophos Central?

My thoughts on the pricing or licensing with Sophos Central are that it is very good.

What needs improvement with Sophos Central?

I have read some information a few months ago about the machine learning features in Sophos Central, and I saw that they added an AI tool, AI feature in the Sophos Central console. However, I haven...

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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Comparisons

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Compared 7% of the time

Cisco Secure Network Analytics vs Vectra AI

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Product Reports

Sophos Central

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Also Known As

No data available

Vectra Networks, Vectra AI NDR

Overview

Sophos Central allows you to manage our award-winning Synchronized Security platform. Advanced attacks are more coordinated than ever before. Now, your defenses are too. Our revolutionary Security Heartbeat™ ensures your endpoint protection and firewall are talking to each other. It’s a simple yet effective idea that means you get better protection against advanced threats and spend less time responding to incidents. It’s so simple, it makes you wonder why nobody did it before.

Sophos

Vectra AI enhances security operations by pinpointing attack locations, correlating alerts, and providing in-depth visibility across attack lifecycles, ultimately prioritizing threats and improving incident responses.

Vectra AI integrates AI and machine learning to detect anomalies early and supports proactive threat response. Its features like risk scoring, alert correlation, and streamlined SOC efficiency are supplemented by integration with tools like Office 365. Users highlight integration, reporting, and customization challenges, alongside limitations in syslog data and false positive management. They seek enhancements in visualization, UI, TCP replay, endpoint visibility, and tool orchestration, with requests for improved documentation, licensing, and cloud processing innovation.

What are the key features of Vectra AI?

Attack Location Identification: Pinpoints specific locations of security breaches.
Alert Correlation: Combines multiple alerts into a single incident for efficiency.
Visibility Across Attack Lifecycle: Offers detailed insight through different attack stages.
Risk Scoring: Aggregates risk scores to prioritize imminent threats.
AI and Machine Learning: Detects anomalies early to aid in proactive threat response.
Integration with Office 365: Seamlessly consolidates data for enriched investigations.

What benefits should users look for?

Enhanced SOC Efficiency: Reduces alert fatigue and improves operational efficiency.
Threat Prioritization: Focuses on the most critical threats with risk scoring.
Proactive Threat Response: Early anomaly detection aids in swift response.
Operational Overhead Reduction: Seamless integration minimizes extra workload.
Compliance and Policy Support: Assists in adhering to policies and regulations.

In industries like finance, healthcare, and critical infrastructure, Vectra AI is crucial for threat detection and network monitoring. Entities use it for identifying anomalous behaviors and enhancing cybersecurity by responding to network activities and analyzing traffic for potential breaches. It operates on-premises and in hybrid cloud settings, enabling threat detection without endpoint agents and supporting compliance and policy enforcement.

Sample Customers

Information Not Available

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

Sophos Central vs. Vectra AI