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: July 2025).

Sophos Central 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

Sophos Central

Ranking in AI-Powered Cybersecurity Platforms

9th

Average Rating

8.4

Reviews Sentiment

8.5

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) (4th), Network Detection and Response (NDR) (2nd), Extended Detection and Response (XDR) (19th), Identity Threat Detection and Response (ITDR) (10th)

Mindshare comparison

As of August 2025, in the AI-Powered Cybersecurity Platforms category, the mindshare of Sophos Central is 0.0%. The mindshare of Vectra AI is 11.2%, up from 9.6% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.

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 tool improves security and saves time."

"The product's initial setup phase was easy."

"The most valuable feature is that it protects my IT infrastructure from attacks."

"One of the most valuable features of Sophos Central for maintaining our cybersecurity posture is its ease of use."

"The product is easy to use."

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

"One of the standout features is its highly detailed and user-friendly graphical interface."

"The product's installation phase was easy."

More Sophos Central pros

"The packet-capturing feature is very useful."

"The dashboard gives me a scoring system that allows me to prioritize things that I should look at. I may not necessarily care so much about one event, whereas if I have a single botnet detection or a brute force attack, I really want to get on top of those."

"What I like best about Vectra AI is that it alerts you about suspicious activities."

"The UI is easy to use and when we send detection to everybody, they easily understand what we are asking at the time."

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

"Most of their use cases, including deployment, are managed by the tool itself, requiring less manual input from our team."

"The core product provides excellent visibility, but my favorite feature is Vectra Recall."

"One of the key advantages for us is we define a 24/7 service around it. We use far more of Vectra alerts than we do with our SIEM product because we understand that when we get an alert from Vectra we actually need to do something about it."

More Vectra AI pros

Cons

"The tamper protection password is an area with certain shortcomings where improvements are required."

"Vulnerability protection and monitoring any changes are crucial aspects that require attention."

"SSID authentication has to be improved."

"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."

"Improving the response time of the customer support team would be beneficial."

"The solution's performance drops at times because it is a SaaS-based tool, making it an area that requires improvement."

"The product does not have a dedicated MFA."

"One area I would like to see improvement in Sophos Central is the multi-factor authentication process."

More Sophos Central cons

"Vectra is still limited to packet management. It's only monitoring packet exchanges. While it can see a lot of things, it can't see everything, depending on where it's deployed. It has its limits and that's why I still have my SIEM."

"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."

"There is room for improvement in the documentation. We would like to have more details on how it detects what we see."

"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."

"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."

"In comparison with a lot of systems I used in the past, the false positives are really a burden because they are taking a lot of time at this moment."

"The advantages of the integration are not entirely out-of-the-box. You have to do it manually."

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

More Vectra AI cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

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

"The tool's pricing is good."

"Sophos Central is an affordable solution that any mid-level customer can buy."

"The pricing of Sophos is quite reasonable and generally cheaper compared to competitors like Fortinet and Check Point."

"The product is expensive. However, you can get discounts for over 100 users."

"It offers the most competitive pricing compared to other vendors."

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

"There is a one-time fee for the hardware and an annual subscription fee, which is pretty good because we can get free updates."

More Sophos Central pricing and cost advice

"The solution is low-cost and affordable."

"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."

"The licensing is on an annual basis."

"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."

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

"Its cost is too much. It's an investment that we can afford. It's a lot, but it's worth it."

"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 AI is not a cheap solution."

More Vectra AI pricing and cost advice

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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Manufacturing Company

18%

Comms Service Provider

13%

Financial Services Firm

10%

University

Financial Services Firm

13%

Computer Software Company

11%

Manufacturing Company

Government

Company Size

By reviewers

Large Enterprise

Midsize Enterprise

Small Business

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?

As we get more people, we just add another item or Sophos appliances, and then we are good to go.

What needs improvement with Sophos Central?

As a user, I suggest improving Sophos Central by addressing some error messages we occasionally encounter that we just do not know what they relate to, even when it says it has resolved them. To im...

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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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 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

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