Varonis Platform vs Vectra AI comparison

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Varonis Platform

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Executive SummaryUpdated on Apr 20, 2025

Vectra AI and Varonis Platform compete in cybersecurity solutions, with their strengths lying in threat detection and data governance, respectively. Vectra AI appears to have the upper hand in network-based threat identification, while Varonis leads in data access governance.

Features: Vectra AI reduces alert fatigue by consolidating multiple alerts into a single incident, provides risk scores for threat prioritization, and grants extensive visibility across the attack lifecycle using AI-driven analysis. Its focus on network metadata and privileged account analytics further bolsters its threat detection capabilities. Varonis Platform specializes in data security, offering detailed insights into file access and data classification, making it easy to manage sensitive data and tailor features for large datasets, thus excelling in data access governance.

Room for Improvement: Vectra AI's integration with more third-party tools and streamlined detection alerts could be improved. Reducing false positives and enhancing packet capture capabilities require attention, as does better visibility integration in mixed environments like DHCP and VPN. Varonis users seek a less complex UI and faster processing of large datasets. Transitioning to the cloud and offering more flexible remediation solutions would strengthen Varonis’s capabilities.

Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: Vectra AI is praised for excellent customer service and deployment flexibility across on-premises and hybrid environments. However, its reliance on personalized technical support could pose scalability challenges. Varonis also provides top-notch support, with quick responses and comprehensive solutions, and offers hybrid and cloud deployment options that effectively support diverse IT architectures.

Pricing and ROI: Vectra AI's pricing is high, with a complex licensing model based on IP addresses, yet users find value in its enhanced security capabilities. Improvements in detection times and a reduced security analyst workload highlight its ROI, though they vary. Varonis Platform's modular structure can be costly, adding expenses for each feature. Despite this, the ROI is seen in better data management and security, although these costs may deter smaller companies from investing due to significant initial costs and promising long-term benefits.

To learn more, read our detailed Varonis Platform vs. Vectra AI Report (Updated: June 2025).

Varonis Platform vs. Vectra AI

June 2025

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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

Varonis Platform

Ranking in Identity Threat Detection and Response (ITDR)

6th

Average Rating

8.2

Reviews Sentiment

6.4

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

Data Loss Prevention (DLP) (10th), Data Governance (4th), SaaS Security Posture Management (SSPM) (5th), Data Security Posture Management (DSPM) (4th), Compliance Management (7th), Ransomware Protection (11th)

Vectra AI

Ranking in Identity Threat Detection and Response (ITDR)

10th

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) (14th), AI-Powered Cybersecurity Platforms (6th)

Mindshare comparison

As of June 2025, in the Identity Threat Detection and Response (ITDR) category, the mindshare of Varonis Platform is 5.7%, up from 5.7% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Vectra AI is 1.6%, up from 0.7% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.

Identity Threat Detection and Response (ITDR)

Featured Reviews

Frederic Delos

Senior Cloud Engineer at a financial services firm with 10,001+ employees

Offers the ability to identify sensitive areas, allowing you to drill down into the sensitive data

The most effective feature for me is its ability to identify sensitive areas, allowing you to drill down into the sensitive data, provided you have access, to determine whether it's a false positive or a true positive. That's the best thing for me, out of all of it. It's got everything, like other ones, but I like to be able to look at something if I'm doing forensics on the alert and say, "Okay, do I really need to do something with this?" For example, we don't want sensitive data in our OneDrive. So it identifies the sensitive data that's possibly in the OneDrive. And what I can do is look at it and identify whether it's actually sensitive data in Datalert or whether it looks like sensitive data, but I know it's a false positive. If it is a false positive, I can basically say ignore this pattern based on X, Y, and Z, you know, whether it's Redjax or keyword proximity. So I like that. With other tools, I gotta go through a whole process because it's a little bit more complex. Here, I can tag it and bag it in one shot. And the next good time I scan, it slips over it. So it helps in that.

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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 analytics would have to be our most valuable feature."

"The solution's classification engine is highly configurable and efficient."

"It can easily identify unusual behavior or access patterns that may pose a potential threat, while operating as a unified reporting system."

"There's also a 90-day policy where if a user is not using the warehouse, it will automatically delete that username."

"The solution ensures that users have not accidentally shared sensitive information with the wrong people or too many people."

"Technical support from Varonis is rated as nine out of ten."

"I also appreciate the reporting feature, which allows for the extraction of various reports based on specific needs. These reports can be used for audit purposes, such as tracking changes in file locations or deletions."

"The most important feature is remediation. In remediation support, there is no group permission. We'll go ahead and remediate the access from the Dell folder to the parent folder."

More Varonis Platform pros

"It provides various dashboards that facilitate the identification of connections and can detect data exfiltration, meaning data sent from your environment to another."

"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 packet-capturing feature is very useful."

"Vectra AI generates relevant information."

"The solution provide visibility into behaviors across the full lifecycle of an attack in our network, beyond just the Internet gateway. It makes our security operations much more effective because we are now looking not just at traffic on the border, but we're looking at east-west internal traffic. Now, not only will we see if an exploit kit is being downloaded, but we would be able to see then if that exploit kit was then laterally distributed into our environment."

"Vectra AI can bring the ability to detect intrusion on the network more so than legacy IDS tools."

"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."

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

More Vectra AI pros

Cons

"There is one thing that if I add something manually, I get so many alerts. That's the biggest bad thing."

"For unstructured data monitoring, it's one of the top ones, if not the top one, due to its usability."

"The product is very complicated."

"It is significantly complex."

"The solution's areas of improvement are the interface and the dependency on on-premises deployment for some components."

"The solution's interface is a little complicated with regard to setting up filters and reports."

"Varonis requires more access permissions for its core functions compared to competitors, which can be a concern for companies about data safety."

"The GUI should be more functional. There should be a process for connecting through Chrome, Internet Explorer, etc."

More Varonis Platform cons

"The rules for threats are not always precise and Vectra AI should improve this."

"The solution's marketing is not good."

"You are always limited with visibility on the host due to the fact that it is a network based tool. It gives you visibility on certain elements of the attack path, but it doesn't necessarily give you visibility on everything. Specifically, the initial intrusion side of things that doesn't necessarily see the initial compromise. It doesn't see stuff that goes on the host, such as where scripts are run. Even though you are seeing traffic, it doesn't necessarily see the malicious payload. Therefore, it's very difficult for it to identify these type of host-driven complex attacks."

"ExtraHop has better features that seem more advantageous when compared to Vectra."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"One area where there's room for improvement is the absence of a comprehensive TCP recording and replay feature."

More Vectra AI cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The platform is expensive. I rate the pricing a nine out of ten."

"Varonis Platform wasn't certainly the cheapest solution."

"You could do a subscription, where you pay yearly, or you could purchase it outright. The licensing cost is based on the number of users on the system that you are monitoring."

"It's expensive, kind of, really expensive."

"The pricing is good. It neither expensive nor cheap. It is average."

"Licensing is on an annual basis. Maintenance and renewal fees are separate. Varonis Datalert is quite expensive."

"I would rate the pricing an eight out of ten, with ten being the most expensive."

"There are additional features that can be purchased in addition to the standard licensing fee, such as Cognito Recall and Stream."

"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."

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

"Their licensing model is antiquated. I'm not a fan of their licensing model. We have to pay for licensing based on four different things. You have to pay based on the number of unique IPs, the number of logs that we send through Recall and Stream, and the size of our environment. They need to simplify their licensing down to just one thing. It should be based on the amount of data, the number of devices, or something else, but there should be just one thing for everything. That's what they need to base their licensing on. Cost-wise, they're not cheap. They were definitely the most expensive option, but you get what you pay for. They're not the cheapest option."

"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."

"At the time of purchase, we found the pricing acceptable. We had an urgency to get something in place because we had a minor breach that occurred at the tail end of 2016 to the beginning of 2017. This indicated we had a lack of ability to detect things on the network. Hence, why we moved quickly to get into the tool in place. We found things like Bitcoin mining and botnets which we closed quickly. In that regard, it was worth the money."

More Vectra AI pricing and cost advice

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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Financial Services Firm

16%

Computer Software Company

10%

Manufacturing Company

Healthcare Company

Financial Services Firm

13%

Computer Software Company

12%

Manufacturing Company

Government

Company Size

By reviewers

Large Enterprise

Midsize Enterprise

Small Business

Questions from the Community

What do you like most about Varonis Platform?

The solution has significantly improved data security and compliance posture by allowing us to track and monitor activities. We can see who accesses data and when files are created and understand w...

What needs improvement with Varonis Platform?

Varonis started as an on-premises solution and is transitioning to cloud. It hasn't fully moved yet, which is an area for improvement. Varonis requires more access permissions for its core function...

What is your primary use case for Varonis Platform?

The primary use case for Varonis Platform is data discovery, specifically for discovering sensitive data in our organization to protect it. We are looking for a solution that can scan our repositor...

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.

Microsoft Purview Data Governance vs Varonis Platform

Comparisons

Compared 19% of the time

Cyera vs Varonis Platform

Compared 12% of the time

BigID vs Varonis Platform

Compared 11% of the time

Wiz vs Varonis Platform

Compared 6% of the time

Microsoft Purview Information Protection vs Varonis Platform

Compared 3% of the time

More Varonis Platform Competitors

Darktrace vs Vectra AI

Compared 30% of the time

ExtraHop Reveal(x) vs Vectra AI

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

Arista NDR vs Vectra AI

Compared 5% of the time

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Product Reports

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Varonis Platform

May 2025

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May 2025

Also Known As

No data available

Vectra Networks, Vectra AI NDR

Overview

Varonis Platform specializes in network security and data monitoring with modules for alerting, data classification, and access management, benefiting environments like Microsoft 365.

Varonis is designed to secure data by auditing and tracking data movement. It leverages data alert and classification modules to identify and manage sensitive information. The platform enhances network security by alerting users to unexpected data modifications and deletions, crucial for effective data loss prevention. It supports unstructured data management, ensuring proper data access and permission controls. Known for its 24/7 support, Varonis offers comprehensive analytics and unified reporting, helping prevent data overexposure and facilitating compliance efforts.

What are the key features of Varonis Platform?

24/7 Support: Provides round-the-clock assistance.
Data Monitoring: Tracks data activities efficiently.
Unified Reporting: Consolidates data access reports.
Data Classification: Identifies sensitive data effectively.
Permission Management: Simplifies managing access rights.
Behavior Analytics: Detects abnormal behavior patterns.

What benefits should be highlighted in user reviews?

Enhanced Security: Improves data protection measures.
Compliance Support: Assists in meeting compliance standards.
Data Transparency: Offers clarity in data access activities.
Access Control: Ensures proper access to data.
Centralized Remediation: Eases remediation procedures.

Varonis Platform is widely utilized in industries needing stringent data confidentiality and management, such as finance and healthcare, for tracking data modifications and unauthorized access. Enterprises deploy it to manage permissions within large datasets, benefiting Microsoft 365 environments. While Varonis requires enhancements in cloud integration, the current deployment is often based on-premises, with attention to addressing the security needs and effective data handling for critical infrastructure.

Varonis

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

Nottingham Building Society

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