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AlienVault OSSIM vs Netsurion comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Sep 18, 2024

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

AlienVault OSSIM
Ranking in Security Information and Event Management (SIEM)
13th
Average Rating
7.4
Reviews Sentiment
7.1
Number of Reviews
31
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
Netsurion
Ranking in Security Information and Event Management (SIEM)
54th
Average Rating
8.4
Reviews Sentiment
7.1
Number of Reviews
24
Ranking in other categories
Managed Security Services Providers (MSSP) (33rd), SOC as a Service (14th), Managed Detection and Response (MDR) (39th), Extended Detection and Response (XDR) (47th)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of February 2026, in the Security Information and Event Management (SIEM) category, the mindshare of AlienVault OSSIM is 1.7%, down from 4.2% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Netsurion is 0.7%, up from 0.3% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Security Information and Event Management (SIEM) Market Share Distribution
ProductMarket Share (%)
AlienVault OSSIM1.7%
Netsurion0.7%
Other97.6%
Security Information and Event Management (SIEM)
 

Featured Reviews

BP
Independent Contractor at a comms service provider with 5,001-10,000 employees
Enables cost-effective security management for small businesses
Scaling for USM is always challenging for any product unless it is purpose-built or overbuilt at the front end. They will use Palo Alto and its competitors, and LevelBlue will manage that implementation. The main area where the AlienVault product was lacking around the 2018 timeframe was in its ability to scale. By pushing it to a cloud-based system, they've largely alleviated scale issues. It's native in Amazon but will also run in Azure. They have worked with cloud service providers to offer enough throughput at a cost reasonable for a corporation. Scaling was their biggest problem, and they've largely conquered those issues.
John-Berry - PeerSpot reviewer
Information Technology Manager at ProfitSolv
The SOC center monitors, hunts, and notifies us of threats around the clock
I know they are working to resolve this issue, but Netsurion is currently unable to retrieve logs from S3 buckets. We use WP Engine for a lot of web hosting as well as AWS, and both of these platforms use S3 buckets. I would like Netsurion to be able to pull logs from Linux devices. We have some of that capability, and I believe they can do it. However, the way it works with Amazon is strange and glitchy. Therefore, working something out with Amazon would be great. Netsurion's SOC can be a bit too aggressive at times. We have asked them to adjust their playbook because I am tired of being notified about the same issue multiple times a day. I am aware of the issue, and it is not a cause for concern. Let's only take action on this issue if we see an actual problem.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"Network traffic analysis is highly efficient."
"The most valuable features of AlienVault OSSIM are vulnerability assessment, network intrusion detection system, response to critical events, and awareness of the whole network."
"The open vault component and the checking of vulnerabilities are the most valuable features. The page management helps with this. If you know how your device is vulnerable at least you can do something about it."
"You can customize the dashboards as well as the reporting."
"With AlienVault you get everything in one box."
"OSSIM is the only solution that includes the large number of modules that we need: a vulnerability scanner, a network IDS system, a host IDS system."
"The initial setup is straightforward."
"The threat policies of the solution are always very advanced and the best in the market. They are very persistent in terms of keeping up with security protocols."
"Netsurion's 24/7 monitoring has enhanced the overall security of the company. They have someone looking at the data 24/7 who will call us as needed. If their team spots a malicious process after hours, they notify the appropriate person by phone. We get a lot of actionable threat intelligence from Netsurion. For example, if a user clicks on a malicious link in a web page and starts an unusual process that isn't on the white-list, Netsurion's team can detect it and prevent it from executing. Afterward, they'll notify us by telephone, so we can respond and clean up whatever damage has occurred."
"Their SOC team manages vulnerability management and IOC reviews. They stop bad processes when they happen. The best thing is their weekly reviews of what has been going on in the infrastructure as well as the things that they see and what we should look out for."
"There are a host of things that are most valuable. Obviously monitoring our environment and reporting out different events is important. They perform a suite of services. They monitor all of our servers, all of our key infrastructure, like our DNS, our switches, all that stuff. They aggregate and correlate that quarterly. They'll tell us if we're getting a lot of login failures and something is going on or if something's weird."
"When I looked last week, we probably averaged about 20 million log entries a day. So, we certainly can't individually manage that. Just looking at the reports, then trying to go back and find anything that was questionable, was a challenge. Therefore, the managed service has been invaluable to us in terms of being able to narrow the scope of what really needs to be looked at and bringing those things to our attention to be dealt with."
"I like the UI, overall. I like the main page and there are aspects of the search page that I like. When you bring it up on the left-hand side of the page, as you look at the events, the ability to simply hit and click the plus/minus to pull events in and out of the overall view is well done and is very effective from a threat-hunting and an analysis perspective. I like the detail it shows."
"The product satisfies our compliance, and thus, all of our auditors. All of the data that we use and store for all security events is required by our auditors to be kept in a central storage location."
"Expediting incident response is really great."
"The most valuable feature is definitely real-time alerting, especially in situations where someone might attempt to exploit or hack into our network."
 

Cons

"The solution needs more integration with cyber intelligence systems."
"I don't like to work on OSSIM because it is unpredictable."
"The user interface needs to be friendlier across the board."
"The user interface could be improved."
"AlienVault OSSIM gives unwanted notifications."
"AlienVault OSSIM’s configuration and integration could be a little easier."
"Lacking in depth of reporting."
"It's under heavy traffic. If you have heavy traffic, the system is slow."
"The agents on the endpoints seem to fail quite a bit, requiring manual involvement from the local administrators. I would like to see their product be much more ad hoc and update automatically."
"They have their programs and tools that you have to put into your own environment. We basically ingest all the log data and then push it out to them. I wish it was a little bit different than that where we just push directly towards them. I do not know if that is a function that they thought would be better in terms of security, but I wish that instead of doing that, it should go from the device to them and not from the device to another system and then out to them. There seem to be some drawbacks to doing that."
"The solution's dashboard is okay. The one thing that we ran into are issues when we upgraded to the newer version. It uses Elasticsearch for the different dashboard entries. So, we were running on spinning disks, and Elasticsearch didn't work that well. A number of the different dashboards, like my dashboard or different things like that, pull from Elasticsearch. Since Elasticsearch really wasn't working, we were having some issues with that, but we just migrated."
"Netsurion's threat detection and response aren't quite mature. I would expect a little more."
"With version 8, there are quite a few things. The query tool was one of the big ones, and the query speed was one of the big ones, but they've made some great strides between versions 8 and 9. There were also issues in version 8 around the ability to get the data back out. It's one thing to collect data, but it's a whole other thing to be able to present it or run it in a timely manner. The old tool, depending on how far back I was looking, might even time out and I would have to run it again."
"The deployment of the agents could be a bit easier. We always seem to have a bit of a challenge with that. A lot of times the agents either don't deploy or they quit responding, then we have to go and redeploy them."
"I'd like to see improvement in the ease of generating reports. It seems fairly cumbersome whenever you decide to start tracking new categories of events. It seems a little kludgy when trying to generate those reports."
"The threat detection and response is passive. We have asked if there were options for taking action, and we have not gotten any feedback on that, which would be useful to know. Depending on the situation and threat, some actions may not be possible, but we haven't gotten any feedback on what options could be directed and actionable with the understanding that it may have an extra cost. It would be nice to know or find out if it is actually possible to take actions by a SIEM service or a SIEM agent."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"When comparing AlienVault OSSIM to Microsoft Sentinel, AlienVault OSSIM incurs additional costs due to its licensing price structure. If you are using AlienVault for security purposes at a certain level it can have a higher price point than the current pricing of Microsoft Sentinel."
"We are using a free version of the solution. If you purchase a license there are more features available but the price is a little high. The solution should be cheaper to allow more customers to be able to afford it."
"The price of AlienVault OSSIM is too high sometimes for us to present to our customers. The price should be lower. We are on a three-year license to use the solution. We had to pay extra for the support."
"OSSIM is free."
"AlienVault pricing is the best. Whatever cost you are paying, you are getting a return on every penny... It's not like your IBM, your QRadar, or Splunk, where the cost is too high."
"AlienVault OSSIM is expensive compared to its competitors."
"The solution is open source, so it's free to use."
"OSSIM is open source, and USM is the paid license. So, if you want, you can switch to USM. There you will have to buy a license, and they have a support team that helps you out on issues you face."
"Netsurion's pricing is extremely fair and flexible. The price of their SIEM product is reasonable, and you can pay for those services you want on top of that. It wasn't cheap, but it's competitive, and we intend to renew our contract."
"The upfront costs have increased, and we have been locked into this contract. The cost of changing over from it is way too high."
"In the security space, it's hard to quantify your return on investment. So, I don't. We spend about $40,000 a year and so. It's hard to say if the SIEM saved that much money."
"You are paying for different levels, especially as far as the monitoring goes and how often you review it with the team. The other factor that figures in is how many nodes are on your network, such as clients, network equipment, servers, etc. There are some additional pieces on top of that, but it's laid out pretty simply, as far as how much you're going to pay for a node."
"Licensing is very easy. Our CIO takes care of the billing, but in terms of price point, he hasn't complained, so it must be good."
"When we first got the EventTracker product, we were using SIEM Simplified. At the time they didn't call it that, but it was more of a service thing. So, there was a bit more hand-holding and getting stuff set up, along with failure reports, that they did during the first one to two years. Then, we decided that the the additional money to have someone do these daily reports wasn't terribly useful, so we discontinued that service."
"We have seen time and cost savings. It prevents us from having to hire specialized people for this type of work. We would need to hire six staff members to accommodate the same service."
"EventTracker's subscription-based model is interesting as far as yearly license type stuff. It's nice because you know what it's going to be next year. We haven't really looked at any other solutions. The pricing at the time compared to the other solutions was a lot less. A couple of years ago, we actually looked at Splunk. The amount in Splunk's licensing model is based on 20 gigs a day, or something like that. Based on our number of logs and stuff that we were already generating, the costs would be substantially more for the amount of logs that we would be getting."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Computer Software Company
13%
Comms Service Provider
11%
Financial Services Firm
9%
Manufacturing Company
8%
Performing Arts
16%
Manufacturing Company
9%
Outsourcing Company
9%
Retailer
5%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business18
Midsize Enterprise9
Large Enterprise8
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business10
Midsize Enterprise7
Large Enterprise7
 

Questions from the Community

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for AlienVault OSSIM?
It depends. I would need to review their cost models, but generally, they are on a scaled basis based on throughput usage. Because it's a software as a service solution for their core product for U...
What needs improvement with AlienVault OSSIM?
Scaling for USM is always challenging for any product unless it is purpose-built or overbuilt at the front end. They will use Palo Alto and its competitors, and LevelBlue will manage that implement...
Ask a question
Earn 20 points
 

Also Known As

OSSIM
Netsurion Managed Threat Protection, Netsurion EventTracker
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Council Rock School District
The Salvation Army, The FRESH Market, Pacific Western Bank, NASA, American Academy of Orthopaedic Surgeons (AAOS), and Talbot’s Stores
Find out what your peers are saying about AlienVault OSSIM vs. Netsurion and other solutions. Updated: December 2025.
881,665 professionals have used our research since 2012.