Arista NDR vs Vectra AI comparison

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Arista NDR

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Executive SummaryUpdated on Nov 6, 2024

Vectra AI and Arista NDR are prominent competitors in the realm of network detection and response solutions. Vectra AI appears to have the upper hand due to its precise detection capabilities through AI-enabled filtering and triaging, which are highly praised in reducing alert fatigue.

Features: Vectra AI emphasizes detection precision with AI-enabled filtering and triaging, comprehensive attack lifecycle visibility, and risk-based threat prioritization. Arista NDR is known for its detailed traffic analysis, enriched security insights, and real-time enhanced visibility, coupled with its praised detailed reporting capabilities.

Room for Improvement: Vectra AI could benefit from better integration with third-party systems and improved management of complex host-driven threats. Enhancements for tracking multiple attack sources and better integrating host behavior analysis are needed. Arista NDR should expand its geographic presence and enhance engineering support, especially in underrepresented markets.

Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: Both Vectra AI and Arista NDR offer strong technical support. Vectra AI is recognized for its robust customer service structure, ensuring responsive support. Arista NDR is appreciated for its responsive customer service due to a close-knit support team, but might benefit from an expanded support infrastructure as the company grows.

Pricing and ROI: Vectra AI’s licensing is costly but seen as a valuable investment for enterprises focusing on threat detection. Arista NDR offers competitive pricing, making it a budget-friendly option, ideal for firms seeking cost-effective MDR service integration. Both solutions provide ROI by reducing incident response times and enhancing network security efficiency, though Vectra AI’s complex licensing may deter some customers.

To learn more, read our detailed Arista NDR vs. Vectra AI Report (Updated: December 2025).

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Arista NDR vs. Vectra AI

December 2025

Helped 881,082 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

Arista NDR

Ranking in Network Detection and Response (NDR)

11th

Average Rating

9.0

Reviews Sentiment

7.6

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

Network Traffic Analysis (NTA) (8th)

Vectra AI

Ranking in Network Detection and Response (NDR)

2nd

Average Rating

8.6

Reviews Sentiment

7.0

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

Intrusion Detection and Prevention Software (IDPS) (5th), Extended Detection and Response (XDR) (16th), Identity Threat Detection and Response (ITDR) (11th), AI-Powered Cybersecurity Platforms (6th)

Mindshare comparison

As of January 2026, in the Network Detection and Response (NDR) category, the mindshare of Arista NDR is 3.5%, down from 4.6% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Vectra AI is 13.3%, down from 16.9% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.

Network Detection and Response (NDR) Market Share Distribution
Product	Market Share (%)
Vectra AI	13.3%
Arista NDR	3.5%
Other	83.2%

Network Detection and Response (NDR)

Featured Reviews

reviewer1719513

Chief Technology Officer at a financial services firm with 11-50 employees

it's much easier to create your own queries and hunt for threats

We take in IOCs from my SOC and from AlienVault, and then we focus on traffic that hits IOCs and alerts us to it. The one thing that the Awake platform lacks is the ability to automate the ingestion of IOCs rather than having to import CSV files or JSON files manually. Awake didn't support the manual importation of CSV and JSON in version 3.0, but they added it in version 4.0. It's helpful, but it still has to be a specific CSV format. Automated IOCs are on the roadmap. Hopefully, they will be able to automate the ingestion of IOCs by Q1 next year. I'm currently leveraging Mind Meld, an open-source tool by Palo Alto, to ingest IOCs from external parties. I aggregate those lists and spit them out as a massive list of domains, hashes, file names, IPS. Then we aggregate those into their own specific categories, like a URL category. Awake ingests that just like the Palo Alto firewall does, and then it alerts me if traffic attempts to go into it. Some of that is already on the Palo Alto firewall, which blocks it, but that doesn't mean that there is no attempted communication. I want to know if there's a communication attempt because there might be an indicator on that specific device trying to reach an IOC. Yes, my Palo Alto blocked it, but there's still something odd sitting there, and what if it can reach a different IOC that I don't have information about? I want to focus on it. I could do that by leveraging Awake if it could ingest the IOCs automatically. That's something I leverage Awake for today. I still have to manually import it, which is cumbersome because I have to manipulate the files that I get from the different IOC providers into a specific format that it understands. Once they add the ability to automate that, it'll be more useful.

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RahulReddy

Consultant at a retailer with 5,001-10,000 employees

Threat detection has improved and malicious emails are now identified quickly

Vectra AI offers artificial intelligence capabilities with visibility that can be integrated into our day-to-day operations and other tools, including malware detection tools and cyber threat tools. Vectra AI has positively impacted my organization. Last year while using it, we received many malicious email threats and virus incidents, including a trojan virus that had reportedly been deployed by someone. Our company used Vectra AI to detect the malicious threats and viruses before they could cause more damage, and we successfully stopped the threats. Using Vectra AI, I notice that server downtime has decreased significantly. We now experience only two to three hours of downtime, whereas without Vectra AI and other tools, our downtime would exceed 48 to 72 hours.

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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

"Arista NDR's scalability is very good, making it easy to add more hardware components. You can order additional hardware and integrate it by stacking it with the existing setup. This feature cannot be seen in other NDR tools."

"This solution help us monitor devices used on our network by insiders, contractors, partners, or suppliers. Its correlation and identification of specific endpoints is very good, especially since we have a large, virtualized environment. It discerns this fairly well. Some of the issues that we have had with other tools is we sometimes are not able to tell the difference between users on some of those virtualized instances."

"The interface itself is clean and easy to use, yet customizable. I like that I can create my own dashboards fairly easily so that I can see what is important to me. Also, the query language is pretty easy to use. I haven't needed to use it a ton, but as I need to go in and do different queries based on their requests, it has been fairly simple to use."

"The most valuable feature is the ability to see suspicious activity for devices inside my network. It helps me to quickly identify that activity and do analysis to see if it's expected or I need to mitigate that activity quickly."

"This solution’s encrypted traffic analysis helps us stay in compliance with government regulations. It is all about understanding data exfiltration, what is ingressing and egressing in our network. One common attack vector is exfiltrating data using encryption. My capabilities to see potential data exfiltration over encrypted traffic is second to none now."

"The query language that they have is quite valuable, especially because the sensor itself is storing some network activity and we're able to query that. That has been useful in a pinch because we don't necessarily use it just for threat hunting, but we also use it for debugging network issues. We can use it to ask questions and get answers about our network. For example: Which users and devices are using the VPN for RDP access? We can write a query pretty quickly and get an answer for that."

"When I create a workbench query in Awake to do threat hunting, it's much easier to query. You get a dictionary popup immediately when you try to type a new query. It says, "You want to search for a device?" Then you type in "D-E," and it gives you a list of commands, like device, data set behavior, etc. That gives you the ability to build your own query."

"The security knowledge graph has been very helpful in the sense that whenever you try a new security solution, especially one that's in the detection and response market, you're always worried about getting a lot of false positives or getting too many alerts and not being able to pick out the good from the bad or things that are actual security incidents versus normal day to day operations. We've been pleasantly surprised that Awake does a really good job of only alerting about things that we actually want to look into and understand. They do a good job of understanding normal operations out-of-the-box."

More Arista NDR pros

"Our company used Vectra AI to detect the malicious threats and viruses before they could cause more damage, and we successfully stopped the threats."

"Vectra AI generates relevant information."

"Vectra AI is the best. It is a major product in our cybersecurity."

"The biggest feature for us, because we are heavy Microsoft users, is its integration with Office 365. On top of Vectra AI, we use all of the Microsoft security platforms, such as Defender ATP and Sentinel. Having full integration and a central platform to look at all of the threats that are coming through from the different platforms is a huge benefit for us."

"Attack Signal Intelligence helped reduce irrelevant alerts by 80% to 90%, with metrics showing a 100-plus reduction in investigation workloads and roughly saving about 55,000 hours of investigation time."

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

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

More Vectra AI pros

Cons

"One thing I would like to see is a little bit more education or experience on AWS cloud for their managed services team. We've explained how we have the information set up, that the traffic coming in goes to the AWS load balancer and then gets sent on to our internal servers... but when I get notices they always tell me this traffic is coming from the IPs belonging to the load balancers, not the source IPs. So a little bit more education for their team about how AWS manages the traffic might help out."

"I would like to see a bit more in terms of encrypted traffic. With the advent of programs that live off the land, a smart attacker is going to leverage encryption to execute their operation. So I would like to see improvements there, where possible. Currently, we're not going to be decrypting encrypted traffic. What other approaches could be used?"

"While the appliance is very good, and I think they're working on it, it would probably help if they integrated the management team cases into the appliance so that everything we are working on with them would be accessible on our platform, on the dashboard, on the portal. Right now, Awake is just an additional team that uses the appliance that we use and then we communicate with them directly. Communication isn't through the portal."

"The one thing that the Awake platform lacks is the ability to automate the ingestion of IOCs rather than having to import CSV files or JSON files manually."

"I would like to see the capability to import what's known as STIX/TAXII in an IOC format. It currently doesn't offer this."

"Be prepared to update your SOPs to have your analysts work in another tool separately. There are some limitations in the integrations right now. One of the things that I want from a security standpoint is integration with multiple tools so I don't need to have my analysts logging into each individual tool."

"When I looked at the competitors, such as Darktrace, they all have prettier interfaces. If Awake could make it a little more user-friendly, that would go a long way."

"There's room for improvement with some of the definitions, because I don't have time and I'm not a Tier 4 analyst. I believe that is something they're working towards."

More Arista NDR cons

"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."

"Multiple appliances are required for Vectra AI, making it less convenient compared to competitors."

"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."

"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 reporting from Cognito Detect is very limited and doesn't give you too many options. If I want to prepare a customized report on a particular host, even though I see the data, I have to manually prepare the report. The reporting features that are built into the tool are not very helpful."

"One of the things that we are missing a bit is the capability to add our own rules to it. At the moment, the tech engine does its thing, but we have some cool ideas to make additional rules. There should be an option in the platform to add custom rules, or there should be some kind of user group where we can suggest them for the roadmap and see if they get evaluated and get transparent communication on whether they will be implemented in the product or not."

"Vectra AI could be improved by focusing on all threat types, not only malicious threats or virus threats."

"It would be commercially beneficial if Vectra AI had something like Darktrace's Antigena Email or something similar to email protection."

More Vectra AI cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

"Awake Security was the least expensive among their competitors. Everyone was within $15,000 of each other. The other solutions were not providing the MNDR service, which is standard with Awake Security's pricing/licensing model."

"Because I represent a hedge fund, I have some leverage. I told them that they had to meet my conditions if they wanted me as a client. It was the same way with Awake. They wanted an initial four-year agreement. Initially, we signed on for a one-year contract, but they wanted the four-year deal when it came time for the renewal. I told them that I was not doing that. I said that they either had to do it on my terms, or I'd go somewhere else."

"The solution is very good and the pricing is also better than others..."

"The pricing seems pretty reasonable for what we get out of it. We also found it to be more competitive than some other vendors that we've looked at."

"The solution has saved thousands of dollars within the first day. Our ROI has to be in the tens of thousands of dollars since October last year."

"We switched to Awake Security because they were able to offer a model that was significantly less expensive and the value that we get out of it is higher."

"Awake's pricing was very competitive. It's not a cheap option though. It's an investment to utilize it, but it's one that we decided was worth the cost, with the managed services. At our scale, it was a much better option to utilize their software and their managed services to handle this, rather than hiring another person to be an analyst. It was quite cost-effective for us."

"The solution is low-cost and affordable."

"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."

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

"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."

"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 pricing is very good. It's less expensive than many of the tools out there."

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

"My company pays for the Vectra AI licensing fee yearly. I know the figure because my company recently renewed the license, and it's okay, at least for the financial sector."

More Vectra AI pricing and cost advice

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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Computer Software Company

13%

Financial Services Firm

11%

Government

Comms Service Provider

Financial Services Firm

10%

Computer Software Company

Manufacturing Company

Government

Company Size

By reviewers

Large Enterprise

Midsize Enterprise

Small Business

By reviewers
Company Size	Count
Small Business	5
Midsize Enterprise	2
Large Enterprise	7

By reviewers
Company Size	Count
Small Business	9
Midsize Enterprise	10
Large Enterprise	29

Questions from the Community

What do you like most about Arista NDR?

Arista NDR's scalability is very good, making it easy to add more hardware components. You can order additional hardware and integrate it by stacking it with the existing setup. This feature cannot...

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Arista NDR?

The tool's pricing is expensive but it is competitive.

What needs improvement with Arista NDR?

Arista NDR needs to open legal offices to be closer to customers and partners. It needs more visibility in the NDR market in the Middle East. While they are doing well, they lack sufficient enginee...

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.

Cisco Secure Network Analytics vs Arista NDR

Comparisons

Darktrace vs Arista NDR

Compared 14% of the time

Compared 11% of the time

Trend Micro Deep Discovery vs Arista NDR

Compared 7% of the time

Aruba IntroSpect vs Arista NDR

Compared 7% of the time

GoSecure Titan Platform vs Arista NDR

Compared 6% of the time

More Arista NDR Competitors

Darktrace vs Vectra AI

Compared 23% of the time

ExtraHop Reveal(x) vs Vectra AI

Compared 8% of the time

Corelight vs Vectra AI

Compared 5% of the time

Cisco Secure Network Analytics vs Vectra AI

Compared 4% of the time

Trend Micro Deep Discovery vs Vectra AI

Compared 3% of the time

More Vectra AI Competitors

Product Reports

Download Arista NDR product report

Arista NDR

January 2026

Download Vectra AI product report

January 2026

Also Known As

Awake Security Platform

Vectra Networks, Vectra AI NDR

Overview

Arista NDR (formerly Awake Security) is the only advanced network detection and response company that delivers answers, not alerts. By combining artificial intelligence with human expertise, Arista NDR hunts for both insider and external attacker behaviors, while providing autonomous triage and response with full forensics across traditional, IoT, and cloud networks. Arista NDR delivers continuous diagnostics for the entire enterprise threat landscape, processes countless network data points, senses abnormalities or threats, and reacts if necessary—all in a matter of seconds. The Arista NDP platform stands out from traditional security because it is designed to mimic the human brain. It recognizes malicious intent and learns over time, giving defenders greater visibility and insight into what threats exist and how to respond to them.

The Advent of Advanced Network Detection and Response & Why it Matters

The 5 Levels of Autonomous Security paper

Arista

Vectra AI offers advanced hybrid network and identity security, detecting threats traditional tools miss. It uses AI to identify lateral attacks and credential misuse, providing a proactive defense for enterprises.

Vectra AI enhances security by using AI-driven detection across network, cloud, and identity layers, surpassing EDR and SIEMs by offering real-time threat detection. It ensures continuous observability and automates SOC workflows to minimize manual efforts, creating an efficient security environment. Its AI-powered approach significantly reduces noise, focusing on true threats, and provides insights into complex threat landscapes, with seamless integration into environments like EDR and Office 365.

What are Vectra AI's key features?

AI-driven detection: Identifies lateral movement and credential misuse across networks.
Continuous observability: Monitors data centers, cloud, SaaS, and OT environments.
SOC automation: Reduces manual processes, lowering analyst fatigue.
Attack Signal Intelligence: Filters noise to deliver relevant alerts quickly.
Network visibility: Provides insight into encrypted traffic and unmanaged assets.

What benefits should users expect?

Improved threat detection: Faster identification of potential threats.
Efficiency in response: Automated processes free resources for high-impact tasks.
Reduced alert fatigue: Intelligent alerts reduce false positives.
Operational integration: Works seamlessly with existing platforms and tools.

Vectra AI is utilized across industries for comprehensive network and anomaly detection. Organizations deploy it for threat hunting and incident response, monitoring both on-premises and cloud activities. By placing sensors across sites, they optimize security practices and streamline their detection processes.

Sample Customers

- Dolby Laboratories- Seattle Genetics- ARM Energy- Ooma- Prophix- Yapstone

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