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Arista NDR vs Vectra AI comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Jun 3, 2026

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)
17th
Average Rating
9.0
Reviews Sentiment
7.6
Number of Reviews
14
Ranking in other categories
Network Traffic Analysis (NTA) (9th)
Vectra AI
Ranking in Network Detection and Response (NDR)
3rd
Average Rating
8.6
Reviews Sentiment
7.0
Number of Reviews
48
Ranking in other categories
Intrusion Detection and Prevention Software (IDPS) (5th), Extended Detection and Response (XDR) (20th), Identity Threat Detection and Response (ITDR) (11th), AI-Powered Cybersecurity Platforms (10th)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of June 2026, in the Network Detection and Response (NDR) category, the mindshare of Arista NDR is 3.2%, down from 4.0% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Vectra AI is 10.6%, down from 16.1% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Network Detection and Response (NDR) Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
Vectra AI10.6%
Arista NDR3.2%
Other86.2%
Network Detection and Response (NDR)
 

Featured Reviews

it_user1719513 - PeerSpot reviewer
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.
RR
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.

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."
"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 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."
"With Awake, it's very self-sufficient, the tool does a lot of the work and they even have managed services on top, if you need additional resourcing to help you deal with the alerts or configure the system more, that comes as part of the solution."
"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 MNDR has affected our overall security posture very positively."
"The most valuable portion is that they offer a threat-hunting service. Using their platform, and all of the data that they're collecting, they actually help us be proactive by having really expert folks that have insight, not just into our accounts, but into other accounts as well. They can be proactive and say, 'Well, we saw this incident at some other customer. We ran that same kind of analysis for you and we didn't see that type of activity in your network.'"
"Awake Security gets a solid nine (out of 10) based on our experience, which is based on their technology, professionalism, and communication."
"We often use the new feature to create PCAP files from the whole data traffic. It makes it much easier to find network problems such as whether the server is responding to a request. It has nothing to do with security, but it helps a lot to find other problems."
"I like the way that Vectra AI focuses on the internal network. Nowadays, most of the attackers are already inside, and they can be inside for many years before they start attacking. With normal monitoring, it's quite difficult to find them."
"What I like best about Vectra AI is that it alerts you about suspicious activities."
"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."
"The key feature for me for Detect for Office 365 is that it can also concentrate all the information and detection at one point, the same as the network solution does. This is the key feature for me because, while accessing data from Office 365 is possible using Microsoft interfaces, they are not really user-friendly and are quite confusing to use. But Detect for Office 365 is aggregating all the info, and it's only the interesting stuff."
"The intuitive dashboards are incredibly useful, with both the Quadrant UX and the Respond UX, so whether looking from a management point of view or an analyst point of view, both dashboards are very intuitive."
"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."
"Vectra has saved us weeks, if not months, in terms of the ability to identify a breach."
 

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."
"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 engineers. They need to hire more engineers to meet the demand and expand their presence. The current team is good but not enough to fully capture the market."
"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?"
"One thing I would like to see is a little bit more education or experience on AWS cloud for their managed services team."
"Some of the searching capability is a bit hard to use without in-depth knowledge."
"I enjoy the query language, but it could be a bit more user-friendly, especially for new users who come across it... They should push it more into a natural language style as opposed to a query language."
"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."
"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."
"The false positives and the tuning side of it are some things that could use improvement but that could be from our side."
"I would like more integrations with IOCs and threats currently on the Internet. I would also like to know which threats are based on zero-day attacks, current botnets, etc. Therefore, I would like more information on external threats."
"The solution's marketing is not good."
"Vectra AI could be improved by focusing on all threat types, not only malicious threats or virus threats."
"A blind spot that I have is around the ease with which you can automate threat intervention."
"One area where there's room for improvement is the absence of a comprehensive TCP recording and replay feature."
"If you hit a certain number of rules, triage filters, or groups, the UX responds more slowly."
"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."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"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."
"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."
"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."
"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."
"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."
"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."
"The solution's pricing was 50 percent lower than the other vendors shortlisted."
"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 license is based on the concurrent IP addresses that it's investigating. We have 9,800 to 10,000 IP addresses."
"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 is low-cost and affordable."
"Its cost is too much. It's an investment that we can afford. It's a lot, but it's worth it."
"The pricing is high."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
10%
Computer Software Company
8%
Comms Service Provider
7%
Government
7%
Financial Services Firm
10%
Manufacturing Company
10%
Computer Software Company
9%
Government
7%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business5
Midsize Enterprise2
Large Enterprise7
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business10
Midsize Enterprise10
Large Enterprise29
 

Questions from the Community

Ask a question
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What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Vectra AI?
I find the pricing of Vectra AI to be one of the best we have seen as feedback from customers and partners indicates it is very competitive for an EDR solution.
What needs improvement with Vectra AI?
I think one area that could be improved about Vectra AI is their marketing. One of the aspects that Darktrace excels at is their marketing, and I do not feel Vectra AI is on that level yet, leading...
What is your primary use case for Vectra AI?
I primarily use Vectra AI for customers, and I only provide Vectra AI.
 

Also Known As

Awake Security Platform
Vectra Networks, Vectra AI NDR
 

Overview

 

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
Find out what your peers are saying about Arista NDR vs. Vectra AI and other solutions. Updated: June 2026.
900,747 professionals have used our research since 2012.