Cisco Secure Cloud Analytics [EOL] vs Vectra AI comparison

Cisco Secure Cloud Analytic...

Read 45 Vectra AI reviews

9,125 Views
3,924 Comparison Views

97% willing to recommend

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Download the report

Executive Summary

We performed a comparison between Cisco Secure Cloud Analytics [EOL] and Vectra AI based on real PeerSpot user reviews.

Find out what your peers are saying about Darktrace, Check Point Software Technologies, Fortinet and others in Intrusion Detection and Prevention Software (IDPS).

To learn more, read our detailed Intrusion Detection and Prevention Software (IDPS) Report (Updated: July 2025).

Intrusion Detection and Prevention Software (IDPS)

July 2025

Download the complete report

Helped 865,295 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

Cisco Secure Cloud Analytic...

Average Rating

8.6

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

No ranking in other categories

Vectra AI

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), AI-Powered Cybersecurity Platforms (6th)

Featured Reviews

Olivier CHAMBELANT

Global Network and Telecommunication Manager at Nemera Development S.A.

Beneficial cloud deployment

Opening a ticket with support can be difficult but once it is open the support does a good job. They want us to provide a lot of information, such as the order number and when it was bought. It takes a long time, they can improve by having a faster response time.

Read full review

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.

Read full review

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"Cisco Stealthwatch Cloud is scalable because it is on the cloud."

"Monitoring the traffic, making sure you have the visibility."

"The product helps me to see malware."

"The logs in Cisco Stealthwatch Cloud are very good when doing the API integration in the team. It is able to give you important information for the correlations."

"When it comes to scalability, there's no size limit. It varies based on licenses and requirements."

"It tells you if there is any communication going to command and control servers, or if there is any traffic that violates your internal policy, or if any data hoarding is happening where data is being dumped from your machine to outside of the environment. It provides all such meaningful reports to help you understand what's happening."

"The tool's best feature is its ability to monitor network traffic. It will also inform users whether the traffic generated by a network is legitimate. The tool helps to capture and analyze the network traffic."

"It is doing some artificial intelligence. If it sees a server doing a lot of things, then it will assume that is normal. So, it is looking for anomalous behavior, things that are out of context which helps us reduce time. Therefore, we don't have to look in all the logs. We just wait for Vectra to say, "This one is behaving strange," then we can investigate that part."

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

"It does a reliable job of parsing out the logs of all the network traffic so that we can ingest them into our SIEM and utilize them for threat hunting and case investigations. It is pretty robust and reliable. The administration time that we spend maintaining it or troubleshooting it is very low. So, the labor hour overhead is probably our largest benefit from it. We spend 99% of our time in Vectra investigating cases, responding to incidents, or hunting, and only around 1% of our time is spent patching, troubleshooting, or doing anything else. That's our largest benefit from Vectra."

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

"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 most valuable feature for Cognito Detect, the main solution, is that external IDS's create a lot of alerts. When I say a lot of alerts I really mean a lot of alerts. Vectra, on the other hand, contextualizes everything, reducing the number of alerts and pinpointing only the things of interest. This is a key feature for me. Because of this, a non-trained analyst can use it almost right away."

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

"One of the most valuable features is all the correlation that it does using AI and machine learning. An example would be alerting on a host and then alerting on other things, like abnormal behavior, that it has noticed coming from the same host. It's valuable because we're a very lean team."

More Vectra AI pros

Cons

"When I used to work on it, I just didn't see anything new happening for about a year and a half. Providing newer data and newer reports constantly would help. There should be more classifications and more interesting data."

"The product needs to improve its user-friendliness. It is very tricky and you need to study it before using the standard functionalities."

"The product's price is high."

"If we migrate these things to an event or send us an email if there is any critical event, I would like to configure these things on the initial launch. Because if a system is compromised, there will be a lot of data movement from one post to another post to the outside. Then, we should also get an alert on email as well. We have since we have integrated these things. But a direct email for critical alerts should be there. So, I would like to enhance the critical event configuration."

"The initial setup of Cisco Stealthwatch Cloud is complex."

"Cisco Stealthwatch Cloud could improve the graphical user interface. It could be a more user-friendly graphical user interface. so that. Not everybody's a cyber security professional, most of the customers that I deal with are not very skilled. The terms that they use in the solution are quite understandable for a normal CIO."

"The initial setup is a bit complex in terms of deployment and configuration"

"I'd like to be able to get granular reports and to be able to output them into formats that are customizable and more useful. The reporting GUI is lacking."

"The UI/UX and detection could be improved. More detections of specific security events could be useful. We've had a few incidents that were not detected by Vectra. The teams are working on it right now, but more detection is always better."

"We would like to see more information with the syslogs. The syslogs that they send to our SIEM are a bit short compared to what you can see. It would be helpful if they send us more data that we can incorporate into our SIEM, then can correlate with other events."

"Some of the customization could be improved. Everything is provided for you as an easy solution to use, but working with it and doing specific development could be worked on a bit more in the scope of an incident response team."

"We have had a few issues with the integration of Vectra AI with EDR. Some filters have not been working. We've also had issues with the brain not being powerful enough."

"Neither Vectra nor Darktrace have a function like a status health check on my log sources and traffic sources."

"The false positives and the tuning side of it is something that could use improvement. But that could be from our side."

"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."

More Vectra AI cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The solution is quite expensive."

"The price of Cisco Stealthwatch Cloud is expensive."

"Cisco Stealthwatch Cloud is an expensive enterprise solution."

"The pricing is high."

"The pricing and licensing are quite straightforward because they're based on the IP licenses. As a result, they are easy to count."

"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."

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

"Vectra AI's pricing is cheaper than that of Darktrace."

"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."

"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

See which vendors are best for you

Use our free recommendation engine to learn which Intrusion Detection and Prevention Software (IDPS) solutions are best for your needs.

See recommendations

865,295 professionals have used our research since 2012.

Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Computer Software Company

37%

University

Government

Manufacturing Company

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 Cisco Stealthwatch Cloud?

When it comes to scalability, there's no size limit. It varies based on licenses and requirements.

What needs improvement with Cisco Stealthwatch Cloud?

There are two areas of improvement. Firstly, extend the log retrieval limit to at least three months. For example, there is a limit on the number of log messages that can be received. So, I would l...

What is your primary use case for Cisco Stealthwatch Cloud?

We are using Cisco Secure Cloud Analytics, also known as Cisco's WatchCloud, to monitor user activity in the cloud. Specifically, we are looking for users who are uploading or downloading data beyo...

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.

ExtraHop Reveal(x) vs Vectra AI

Comparisons

No data available

Darktrace vs Vectra AI

Compared 28% of the time

Compared 11% of the time

Corelight vs Vectra AI

Compared 7% of the time

Cisco Secure Network Analytics vs Vectra AI

Compared 5% of the time

Arista NDR vs Vectra AI

Compared 4% of the time

More Vectra AI Competitors

Product Reports

Cisco Secure Cloud Analytics [EOL]

August 2025

Cisco Secure Cloud Analytics [EOL] report

Download Cisco Secure Cloud Analytics [EOL] product report

Download Vectra AI product report

July 2025

Also Known As

Cisco Stealthwatch Cloud, Observable Networks

Vectra Networks, Vectra AI NDR

Overview

Cisco Secure Cloud Analytics is a cloud-based security solution that provides visibility and threat detection for cloud environments. It offers software mapping and automation for incident response, forensic analysis, and segmentation of IT architecture. The solution can be used on-premise or on the cloud and is used in various sectors such as insurance and government.

The logs in Cisco Secure Cloud Analytics are valuable for API integration in a team as they provide important information for correlations. The solution also offers automated incident response and integration with next-generation firewalls and antivirus solutions."

Cisco

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

Options, Schneider Electric, Washington University in St Louis, Gotcha, Kraft Kennedy, PartnerRe, Sumologic, Veterans United, AFGE, Agraform, Artesys, Dynamic Ideas Financials, Department of Agriculture and Commerce

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