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Cisco Sourcefire SNORT vs RedSeal comparison

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Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive Summary

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 Sourcefire SNORT
Average Rating
7.8
Reviews Sentiment
6.8
Number of Reviews
20
Ranking in other categories
Intrusion Detection and Prevention Software (IDPS) (12th)
RedSeal
Average Rating
8.2
Reviews Sentiment
7.5
Number of Reviews
9
Ranking in other categories
Risk-Based Vulnerability Management (21st), Continuous Threat Exposure Management (CTEM) (19th)
 

Mindshare comparison

Cisco Sourcefire SNORT and RedSeal aren’t in the same category and serve different purposes. Cisco Sourcefire SNORT is designed for Intrusion Detection and Prevention Software (IDPS) and holds a mindshare of 2.9%, up 2.7% compared to last year.
RedSeal, on the other hand, focuses on Risk-Based Vulnerability Management, holds 1.6% mindshare, up 0.5% since last year.
Intrusion Detection and Prevention Software (IDPS) Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
Cisco Sourcefire SNORT2.9%
Darktrace10.0%
Fortinet FortiGate7.1%
Other80.0%
Intrusion Detection and Prevention Software (IDPS)
Risk-Based Vulnerability Management Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
RedSeal1.6%
Qualys Exposure Management9.7%
Tenable Security Center6.6%
Other82.1%
Risk-Based Vulnerability Management
 

Featured Reviews

reviewer2772102 - PeerSpot reviewer
Cloud Architect at a consultancy with 1-10 employees
Logging and customizable rules have helped improve threat monitoring and detection
The logging is mainly what I consider one of the best features with Cisco Sourcefire SNORT. Being able to log and store it in a file allows you to push it to a centralized repository. The logging and reporting help improve incident response. You should always be logging threats, any sort of misconfiguration, and anything that could be an issue. It's important to at least log and monitor it. The basic rules provide a good baseline in assessing Cisco Sourcefire SNORT's ability in providing real-time analytics for threat detection, but as a professional, you should look to constantly modify that baseline. They provide extensive customizability so you can define your own rules. The customizability allows it to be adaptable in protecting against diverse network threats to the constant change.
reviewer1339494 - PeerSpot reviewer
Associate Consultant at a consultancy with 10,001+ employees
Enhancing network visibility with competitive pricing but needs better OT and 5G integration
The primary use cases for RedSeal are lifecycle management, vulnerabilities, and change management. Customers might look up or use these solutions for these areas RedSeal helps in optimizing the cost for the customer based on different use cases. If the solution caters to a particular use case,…

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"It has a huge rate of protection. It's has a low level of positives and a huge rate of threat protection. It's easy to deploy and easy to implement. It has an incredible price rate compared to similar solutions."
"The whole solution is very good, and stable."
"If you compare it to other vendors, the technical support from Cisco is excellent."
"The solution is rather easy to use."
"Cisco Sourcefire SNORT is easy to configure and the reporting is great. It's also very user-friendly."
"Users have access to intelligent security automation as one of the features, which can easily automate your event impact assessment so your IPS policy tuning can be done as well as your network behavior analysis, and you can do real-time contextual awareness with correlation of events created on your applications, user devices, operating systems, or vulnerabilities, with all of this real-time data captured including your apps and port scans."
"The most valuable feature of this solution is the filtering."
"The solution can be integrated with some network electors like Cisco Stealthwatch, Cisco ISE, and Active Directory to provide the client with authentication certificates."
"The Vulnerability and Risk Management feature is valuable to us for keeping the security posture up-to-date and conducting regular continuous audits."
"Overall, I am very happy with the way the product is working."
"RedSeal helps you prioritize and allocate your scarce human and capital resources where they have the biggest impact to protect your most-valuable digital assets."
"The most valuable feature I enjoy that is provided by this security analytics platform is the ability to measure resilience."
"This is the only solution in the world that gives you a digital resilience score."
"RedSeal has different modules, such as the Analyzer module, which can be leveraged."
"RedSeal integrates the network and gives us a visual or graphical overview of our network. If an organization is geographically dispersed, for instance, with one office in Canada and one office in the Philippines, the whole network, including all devices, is integrated into RedSeal, and you can see from where the traffic is going in and out."
"The most valuable feature of the product to me is being able to ask what-if questions about traffic flows, which is a great ability to have for security and incident response."
 

Cons

"I want to see a better dashboard for the product. The dashboard can be a bit modified or enhanced."
"The main dashboard of Cisco Sourcefire SNORT could improve."
"Performance needs improvement."
"To be frank, the product is not really stable, although they're working on that. Whenever I go to the technical community with an issue, they will usually say that it is not there yet, but the technical team are working on it. The issues are not insolvable. I think they should just keep working on the product to make sure that the product can become very stable. The technical support is great. I appreciate that. We have a lot of communities supporting Firepower now, so you can find help for whatever issue you have."
"We are unhappy with technical support for this solution, and it is not as professional as what we typically expect from Cisco."
"The pricing needs to be improved. We have lots of low-budget clients around us. Budget constraints are always a deterrent in our market."
"I did not experience any pain points that required improvement. Maybe a couple of false-positives, but that's about it."
"This solution needs to be more customizable."
"There is room for improvement in integrating the OT security part and the private 5G security part in RedSeal."
"Although we are talking about a very robust platform, I would like to see the Windows compatible VM version come back."
"Sometimes, it required us to refresh the configuration. When we integrated any of the configurations into the device, sometimes, it could not detect the exact picture of that device. So, we had to reset the device to see that if it was giving true-positive results or false-positive results. In some cases, we were not able to get true-positive results. There was some kind of bug in that version. Its interface is not user-friendly and needs to be improved. It takes time to understand the interface and various options. Skybox has quite a user-friendly interface. They could provide a feature for compliance audit policy if it is already not there. A compliance audit policy ensures that all configurations are based on the best practices standards, such as CIS benchmarks standard or other similar standards. It provides visibility about whether your device configuration is based on best practices or not. Usually, such a feature is provided by other solutions such as Meteor or Tenable Nessus."
"Integration with other security tools. Have the ability to create custom reports: Currently, within RedSeal you only have the option to run the canned reports."
"Its interface is not user-friendly and needs to be improved."
"There is room for improvement regarding customization and automation of reports."
"Initially their level one support was very frustrating to work with."
"The dashboard should be improved to make correlating data easier to do."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"Licensing for this solution is paid on a yearly basis."
"The cost is per port and can be expensive but it does include training and support for three years."
"I don't know the exact amount, but most of the time when I go to a company with a proposition, they will say, "This thing that you are selling is good, but it's expensive. Why don't you propose something like FortiGate, Check Point, or Palo Alto?" Cisco device are expensive compared to other devices."
"We have a three-year license for this solution."
"If one is an extremely expensive product, and ten is cheap, I rate the tool's price as a five."
"The pricing is based on the number of endpoints and devices, and we have seen it range from mid-five figures to low six figures."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Construction Company
13%
Outsourcing Company
9%
Manufacturing Company
8%
Financial Services Firm
8%
Outsourcing Company
11%
Construction Company
8%
Financial Services Firm
8%
Manufacturing Company
7%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business5
Midsize Enterprise9
Large Enterprise7
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business1
Midsize Enterprise1
Large Enterprise7
 

Questions from the Community

What needs improvement with Cisco Sourcefire SNORT?
I have not had much experience with the community-driven rule set while utilizing Cisco Sourcefire SNORT. I don't have experience with recognizing zero-day vulnerabilities, but based on my knowledg...
What is your primary use case for Cisco Sourcefire SNORT?
Endpoint protection is the main use case. The main aspect involves specifying different rules, and when network traffic hits these rules, it will try to block the traffic or at least log the traffi...
What needs improvement with RedSeal?
There is room for improvement in integrating the OT security part and the private 5G security part in RedSeal.
What is your primary use case for RedSeal?
The primary use cases for RedSeal are lifecycle management, vulnerabilities, and change management. Customers might look up or use these solutions for these areas.
 

Also Known As

Sourcefire SNORT
No data available
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

CareCore, City of Biel, Dimension Data, LightEdge, Lone Star College System, National Rugby League, Port Aventura, Smart City Networks, Telecom Italia, The Department of Education in Western Australia
United States Postal Service, Pacific Gas and Electric Co., Interval International
Find out what your peers are saying about Darktrace, Fortinet, Check Point Software Technologies and others in Intrusion Detection and Prevention Software (IDPS). Updated: October 2026.
920,769 professionals have used our research since 2012.