Corelight vs Vectra AI comparison

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Corelight

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Executive SummaryUpdated on Nov 6, 2024

Vectra AI and Corelight are contenders in the network security solutions space. Vectra AI seems to have the upper hand due to its advanced AI-driven alert management capabilities.

Features: Vectra AI offers capabilities like advanced alert management that consolidates alerts into manageable incidents, captures network metadata at scale for enhanced context, and provides functionalities like Cognito Recall and Cognito Detect for improved visibility. Corelight integrates with Zeek for robust open-source traffic analysis, facilitates easy deployment, and enables detailed traffic insights.

Room for Improvement: Vectra AI needs improvements in integrating with external solutions and enhancing its user interface for better engagement. Users seek better logging and visibility on host-driven attacks. Corelight, despite its open-source strengths, requires additional feature development and ease of use improvements. Its complexity can overwhelm and complicate pricing.

Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: Vectra AI is mainly deployed on-premises with hybrid options, boasting strong technical support that enhances customer satisfaction. Corelight, also primarily on-premises, benefits from excellent technical support due to its smaller size, although its scalability might face challenges as demand grows.

Pricing and ROI: Vectra AI's high pricing reflects its comprehensive offerings, delivering a good ROI by reducing attack response time. However, it is less accessible for smaller budgets. In contrast, Corelight's pricing is more affordable and open-source, appealing to technically adept users, though additional investments may be required to maximize its value.

To learn more, read our detailed Corelight vs. Vectra AI Report (Updated: June 2025).

Corelight vs. Vectra AI

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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

Corelight

Ranking in Network Detection and Response (NDR)

19th

Average Rating

9.0

Reviews Sentiment

7.6

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

Network Traffic Analysis (NTA) (6th)

Vectra AI

Ranking in Network Detection and Response (NDR)

2nd

Average Rating

8.6

Reviews Sentiment

7.1

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

Intrusion Detection and Prevention Software (IDPS) (4th), Extended Detection and Response (XDR) (14th), Identity Threat Detection and Response (ITDR) (10th), AI-Powered Cybersecurity Platforms (6th)

Mindshare comparison

As of July 2025, in the Network Detection and Response (NDR) category, the mindshare of Corelight is 4.6%, down from 5.3% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Vectra AI is 16.2%, down from 17.3% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.

Network Detection and Response (NDR)

Q&A Highlights

Mazin Al-Shuaili

Head Of Retail Operations at a financial services firm with 201-500 employees

Jun 09, 2020

What is the biggest difference between Corelight and Vectra AI?

Corelight is a Zeek based solution for network behavior analysis and Vectra AI is a User Behavior based solution. If you are comparing these 2 systems you are comparing apples to oranges. You shouldn't be evaluating these products against each other as they address different use cases for your network. My guess is you are either looking for better network visibility and possibly network detection or you need to understand insider threats (User Behavior). If you need both then you need both tools.

An open-source solution that gave us insight into our clients' network traffic flow

Featured Reviews

Dan Jeske

Account Executive at Fishtech Group

We use the solution for packet capture sampling. We offer it as part of our managed service. It's so we can identify east-west traffic on a customer's network Corelight is low-cost and made on open-source, and the code is Zeek. It's an easy way for us to get visibility in a client's environment.…

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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.

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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

"It is easy to deploy and easy to handle."

"The most valuable feature is the embedded IDS from Suricata."

"It's an easy way for us to get visibility in a client's environment."

"Corelight is easy to use."

"It's easy to create additional dashboards specific to supporting specific tasks."

"One of the key advantages for us is we define a 24/7 service around it. We use far more of Vectra alerts than we do with our SIEM product because we understand that when we get an alert from Vectra we actually need to do something about it."

"One of the most valuable features of the platform is its ability to provide you with aggregated risk scores based on impact and certainty of threats being detected. This is both applied to individual and host detections. This is important because it enables us to use this platform to prioritize the most likely imminent threats. So, it reduces alert fatigue follow ups for security operation center analysts. It also provides us with an ability to prioritize limited resources."

"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."

"It's easy to manage, and I love the UX. It's very well designed. When we are looking for something, it's quite easy to find it."

"The solution's ability to reduce alerts, by rolling up numerous alerts to create a single incident or campaign, helps in that it collapses all the events to a particular host, or a particular detection to a set of hosts. So it doesn't generate too many alerts. By and large, whatever alerts it generates are actionable, and actionable within the day."

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

"Vectra AI can bring the ability to detect intrusion on the network more so than legacy IDS tools."

"The administrative privilege detection feature is the most valuable feature. The admin accounts are often highly accessible to the high-risk component of the environment. If those accounts are compromised or are being used in a suspicious manner, that's high-fidelity events for us to look into."

More Vectra AI pros

Cons

"They can enhance the interface of the product. They can make it more interactive and also easier to use for feature access."

"The solution’s architecture is complex and difficult to understand. There are multiple machines and VMs."

"Machine learning could be a good improvement, but it's very costly."

"In the next release, building a graphical user interface would be helpful."

"Corelight hasn’t added features in a long time."

"We have a lot of system solutions and integrations with system solutions. Vectra is a type of black box. It implements AI-informed detection mechanisms, but we cannot create system detections. I understand that the product is designed this way, but it would be great if we could create our own detections as well."

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

"If you hit a certain number of rules, triage filters, or groups, the UX responds more slowly. However, we have a complex network and a lot of rules. So, our setup might not be a typical implementation example. We even had UX engineers onsite, and they looked at issues, improvements, and user feedback. Since then, it has gotten a lot better, they even built in features that we specifically requested for our company."

"In education as a sector, we are looking at AI a lot in terms of how it can be used as part of the teaching and learning side of things. It would be great to have Vectra AI look at a better way to enhance the security posture related to the AI tools in our portfolio."

"We are using SMB 3.0, which is an encrypted protocol. When we get some alerts or something, we cannot go deep into the protocol to see what's wrong because it's encrypted. We need to decrypt the protocol in another way, which is quite difficult. We might go back to SMB 2.0 just for this reason, but that's not a good solution."

"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."

"In comparison with a lot of systems I used in the past, the false positives are really a burden because they are taking a lot of time at this moment."

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

More Vectra AI cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

"It's a yearly fee and depends on what you are looking for."

"From a pricing perspective, they are very commercially competitive. From a licensing perspective, just be conscious that some of their future cloud solutions come with additional subscriptions. Also, if you're outside of the US, you will get charged freight for the device back to your country."

"The license is based on the concurrent IP addresses that it's investigating. We have 9,800 to 10,000 IP addresses."

"It is an expensive solution, but it's not the most expensive we've seen. We also know how much we're going to pay, unlike with some other providers where all of a sudden our license explodes."

"The pricing is high."

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

"The licensing is on an annual basis."

"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."

"The solution is low-cost and affordable."

More Vectra AI pricing and cost advice

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Answers from the Community

Mazin Al-Shuaili

Head Of Retail Operations at a financial services firm with 201-500 employees

Jun 9, 2020

What is the biggest difference between Corelight and Vectra AI?

2 out of 5 answers

JJennifer Geisler

Chief Marketing Officer at Vectra

Feb 13, 2020

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 data lake. You then rely on an open-source community for things like detections. Vectra not only does that – but also enriches the underlying data. It is also delivered as an investigative workbench that includes out-of-box detections that highlight and prioritize attacker behaviors and campaigns. Perhaps just as importantly, Corelight has few integrations whereas Vectra natively integrates with parts of infrastructure like EDR, orchestration and network security products.

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OseremeOsobase

Director at Baverianvine

Feb 13, 2020

I would recommend you look at Darktrace instead. Extrahop and the new kid on the block, Awake security are also recommended.

Read full answer

See all 5 answers

Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Financial Services Firm

15%

Government

12%

Computer Software Company

12%

Manufacturing Company

Financial Services Firm

13%

Computer Software Company

12%

Manufacturing Company

Government

Company Size

By reviewers

Large Enterprise

Midsize Enterprise

Small Business

No data available

Questions from the Community

What is the biggest difference between Corelight and Vectra AI?

What do you like most about Corelight?

It's easy to create additional dashboards specific to supporting specific tasks.

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Corelight?

The solution is too expensive compared to others. If you have the technical knowledge, it's good. Corelight is a very big gap between you and others if you’re new.

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.

What needs improvement with Vectra AI?

There are several features found in ExtraHop that are not present in Vectra AI. These include the ability to view graphs of endpoints contacting other endpoints and the bandwidth utilization in the...

ExtraHop Reveal(x) vs Corelight

Comparisons

Darktrace vs Corelight

Compared 26% of the time

Compared 21% of the time

Cisco Secure Network Analytics vs Corelight

Compared 7% of the time

Arista NDR vs Corelight

Compared 6% of the time

ExtraHop Reveal(x) 360 vs Corelight

Compared 5% of the time

More Corelight Competitors

Darktrace vs Vectra AI

Compared 30% of the time

ExtraHop Reveal(x) vs Vectra AI

Compared 11% of the time

Cisco Secure Network Analytics vs Vectra AI

Compared 5% of the time

Arista NDR vs Vectra AI

Compared 5% of the time

Fortinet FortiNDR vs Vectra AI

Compared 4% of the time

More Vectra AI Competitors

Product Reports

Network Detection and Response (NDR)

Download Corelight product report

Download Vectra AI product report

Also Known As

No data available

Vectra Networks, Vectra AI NDR

Overview

Corelight is the most powerful network visibility solution for information security professionals. We provide real-time data that organizations use to understand, detect, and prevent cyber attacks. Our solution is built on Zeek, the powerful and widely-used open source monitoring framework.

Corelight

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

Education First

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

Corelight vs. Vectra AI