IronNet Collective Defense Platform vs Vectra AI comparison

IronNet Collective Defense ...

Read 45 Vectra AI reviews

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97% willing to recommend

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Executive Summary

We performed a comparison between IronNet Collective Defense Platform and Vectra AI based on real PeerSpot user reviews.

Find out what your peers are saying about Darktrace, Vectra AI, Trend Micro and others in Network Detection and Response (NDR).

To learn more, read our detailed Network Detection and Response (NDR) Report (Updated: July 2025).

Network Detection and Response (NDR)

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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

IronNet Collective Defense ...

Ranking in Network Detection and Response (NDR)

24th

Average Rating

0.0

Reviews Sentiment

6.8

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

Network Traffic Analysis (NTA) (15th)

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) (19th), Identity Threat Detection and Response (ITDR) (10th), AI-Powered Cybersecurity Platforms (6th)

Mindshare comparison

As of August 2025, in the Network Detection and Response (NDR) category, the mindshare of IronNet Collective Defense Platform is 0.2%, down from 0.5% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Vectra AI is 16.0%, down from 17.2% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.

Network Detection and Response (NDR)

Featured Reviews

reviewer1468230

Founder and CEO at a tech services company with 51-200 employees

Easy to use, stable, and easy to install

We use this solution for the Ministry of Defense and the special agencies It adds value to our existing platform, and therefore our system becomes more important for the customer. The most valuable feature is the ease of use and the full reach of services. It's pretty decent, and I don't see…

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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

"The most valuable feature is the ease of use and the full reach of services."

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

"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 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."

"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."

"The solution is currently used as a central threat detection and response system."

"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."

"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."

"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."

More Vectra AI pros

Cons

"I would like to see it integrate with third-party systems."

"I think Vectra AI's automation, reporting, and integration could be improved."

"Integration with other security components needs improvement. It should have true integration as opposed to just being a separate pane of glass."

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

"A blind spot that I have is around the ease with which you can automate threat intervention."

"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."

"For S&D account scans, it would be easier if Vectra AI could triage with users. If a client uses a lot of accounts, then it could indicate that these accounts are benign, for example. That would help a lot."

"You are always limited with visibility on the host due to the fact that it is a network based tool. It gives you visibility on certain elements of the attack path, but it doesn't necessarily give you visibility on everything. Specifically, the initial intrusion side of things that doesn't necessarily see the initial compromise. It doesn't see stuff that goes on the host, such as where scripts are run. Even though you are seeing traffic, it doesn't necessarily see the malicious payload. Therefore, it's very difficult for it to identify these type of host-driven complex attacks."

"ExtraHop has better features that seem more advantageous when compared to Vectra."

More Vectra AI cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

"Licensing costs are yearly."

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

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

"The pricing is high."

"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."

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

"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."

"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."

"Its cost is too much. It's an investment that we can afford. It's a lot, but it's worth it."

More Vectra AI pricing and cost advice

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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

No data available

Financial Services Firm

13%

Computer Software Company

11%

Manufacturing Company

Government

Company Size

By reviewers

Large Enterprise

Midsize Enterprise

Small Business

No data available

Questions from the Community

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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 ...

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What do you like most about Vectra AI?

The solution is currently used as a central threat detection and response system.

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What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Vectra AI?

It is very acceptable when you compare it with Darktrace, for example.

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Comparisons

No data available

Darktrace vs Vectra AI

Compared 28% of the time

ExtraHop Reveal(x) vs Vectra AI

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

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Product Reports

Network Detection and Response (NDR)

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IronNet Collective Defense Platform report

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Also Known As

IronDefense, Iron Dome, Cyber Operations Center

Vectra Networks, Vectra AI NDR

Overview

When organizations collaborate to detect, share intelligence, and stop threats together in real time, they form a Collective Defense community. Discover how IronNet's Collective Defense platform – built on our IronDome and IronDefense products – enables organizations to realize the full benefits of this approach.

The IronNet Collective Defense Platform leverages advanced AI-driven Network Detection and Response (NDR) capabilities to detect and prioritize anomalous activity inside individual enterprise network environments. The platform analyzes threat detections across the community to identify broad attack patterns and provides anonymized intelligence back to all community members in real time, giving all members early insight into potential incoming attacks. See Collective Defense in action.

IronNet

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

Thomson Reuters

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

Network Detection and Response (NDR)