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NetWitness Platform vs USM Anywhere comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Sep 18, 2024

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

NetWitness Platform
Ranking in Log Management
37th
Ranking in Security Information and Event Management (SIEM)
29th
Average Rating
7.4
Reviews Sentiment
7.4
Number of Reviews
37
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
USM Anywhere
Ranking in Log Management
46th
Ranking in Security Information and Event Management (SIEM)
31st
Average Rating
8.4
Reviews Sentiment
7.0
Number of Reviews
115
Ranking in other categories
Endpoint Detection and Response (EDR) (52nd), Compliance Management (13th)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of July 2025, in the Security Information and Event Management (SIEM) category, the mindshare of NetWitness Platform is 0.6%, down from 0.7% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of USM Anywhere is 0.9%, down from 1.5% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Security Information and Event Management (SIEM)
 

Featured Reviews

MOTASHIM Al Razi - PeerSpot reviewer
It is a stable solution, but they should make the user interface easier to understand
The solution's initial setup takes work. We have to organize multiple paths and many features. The deployment process takes less than a week. But it takes a month to complete if we want to make the solution smarter by integrating it with various devices. I rate the process as a six out of ten.
Kris Nawani - PeerSpot reviewer
Offers complete coverage without the need to install additional software
USM Anywhere is used for threat detection and investigation. It provides a solution with built-in threat intelligence and various other investigation tools The solution offers complete coverage without the need to install additional software, as it is maintained by the vendor. It helps in saving…

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"NetWitness Platform offers flexibility for deployment and robust integration capabilities."
"The most valuable features are the threat prediction and network forensics."
"It gives the ability to investigate into network traffic in the Net and the organization what we couldn't do before."
"The most valuable features are the packet inspection and the automated incident response."
"Offers a good wireless feature."
"The development of use cases on the SSA console is quite user friendly. This means that the security analyst or the researcher does not have to learn another language."
"In my opinion, the solution's most valuable feature is its capacity to monitor network traffic, logs from devices within the network, and network captures. This capability extends beyond logs to include full network capturing."
"It's fully scalable. There is no limit. Of course, the license limits per day the number of terabytes. In my opinion, it's very flexible."
"It has streamlined log aggregation and analysis to meet organizational and regulatory needs."
"The dashboards are very descriptive and contain just the right amount of information. The activity alarms and events contain a plethora of data that is very descriptive and useful."
"It brought our logs into one place for review and set up alarms based on changes we were missing due to lack of having one place for everything to go."
"As we have to service several servers, we can manage them in a economical way, which is beneficial to our team and business."
"AlienVault's reporting is good. I like that vulnerability assessment is part of the solution, and the UI is intuitive. Also, the overhead is low, which is to say we don't need a dedicated SOC team to manage and analyze things constantly. We're a small company that doesn't have those resources."
"The Event Correlation and vulnerability scans have been the most useful. As a 24/7 SOC, we use the incoming alarms to give an overview of suspicious traffic going through the network. It's easy to look at the correlated events and see the broad picture of traffic for that customer. Vulnerability scans are good for providing patch and remediation guidelines to keep customer systems secure."
"We're using it more for reporting, that's all. We're using it to help our customers to pass any kind of audits that they receive."
"Asset discovery seems to be good."
 

Cons

"The solution should have more integration capabilities with different platforms."
"I'd like to see improvement in its ease of use. It's basically unusable. It's overly complex."
"The system looks like it is a mix of a bunch of different systems, and nothing looked like it was quite together."
"The user interface is a little bit difficult for new users and it needs to be improved."
"It should have a monitoring feature. It would help us analyze the current state of attacks faster from a single platform."
"There are instances where you try to run the reports and then it does not give you the desired outcome."
"Its technical support could be better."
"The documentation is not as structured as I would like, personally, and I think that it can be improved and made much more user-friendly."
"Windows log collection works with HIDS, but documentation is sparse and confusing."
"Plugins could be better utilized, as some of them do not recognize all logs."
"The vulnerability reporting needs to have options to be able to sort or customize the output."
"AT&T AlienVault USM can improve searchable data. It should be available for more than 90 days. If you need more than 90 days of data, you have to put a request and they give you raw data, which is not easy to search. A good addition would be to allow users to search data older than 90 days."
"There could be some type of integration with our existing portal. We have our own customer portals, and it would be good if there was an integration so that our portal can provide reports. There could be some type of API into the AlienVault system with the USM system so that it is easy to show the customers high-level reports of the system through our portal."
"they seem to have bugs from time to time that go unfixed for a while and that is frustrating. I'm not saying the product needs to be bug-free, but they need to be responsive to bugs."
"For creating new rules, you have to be familiar with regular expressions. I feel there could be something built-in to make sure that process is easier."
"Search performance can be slow. The Raw Logs feature is painfully slow. And if we're talking about the newer, the Anywhere product, you can't even schedule reports on the thing. There are probably a dozen other features I'd really like to see there, but that would be one of the biggies."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"We have a perpetual license, so the total cost of ownership is not very expensive. It's a good investment."
"Compared to the competition, the is price is not that high."
"It is cheap."
"This is a pricey solution; it's not cheap."
"We are on an annual license for the use of the solution."
"We have yearly licensing costs. The license fee can be based on the volume of EPS. Some organizations may have, as a gentlemanly gesture, 10,000 EPS and get a 3,000 EPS license but actually use 5,000 EPS."
"The NetWitness Platform may be affordable only for enterprise-level customers, as it may not be within the budget of small and medium-sized businesses."
"In comparison to other SIEM solutions such as Splunk, NetWitness is less costly."
"Its price is in the medium to upper range."
"The pricing is a good value. The key thing is that for the new product, the licensing of it, is subscription-based and it's based on data. Clients need to be really careful when thinking about that, because odds are they're going to need to put a lot more data into it than what they initially estimate, which is going to drive their subscription costs up."
"I don't know exactly, but I know it is based on the number of logs and the retention duration, such as 30 days or something like that. So, the smallest package is about 500 a month for 30 days of logs. There is a virtual machine. You need resources for it. It is a log collecting VM. They provide the software, and you just have to load a virtual machine. So, you're going to incur some CPU RAM and storage for wherever this log collecting appliance is running, which typically is in our cloud and on our platform for the customer."
"We ran a few PoCs. The price and feature set were the best with AlienVault."
"Do the one month trial and try to work out the kinks during it, as it has free support and service hours."
"​The price point is good.​"
"They charge a license based on the storage. ATT AlienVault USM is a less expensive solution than IBM QRadar."
"Pricing is very competitive with other products and you get much more functionality from AlienVault."
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Comparison Review

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Feb 26, 2015
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We at Infosecnirvana.com have done several posts on SIEM. After the Dummies Guide on SIEM, we are following it up with a SIEM Product Comparison – 101 deck. So, here it is for your viewing pleasure. Let me know what you think by posting your comments below. The key products compared here are…
 

Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
17%
Computer Software Company
17%
Manufacturing Company
6%
Government
5%
Computer Software Company
19%
Financial Services Firm
10%
Comms Service Provider
8%
Educational Organization
6%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
 

Questions from the Community

What do you like most about NetWitness Platform?
The product's initial setup phase was not at all difficult.
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for NetWitness Platform?
The pricing is comparable to others, and I consider the cost to be intermediate. Specific cost details are unknown to me.
What needs improvement with NetWitness Platform?
There is currently no need for improvement in the SIEM ( /categories/security-information-and-event-management-siem ), though there could be potential enhancements by integrating with AI.
What do you like most about AT&T AlienVault USM?
The most valuable feature of the solution is the ease of deployment that it provides to users. The integrations that the product has with third-party applications are useful.
What needs improvement with AT&T AlienVault USM?
There are scalability issues due to a 60 TB limit, which restricts its use for large customers like banks. It is also limited when used with bigger products and has complex password requirements.
 

Also Known As

RSA Security Analytics
AT&T AlienVault USM, AlienVault, AlienVault USM, Alienvault Cybersecurity
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Los Angeles World Airports, Reply
Abel & Cole, Bank of Ireland, Bluegrass Cellular, CareerBuilder, Claire's, Hays Medical Center, Hope International, McCurrach, McKinsey & Company, Party Delights, Pepco Holdings, Richland School District, Ricoh, SaveMart, Shake Shack, Steelcase, TaxAct, Taylor Morrison, Vonage and Zoom
Find out what your peers are saying about NetWitness Platform vs. USM Anywhere and other solutions. Updated: June 2025.
860,592 professionals have used our research since 2012.