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Security Onion vs Snare comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Oct 9, 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

Security Onion
Ranking in Log Management
29th
Average Rating
7.2
Reviews Sentiment
7.1
Number of Reviews
4
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
Snare
Ranking in Log Management
48th
Average Rating
8.0
Reviews Sentiment
7.4
Number of Reviews
3
Ranking in other categories
Security Information and Event Management (SIEM) (56th)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of June 2026, in the Log Management category, the mindshare of Security Onion is 2.0%, down from 5.3% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Snare is 1.0%, up from 0.3% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Log Management Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
Security Onion2.0%
Snare1.0%
Other97.0%
Log Management
 

Featured Reviews

HJ
Manager at teshama
Centralized threat monitoring has improved visibility but demands complex setup and configuration
The best features Security Onion offers include acting as the intrusion detection system in my organization and helping me to address traffic, logs, and events happening within the organization. Since Security Onion is an open-source system that integrates with tools like Suricata and Zeek with the ELK stack, it enables threat detection and response capabilities, delivering high-level security measures at a cost, making it suitable for businesses of varying skill levels. These integrations with Suricata and Zeek have greatly impacted our workflow and our team's effectiveness by helping us address issues such as identifying intrusions, evaluating threats, and overseeing log files. This tool is very cost-effective, making it suitable for any size of organization wanting to use it.
Frank Eargle - PeerSpot reviewer
Information Security Engineer at Glasshouse Systems
A highly scalable solution that is easy to manage and super easy to set up
We use Snare for picking up Windows logs, and we used to use it for SQL as well. We had used it for Linux once or twice. We're mainly using it for Windows and Windows flat files The most valuable feature of Snare is flexibility or the ability to filter all things you don't want and don't have…

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 of Security Onion for security monitoring is its ability to find infected ports."
"We use Security Onion for internal vulnerability assessment."
"Security Onion has positively impacted my organization by greatly improving our security posture, making alert triage easier to handle, simplifying the analysis of threats, and decreasing the cost of threat analysis and detection."
"Security Onion is the most mature solution in the market."
"Snare has good agents, especially for Windows."
"The best thing about Snare is its format and consistency."
"The most valuable feature of Snare is flexibility or the ability to filter all things you don't want and don't have security value."
 

Cons

"Security Onion's user interface could be improved."
"The initial setup of the solution is a little bit difficult."
"For Security Onion, setting up and configuring the system can be quite challenging for newcomers due to the need for a grasp of networking and security concepts."
"The product is not easy to learn."
"Users will initially find it difficult to identify the event types and installation in Snare."
"The solution is now developing a SIEM-like feature on Snare Central Server, but it's not complete yet."
"Snare should modernize its GUI a little bit."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"Security Onion is a free solution."
"It is an open-source solution."
"Security Onion is an open-source solution."
"On a scale from one to ten, where one is cheap, and ten is expensive, I rate Snare's pricing a four out of ten."
"Snare has reasonable pricing."
"Snare is a cheap solution because a lot of customers are using it."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
University
12%
Comms Service Provider
11%
Government
10%
Computer Software Company
7%
Financial Services Firm
15%
Outsourcing Company
9%
Manufacturing Company
8%
Healthcare Company
8%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
No data available
No data available
 

Comparisons

 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Information Not Available
Military, Defence and Security Agencies, Banking Finance and Insurance companies, Retail, Health and Utilities.
Find out what your peers are saying about Security Onion vs. Snare and other solutions. Updated: June 2026.
900,644 professionals have used our research since 2012.