Comparison guide
Vectra AI vs. Darktrace
Stop cyberattacks fast with the platform that offers better support and more advanced AI.
Why choose Vectra AI over Darktrace?
With 12 AI patents and more references in MITRE D3FEND than any other vendor, Vectra AI finds attacks others can’t.
80%+ alert fidelity
Unlike Darktrace AI, which focuses on anomalies to show you what’s different, Vectra Attack Signal Intelligence™ reveals what’s critical. It reduces alert noise 80% or more so you can see and stop real attacks in real time.
4x more innovation
Darktrace has historically spent 87% of revenue on sales and marketing — and just 10% on R&D. Vectra invests 4x that amount in product innovation to push the boundaries of what’s possible with AI.
24x7x365 support
Darktrace customers are on their own, and the platform requires a lot of human tuning to work as advertised. With Vectra MXDR, skilled analyst reinforcements can completely offload the responsibility of stopping attacks from becoming breaches.
Industry-leading NDR
Analysts and peers agree — Attack Signal Intelligence makes Vectra AI the leading solution for network detection and response.
Gartner, Gartner Peer Insights Voice of the Customer': Network Detection and Response, Peer Contributors, August 30th, 2024.
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Featured Report
Attack Exposure Gap Analysis: Where Attackers Expose Beyond EDR and Firewall Controls
A gap analysis to understand threat exposure and identify actions to address the risks.
“[Vectra] is one of those rare products that works the way it’s supposed to.”
Senior Security Engineer
Major university healthcare system
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Compare Vectra AI to Darktrace
| Vectra AI | Darktrace | |
|---|---|---|
| Network | Limited | |
| Public Cloud | ||
| Identity | ||
| SaaS | ||
| Endpoint |
Attack coverage
Only Vectra AI provides complete visibility for the entire hybrid cloud attack surface by breaking down silos between data sources. It scales to 300,000 users and includes bidirectional endpoint integrations to optimize existing investments in EDR.
| Vectra AI | Darktrace | |
|---|---|---|
| Prioritize what is urgent | Limited | |
| Triage what is irrelevant | ||
| Detect attacker behavior | ||
| Managed extended detection with full-time analysts |
Signal Clarity
Only Vectra AI delivers AI-driven Attack Signal Intelligence and MXDR to alleviate security team analysts of the burden of tuning detections, and triaging and prioritizing events.
| Vectra AI | Darktrace | |
|---|---|---|
| Integrated Investigation with threat context | Limited | |
| Native Targeted Response / Containment | Limited | |
| Integrated Targeted Response / Containment | Limited | |
| Extended managed response / Containment services |
Intelligent Control
Only Vectra AI-enabled Operations provides the intelligent controls and flexibility security team analysts need to investigate and stop attacks at any stage of attack progression.
The difference between Vectra AI and Darktrace is clear
“Previously, we used Darktrace. There were so many false positives coming through, we found that we were neglecting it and not investigating the alerts. Vectra AI has helped me get my time back.”
Tony Whelton
Director IT, Wellington College
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How Vectra AI beats competitor Darktrace
Better attack coverage
Darktrace
Vectra provides detailed insights across on-premises, IoT/OT, cloud, and hybrid environments.
Scale to support as many as 300,000 users in a single platform without compromising performance or analytics integrity.
Darktrace
Darktrace is challenged to perform across hybrid, multi-site and enterprise scale.
With severe limitations on connections per minute — no more than 10,000 users — traffic can be dropped before throughput capacity is reached.
Vectra continuously analyzes network and cloud metadata in real-time.
Automatically detect threats, identity misuse, SaaS exploits and malware infiltration and infection without having to decrypt.
Darktrace
Darktrace log queries create detection latency and coverage gaps.
Darktrace offers cloud monitoring capabilities, but log queries are throttled by cloud providers creating detection latency and coverage gaps for attackers using eDiscovery and Power Automate.
Vectra offers bi-directional integrations with the top EDR vendors.
Use native integrations for Crowdstrike, SentinelOne, Microsoft Defender, CarbonBlack, Cybereason, and others to enrich context, workflow and response capabilities.
Darktrace
Darktrace integrates with EDR but it’s predominantly one-sided.
Darktrace integrations are built to improve alerts rather than supporting customers’ existing EDR and XDR investments.
Vectra’s managed extended services allows customers to have constant 24x7x365 coverage of all hybrid attack surfaces.
Vectra MXDR natively covers Network, Cloud, Identity, and SaaS. Through robust integrations, Vectra MXDR analysts can monitor and manage endpoints, specifically for CrowdStrike EDR, Microsoft Defender, and SentinelOne.
Darktrace
Darktrace does not offer managed services along with its platform.
Stronger signal clarity
Darktrace
Vectra delivers AI-driven threat detection and response in a single license.
Reduce load 10x without the need for complex rules. Self-tuning AI eliminates the need for constant input from security analysts. And it automates efforts behind prioritization, hunting and response to surface relevant attacker behavior only.
Darktrace
Darktrace anomaly-based rules overwhelm security team with massive amounts of alerts.
There's a dark side to Darktrace. Because it sends alerts for everything that’s different — instead of just what’s critical — analysts are forced to do the heavy lifting when differentiating benign activity from malicious attacks.
Vectra exposes the full narrative of attacks with advanced ML and AI-driven prioritization.
By correlating events that characterize the nature of an attack in layman's terms, security analysts get the full chronology, context and urgency of an active attack in progress.
Darktrace
Darktrace generates anomalous alerts and limits the incidents and detections revealed in Cyber AI Analyst.
Without full context on an attack, analysts spend a fair amount of time figuring out if anomalous means bad.
Vectra reduces false positives with AI-driven triage that allows operators to authorize discrete behaviors.
Authorized behaviors are still present but have no scoring impact, so operators don’t lose sight of what’s been allowed over time.
Darktrace
With Darktrace, defeat rules are complex for the operator.
While it’s possible to tune, creating defeat rules is complex and requires a large number for each module. The result is countless hours of error-prone work with no ability to audit.
More intelligent control
Darktrace
Vectra counters malicious activity in real time to stop threats early in the attack progression.
Whether it be ransomware, supply chain attacks, malicious hacks or identity takeovers, Vectra native response controls can isolate an endpoint or lock down an identity in record time. On top of Vectra’s native response controls, Vectra MXDR analysts can have constant 24x7x365 eyes on a customer’s security system and remotely respond and remediate to attacks.
Darktrace
Darktrace Antigena is only enabled for a handful of scenarios, so it's not as autonomous as their marketing claims.
If you want to expand it, the operator must add Antigena rules to thousands of models. If you choose to expand autonomous blocking, you may end up disrupting legitimate traffic for what are false positives.
Vectra provides security teams with the raw data they need.
Measure the efficacy of your people, processes and technology. Vectra makes it easy to see what’s being detected and how much time analysts spend hunting, assessing and remediating threats.
Darktrace
Darktrace uses their own undocumented metrics and reporting.
You’ll see how much processing their device has done and how much SOC analyst time is offloaded. But it doesn’t account for how many human hours go into tuning the product.
Vectra lets you establish your own desired GRC policies.
For critical Governance Risk and Compliance (GRC) applications, Vectra lets you establish your own GRC policies and alerts as needed. You can easily produce compliance reports, too.
Darktrace
Darktrace cannot report on policies like SMBv1 and expired Cert.
Darktrace alerts on limited low-level conditions, leaving operators with thousands of events to track as opposed to providing simple compliance reporting.
Frequently Asked Questions
How does Vectra AI compare to other NDR vendors?
Vectra AI is trusted by over 1,500 global enterprises, including many in the Fortune 500. Why? Because we focus on finding and stopping hybrid network attacks wherever they occur — from a host/machine, identity, or a combination of both. Our platform leverages over 150+ prebuilt behavior-based AI/ML models that identify attacker behaviors in real time. With 35 patents in AI-driven threat detection, we detect both known indicators of compromises (IOCs) and unknown threats (including zero-day exploits) — and map to over 90% of the MITRE ATT&CK Framework. In addition, Vectra AI has the highest ratings provided by customers. We are the only vendor named Customer's Choice in the 2024 Gartner® Peer Insights™ Voice of the Customer for Network Detection and Response.
How does Vectra AI recognize complex threats?
Vectra AI provides comprehensive visibility into the entire hybrid network infrastructure across network, identity, and cloud. We focus on all hybrid network traffic, regardless of the host or identity data source, to accurately distinguish between malicious behaviors and routine activities. We detect both known and unknown hybrid cloud threats by providing detailed insights into detection processes through enriched metadata, empowering security teams to understand all the data behind each alert. In addition, Vectra AI focuses on reducing the number of alerts by prioritizing the threats our AI detection models find to be critical and urgent. They must meet at least an 80% risk prioritization scoring threshold — unlike Darktrace’s much lower threshold, which causes more work and more alerts to sift through. Vectra AI looks for anomalies that show malicious intent, rather than simply what’s different, to stop the most advanced cyber attacks fast. This proactive approach enables you to detect emerging threats before they can cause significant harm.
How does Vectra AI correlate attacks across different environments?
Vectra AI’s Attack Signal Intelligence follows attackers as they progress across network, identity, cloud, and SaaS environments. It uses precise Host ID attribution for faster investigation and response, and classifies entities by importance for higher fidelity alerts that reduce false positives.
This unified view is designed to provide SOC teams with enriched, prioritized data for highly accurate insights on sophisticated attacks. It includes:
- The Respond view to streamline security analyst workflows with entity-centric prioritization
- Instant Investigations that automatically aggregate and contextualize attacks with enriched metadata
- The Discover dashboard for active network posture to help you prevent future attacks
How does Vectra AI address OT (Operational Technology) security?
Vectra AI delivers behavior-based AI detections for OT environments, providing visibility into lateral movement and privilege abuse across hybrid networks. These capabilities integrate seamlessly with existing OT solutions, enhancing overall detection and response without introducing silos or compromising operational efficiency.
Where does Vectra AI process and store customer data?
Vectra AI offers flexible deployment options to meet customer needs. Data can be processed and stored on-premises (including air gapped environments) or in the cloud, depending on your preferences. Vectra AI reliably detects command and control, exfiltration, brute force, recon, and lateral movement even when encryption is present by using AI to analyze the traffic patterns and identify attacker behaviors. This is done entirely passively, without any requirement for inline deployment. In addition, Vectra AI has a native ability to analyze encrypted traffic without needing to perform costly, intrusive, and complex decryption. Vectra AI also adheres to strict global compliance standards, including GDPR, CCPA, FFIEC, NYDFS, SEC, FINRA, and GLBA.
What support does Vectra AI offer outside the U.S.?
Vectra AI provides comprehensive service and support globally, with regional teams offering localized assistance. Our follow-the-sun support model ensures 24x7 availability to address customer needs promptly. This approach guarantees that customers worldwide receive timely and effective support, regardless of location.
Why your peers chose Vectra AI over Darktrace
Darktrace Reviews
“Great idea but not the best in real life scenario. Too much info and doesn't tell you what to do with it. You need a team of security folks to use this product.”
Read Darktrace review
“Looks pretty but overly complex in setting up automated tasks.”
Read Darktrace review
Vectra AI Reviews
“Honestly the best NDR I have ever used. I have deployed Vectra multiple times, and the support has been amazing. The architecture is shockingly simple for what it does, and produces a lack of noise compared to other leaders in this field."
Read Vectra AI review
“Vectra has helped our organization find the threats that all of our security vendor products combined could not.”
Read Vectra AI review