Plixer Scrutinizer vs Vectra AI comparison

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Plixer Logo
865 views|334 comparisons
92% willing to recommend
Vectra AI Logo
9,334 views|4,360 comparisons
100% willing to recommend
Comparison Buyer's Guide
Executive Summary

We performed a comparison between Plixer Scrutinizer and Vectra AI based on real PeerSpot user reviews.

Find out in this report how the two Network Traffic Analysis (NTA) solutions compare in terms of features, pricing, service and support, easy of deployment, and ROI.
To learn more, read our detailed Plixer Scrutinizer vs. Vectra AI Report (Updated: March 2024).
768,578 professionals have used our research since 2012.
Featured Review
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 features of the solution are the ability to track what a device is doing and to go back historically. It is also able to go down to, and identify, very low levels of traffic.""It helps us determine what is going on with our Internet and who is hogging it all up. If we get a real high throughput or a throughput that's going over and getting dropped fairly quickly, we can tell who (or what device) is consuming that traffic.""One feature I found most valuable in Plixer Scrutinizer is the very extensive reporting. Reporting is very flexible, though sometimes you need a little bit of support from Plixer Scrutinizer to create custom-made reporting in a very short time. Reporting is a very strong feature of the product.""We didn't experience any bugs.""Plixer Scrutinizer is an affordable product. Plixer Scrutinizer is a tool that allows for customization, especially in scenarios where customers need new product features.""The reporting and generating troubleshooting reports would be the best feature; our host-to-host conversation reporting.""The most valuable features of Plixer Scrutinizer are its ease of use, accessibility, and UI.""It's agnostic as far as what your network gear is. As long as it supports an sFlow, JFlow, NetFlow, some kind of flow monitoring, Plixer will support it very well."

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"Vectra AI generates relevant information.""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.""Vectra AI can bring the ability to detect intrusion on the network more so than legacy IDS tools.""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.""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 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.""What I like best about Vectra AI is that it alerts you about suspicious activities.""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."

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Cons
"For updating the Scrutinizer platform, when we have the actual data, it never happens in one day. Every time we have the data, we are obliged to install a new server in order to integrate the old data, and every time it has a problem. Most of the time, we were obliged to scrap all the data because we couldn't transfer it to the new server. So, it would be very good if they could improve this part.""Though Plixer Scrutinizer has network detection and response, it's an area that needs just a little more rounding out. Another room for improvement in the solution is its lack of SaaS offering which some customers were looking for. My company deals in small to medium businesses, mid-market, and some customers wanted the SaaS feature which Plixer Scrutinizer doesn't offer. What I'd like to see in the next release of the solution is for it to have a SaaS offering because my company also deals with educational spaces and smaller businesses that just don't have the staff that can implement this. If there's either a managed service or SaaS-based offering to just make it a little easier for those types of customers, it would be a great addition to Plixer Scrutinizer.""The reporting structure, the front-end GUI, also needs some work. It needs some getting used to. It works fairly well, but it's a technical tool rather than a user tool. You have to understand the structure of the databases before you can really use it.""We couldn't get it set up properly.""From what I understand it is that the solution is not very scalable in a high volume traffic environment with a large number of flows.""Data retention needs improvement. Data retention is a thing where we are looking for a better way to collect flow data for a longer time to do forensic research on security incidents. By default, data retention is quite low. We need detailed data in safe storage for a longer time, e.g., for a couple of months. An improvement would be a way to export data into a secure long-term storage.""In Plixer Scrutinizer, scalability is an area with minor concerns where improvements are required.""There was a price lift because previously the product was privately owned, and now there is some external capital in the organization, so pricing could be lower, though, for Plixer Scrutinizer, there is almost no competition at this price point."

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"I would like to see a bit more strategic metrics instead of technical data. Information that I could show to my executive management team or board would be valuable.""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.""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.""ExtraHop has better features that seem more advantageous when compared to Vectra.""We would like to see more information with the syslogs. The syslogs that they send to our SIEM are a bit short compared to what you can see. It would be helpful if they send us more data that we can incorporate into our SIEM, then can correlate with other events.""One area where there's room for improvement is the absence of a comprehensive TCP recording and replay feature.""The rules for threats are not always precise and Vectra AI should improve this.""The solution's marketing is not good."

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Pricing and Cost Advice
  • "Compared to some of the other tools we have, it's incredibly reasonably priced."
  • "Our entire solution, amortized over five years, is in the vicinity of $40,000 to $50,000 a year."
  • "We pay our one-off cost for the licenses, per device, in blocks of 50. And then we pay an annual maintenance fee of about $15,000 Australian, which is, at this point in time, about $9,000 US, for those 250 devices. The upfront costs for the 250-license use, were about $50,000 Australian, which is about $32,000 US."
  • "The license is per device. We have 50 devices."
  • "We just renewed. The pricing is 5,000 euro per year. This is the final price. All tax (20 percent) is included."
  • "We have increased the license over time. We have added more licenses as the network has grown."
  • "There is a recurring maintenance fee after the initial purchase or if we want the license upgrade."
  • "There are no extra costs. It's about $8,000 a year. The bang for the buck (cost) is definitely a plus."
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  • "We are running at about 90,000 pounds per year. The solution is a licensed cost. The hardware that they gave us was pretty much next to nothing. It is the license that we're paying for."
  • "The license is based on the concurrent IP addresses that it's investigating. We have 9,800 to 10,000 IP addresses."
  • "There are additional features that can be purchased in addition to the standard licensing fee, such as Cognito Recall and Stream."
  • "We have a desire to increase our use. However, it all comes down to budget. It's a very expensive tool that is very difficult to prove business support for. We would like to have two separate networks. We have our corporate network and PCI network, which is segregated due to payment processing. We don't have it for deployed in the PCI network. It would be good to have it fully deployed there to provide us with additional monitoring and control, but the cost associated with their licensing model makes it prohibitively expensive to deploy."
  • "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 pricing is very good. It's less expensive than many of the tools out there."
  • "The pricing is high."
  • "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."
  • More Vectra AI Pricing and Cost Advice →

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    Questions from the Community
    Top Answer:Plixer Scrutinizer is an affordable product. Plixer Scrutinizer is a tool that allows for customization, especially in scenarios where customers need new product features.
    Top Answer:I rate Plixer Scrutinizer's price a three on a scale of one to ten, where one is low price or affordable, and ten is high price or expensive.
    Top Answer:I don't have deep enough knowledge to comment on what requires improvements in Plixer Scrutinizer. In Plixer Scrutinizer, scalability is an area with minor concerns where improvements are required.
    Top Answer: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… more »
    Top Answer:Vectra AI generates relevant information.
    Top Answer:It's relatively on the pricier side, but when compared to other solutions. It's not the most budget-friendly option, but it can be considered somewhat more cost-effective in comparison to other… more »
    Ranking
    Views
    865
    Comparisons
    334
    Reviews
    3
    Average Words per Review
    769
    Rating
    8.3
    Views
    9,334
    Comparisons
    4,360
    Reviews
    20
    Average Words per Review
    772
    Rating
    8.3
    Comparisons
    Also Known As
    Vectra Networks, Vectra AI NDR
    Learn More
    Overview

    The Scrutinizer incident response system leverages network traffic analytics to provide active monitoring, visualization, and reporting of network and security incidents. The system quickly delivers the rich forensic data needed by IT professionals to support fast and efficient incident response.

    Vectra threat detection and response is a complete cybersecurity platform that collects, detects, and prioritizes security alerts. The Cognito platform for Network Detection and Response (NDR) detects and responds to attacks inside cloud, data center, Internet of Things, and enterprise networks. The platform also provides automated response capabilities for low-level threats and escalates more severe anomalies to security personnel.

    Cognito captures data for multiple relevant sources and enriches it with context and security insights. It starts by deploying sensors across different networks in datacenters, IoT, or enterprise networks. The algorithm extracts relevant metadata from network and cloud traffic. The information can also be non-security information that can help investigation. 

    The data is enriched with security context to support critical use cases, such as threat detection, investigation, hunting and compliance. The platform is machine learning-based, which enables it to adapt to any new and current threat scenario. It detects, clusters, prioritizes, and anticipates attacks by using identity and host-level enforcement. 

    With the Vectra platform, a person can investigate 50 threats in just two hours. By prioritizing alerts and leveraging threat intelligence, it provides faster results.Vectra solves today’s security challenges for network detection and response. 

    One of Vectra’s best features is the emphasis they put in pairing research and data science for security insights. It offers behavior codification with unsupervised, supervised, and deep learning models. 

    The pricing is according to a subscription model with a free trial available.Vectra is available for Office 365, Azure AD and AWS Brain.

    Features of Vectra AI

    • AI-based threat detection and response. 
    • Detects attacks in real time with behavior-based threat detection. 
    • Consolidates and correlates thousands of events, detecting threats. 
    • Enriches threat investigation with a chain of evidence and data science security insights. 
    • Machine learning techniques, including deep learning and neural networks. 
    • Gives visibility into cyberattackers and analyzes all network traffic. 
    • Continuous updates with new threat detection algorithms. 
    • Provides encryption at rest and in transit. For the AWS version, it offers AES-256 encryption via AWS Key Management Service. 
    • Guaranteed availability according to the SLA of the service selected. 
    • Does not connect to public sector networks. 

    Benefits of Vectra AI

    • Behavioral models use AI to find unknown attackers. 
    • Context increases the accuracy of threat hunting. 
    • Allows for proactive action by prioritizing the most relevant information. 
    • Provides a clear picture and extensive context for investigations. 
    • Aids decision-making in the incident response process. 
    • Helps working with large datasets by capturing metadata at scale. 
    • Automates time-consuming analysis. 
    • Reduces the security analysts’ workloads on threat investigations. 

    Other advantages of Vectra services include that they can be deployed in the public, private, or hybrid cloud. Support is available via email or online ticketing with an average of 4 hours of response. Phone support is available 24/7. 

    Vectra provides full on-site and online training and documentation. Regarding the user interface, it supports several types of web browsers, such as Internet Explorer, Microsoft Edge, Firefox, Chrome, Safari and Opera. However, it is not available for mobile devices.

    Reviews from Real Users

    Here’s what PeerSpot users of Vectra AI have to say about it:

    "One of the core features is that Vectra AI triages threats and correlates them with compromised host devices. From a visibility perspective, we can better track the threat across the network. Instead of us potentially finding one device that has been impacted without Vectra AI, it will give us the visibility of everywhere that threat went. Therefore, visibility has increased for us." - Dave W., Operations Manager at a healthcare company

    "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.” - T.S., Senior Security Engineer at a manufacturing company

    Sample Customers
    Oxford Networks, Squaw Valley Ski Holdings, UltiSat, Wipro, West Aurora School District 129, SUNY Geneseo College, Bloomington Public Schools, First National Bank of Pennsylvania, Kitsap Credit Union, Metropolitan Transit Authority of Harris County Houston Texas, Carilion Clinic, Banner Health, IDEXX Laboratories, Phibro Animal Health Corporation, Goodwill Industries, Parmalat, Armstrong Coal Company, Flybe, James Walker
    Tribune Media Group, Barry University, Aruba Networks, Good Technology, Riverbed, Santa Clara University, Securities Exchange, Tri-State Generation and Transmission Association
    Top Industries
    REVIEWERS
    Financial Services Firm20%
    Retailer20%
    Comms Service Provider20%
    Government10%
    VISITORS READING REVIEWS
    Computer Software Company13%
    Government11%
    Financial Services Firm10%
    Manufacturing Company8%
    REVIEWERS
    Financial Services Firm17%
    Manufacturing Company11%
    University11%
    Mining And Metals Company8%
    VISITORS READING REVIEWS
    Computer Software Company16%
    Financial Services Firm12%
    Government8%
    Manufacturing Company6%
    Company Size
    REVIEWERS
    Small Business29%
    Midsize Enterprise14%
    Large Enterprise57%
    VISITORS READING REVIEWS
    Small Business20%
    Midsize Enterprise10%
    Large Enterprise70%
    REVIEWERS
    Small Business15%
    Midsize Enterprise23%
    Large Enterprise63%
    VISITORS READING REVIEWS
    Small Business22%
    Midsize Enterprise14%
    Large Enterprise65%
    Buyer's Guide
    Plixer Scrutinizer vs. Vectra AI
    March 2024
    Find out what your peers are saying about Plixer Scrutinizer vs. Vectra AI and other solutions. Updated: March 2024.
    768,578 professionals have used our research since 2012.

    Plixer Scrutinizer is ranked 9th in Network Traffic Analysis (NTA) with 15 reviews while Vectra AI is ranked 2nd in Network Traffic Analysis (NTA) with 40 reviews. Plixer Scrutinizer is rated 8.6, while Vectra AI is rated 8.6. The top reviewer of Plixer Scrutinizer writes "Advanced reporting runs analytics on NetFlow and provides signature-based recognition of problems in the network environment". On the other hand, the top reviewer of Vectra AI writes "Integrates well with other security solutions and provides good technical support". Plixer Scrutinizer is most compared with SolarWinds NetFlow Traffic Analyzer, Flowmon , ManageEngine NetFlow Analyzer and Cisco Secure Network Analytics, whereas Vectra AI is most compared with Darktrace, ExtraHop Reveal(x), Cisco Secure Network Analytics, Arista NDR and Corelight. See our Plixer Scrutinizer vs. Vectra AI report.

    See our list of best Network Traffic Analysis (NTA) vendors.

    We monitor all Network Traffic Analysis (NTA) reviews to prevent fraudulent reviews and keep review quality high. We do not post reviews by company employees or direct competitors. We validate each review for authenticity via cross-reference with LinkedIn, and personal follow-up with the reviewer when necessary.