We performed a comparison between Sophos UTM and Vectra AI based on real PeerSpot user reviews.
Find out what your peers are saying about Sophos, Cisco, WatchGuard and others in Unified Threat Management (UTM)."The most valuable feature of Sophos UTM is reporting, it is flexible. I can monitor the end user's devices, even when they are not on my network. It has good drill-down capabilities."
"It helped to connect our satellite offices to the main Amazon infrastructure in a circular way."
"The cost of the solution is very reasonable."
"The stability, overall, is excellent. I haven't had a problem in the last two years."
"An easy solution to learn because the graphics are very intuitive."
"It now controls all the security aspects of our web servers with Sophos UTM WAF."
"The most valuable features of Sophos UTM are the ease of use, it is very user-friendly. You can understand what they implement in the new firmware, and it's easy to manage the firewalls."
"It's a stable solution."
"It gives you access, with Recall, to instant visibility into your network through something like a SIEM solution. For us, being able to correlate all of this network data without having to manage it, has provided immediate value. It gives us the ability to really work on the stuff where I and my team have expertise, instead of having to manage a SIEM solution..."
"Vectra is very compatible with various cloud providers, such as Amazon and Azure AD. This is helpful as customers often migrate their network infrastructure to the cloud."
"What I like best about Vectra AI is that it alerts you about suspicious activities."
"The key feature for me for Detect for Office 365 is that it can also concentrate all the information and detection at one point, the same as the network solution does. This is the key feature for me because, while accessing data from Office 365 is possible using Microsoft interfaces, they are not really user-friendly and are quite confusing to use. But Detect for Office 365 is aggregating all the info, and it's only the interesting stuff."
"The solution's ability to reduce alerts, by rolling up numerous alerts to create a single incident or campaign, helps in that it collapses all the events to a particular host, or a particular detection to a set of hosts. So it doesn't generate too many alerts. By and large, whatever alerts it generates are actionable, and actionable within the day."
"Cognito Streams gives you a detailed view of what happens in the network in the form of rich metadata. It is just a super easy way to capture network traffic for important protocols, giving us an advantage. This is very helpful on a day-to-day basis."
"The solution is currently used as a central threat detection and response system."
"Some valuable features of Vectra AI are that it is very intuitive and that there are only a small amount of false positives. Therefore, it's an effective solution."
"We would like to have unique viewable IDs for rules and in the packet filter logfile, for easier debugging of old log files."
"Sophos UTM could be simplified, and they can improve on the many other features, like SD-WAN and load balancing. Sophos UTM is missing a few features that their competitors have. For example, if you have multiple branches you would like to connect, the load balancing features aren't available on multilink. If we create a VPM for multiple LAN links, we cannot load balance the traffic."
"Updates come out agonizingly slowly, a trickle."
"An area for improvement in Sophos UTM is load balancing because my company cannot use it currently. If Sophos could release a new configuration for the load balancing feature to work for my company, that would be great."
"There's an issue that when we deploy UTM on fiber, it automatically upgrades to the latest version without giving an option to stay on the current one."
"The management suite is easy and the agent is easy to develop."
"I didn't like it much. It suits only small businesses. It isn't scalable and reliable. There is a very critical issue with the power supply."
"We didn’t find any issues but I know there have been some in the last few years."
"The UI/UX and detection could be improved. More detections of specific security events could be useful. We've had a few incidents that were not detected by Vectra. The teams are working on it right now, but more detection is always better."
"What is most important for us is to have one place where we can manage a few brains because we are based on a zero-trust network. As a result, each customer needs to have a separate brain. For the SOC team, we need to have one place where the SOC analyst can go to visit the website and from that site manage all of the customers. Right now, Vectra AI doesn't have this capability, and I would really like to have this feature."
"It does a little bit of packet capture on alert so you can look at the packet capture activity going on, but it doesn't collect a whole lot of data. Sometimes it's only one or two frames, sometimes it does collect more. That's why they have the addition of their Recall platform, because that really does help expand the capability."
"There is room for improvement in the documentation. We would like to have more details on how it detects what we see."
"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."
"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."
"The solution's marketing is not good."
"They use a proprietary logging format that is probably 90% similar to Bro Logs. Their biggest area of improvement is finishing out the remaining 10%. That 10% might not be beneficial to their ML engine, but that's fine. The industry standard is Zeek Logs or Bro Logs, or Bro or Zeek, depending on how old you are. While they have 90% of those fields, they're still missing some fields. In very rare instances, some community rules do not have the fields that they need, and we had to modify community rules for our logs. So, their biggest area of improvement would be to just finish their matching of the Zeek standard."
Sophos UTM is ranked 1st in Unified Threat Management (UTM) with 110 reviews while Vectra AI is ranked 2nd in Intrusion Detection and Prevention Software (IDPS) with 40 reviews. Sophos UTM is rated 8.4, while Vectra AI is rated 8.6. The top reviewer of Sophos UTM writes "It's a highly stable platform with very few hardware issues". On the other hand, the top reviewer of Vectra AI writes "Integrates well with other security solutions and provides good technical support". Sophos UTM is most compared with Netgate pfSense, Fortinet FortiGate, Sophos XG, OPNsense and Palo Alto Networks NG Firewalls, whereas Vectra AI is most compared with Darktrace, ExtraHop Reveal(x), Cisco Secure Network Analytics, Arista NDR and Corelight.
We monitor all Unified Threat Management (UTM) 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.
