AlienVault OSSIM (discontinued) vs. Darktrace

Overview
ProductRatingMost Used ByProduct SummaryStarting Price
AlienVault OSSIM (discontinued)
Score 8.9 out of 10
N/A
AlienVault OSSIM was an open source Security Information and Event Management (SIEM). AlienVault was acquired by AT&T Cybersecurity, now LevelBlue, and OSSIM is no longer available for sale.N/A
Darktrace
Score 8.9 out of 10
N/A
Darktrace AI interrupts in-progress cyber-attacks, including ransomware, email phishing, and threats to cloud environments. It's able to detect and establish baselines for your organization so it can make the distinction between what is and what isn't normal network activity for your organization. This allows it to tackle complex cyber-attacks as they happen and prevent future cyber-attacks from happening.N/A
Pricing
AlienVault OSSIM (discontinued)Darktrace
Editions & Modules
No answers on this topic
No answers on this topic
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
AlienVault OSSIM (discontinued)Darktrace
Free Trial
NoNo
Free/Freemium Version
NoNo
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
NoNo
Entry-level Setup FeeNo setup feeNo setup fee
Additional Details
More Pricing Information
Community Pulse
AlienVault OSSIM (discontinued)Darktrace
Considered Both Products
AlienVault OSSIM (discontinued)
Chose AlienVault OSSIM (discontinued)
Originally my organization leveraged alien value due to the lower cost of entry and ability to manage it as a service provider. Unfortunately, after several years of working with this tool, it became unwieldy to use as it felt that almost every useful report had to be created …
Chose AlienVault OSSIM (discontinued)
We did not evaluate or use any other product previous to AlienVault [OSSIM]. We had a specific need to meet our audit requirements and AlienVault [OSSIM] provided all the features needed as well as being simple enough to deploy without any dedicated staff. Real-time alerts …
Chose AlienVault OSSIM (discontinued)
I liked it but it seemed a bit pricey for our organization at the time in comparison to AlienVault.
Chose AlienVault OSSIM (discontinued)
We have not used any other products similar to AlienVault so I do not have anything to compare it to. We did look at a few others when first purchasing, but at this point, I do not recall what they were.
Chose AlienVault OSSIM (discontinued)
Best bang for the buck. Darktrace did not perform even close to AlienVault. I ran them concurrently. AlienVault consistently found issues that DarkTrace didn't pick up, and the DarkTrace incidents were false positives. At one point, DarkTrace stated I had 2,000 servers and I …
Chose AlienVault OSSIM (discontinued)
OSSIM is the free version of the Alien Vault USM and comes packed with most of the features you will need to get going. Like most free to use products, it is missing aspects that make the use of the product much more productive.

As an example, you will need a separate system for …
Chose AlienVault OSSIM (discontinued)
AlienVault OSSIM as the first experience with a SIEM is very fine, especially if your company is an SMB. Every SIEM shares some features in common with other products, features such as log retrieval and normalization. So if you stick with principles, you can learn other SIEM …
Chose AlienVault OSSIM (discontinued)
AlienVault OSSIM has the upper ante in initial deployment price, being that it's open source. Also, with perhaps the exception of SolarWinds, it has a lower optimal requirements for onsite deployment, hence your OPEX won't be hit very hard by investing in new hardware to suit …
Darktrace
Chose Darktrace
Its capabilities to respond to a threat both manual than automated way makes Darktrace one of the best NDR in the market. The rules editor allows the right flexibility to build a set of rules sized for the infrastructure, while the third parties integrations and modules helps …
Chose Darktrace
Darktrace is better in terms of scalability, ease of integration, and ongoing support
Chose Darktrace
The product's capacity to provide insights into network traffic is impressive. The organisation was able to find any malware harming the devices with their assistance. We really value network monitoring and self-learning monitoring tools.
Chose Darktrace
We looked into several competitors and are still looking, due to the problems Darktrace has with false positives. Darktrace is attractive as their support is generally good, and working with the product is relatively easy.
Chose Darktrace
We have not evaluated others as they seem to be in their own class.
Chose Darktrace
The weekly reports was why we chose DarkTrace.
Chose Darktrace
We did NOT select Darktrace. OSSIM/AlienVault is a more mature product and it provided better intelligence and reporting. The end user interface is much easier to use - and you can tell built form engineers who have had to do the work. My suggestion for anyone considering …
Chose Darktrace
Darktrace does a very good job at complementing our other security tools by adding an additional level of automated security. It is important to point out that the automation is optional. We ran Darktrace in "manual" mode until we were comfortable enough to switch it to a …
Chose Darktrace
Darktrace allows you to get under the hood in a way that few other services of this type allow.
Features
AlienVault OSSIM (discontinued)Darktrace
Security Information and Event Management (SIEM)
Comparison of Security Information and Event Management (SIEM) features of Product A and Product B
AlienVault OSSIM (discontinued)
7.5
Ratings
3% below category average
Darktrace
-
Ratings
Centralized event and log data collection9.40 Ratings00 Ratings
Correlation6.90 Ratings00 Ratings
Event and log normalization/management8.10 Ratings00 Ratings
Deployment flexibility8.20 Ratings00 Ratings
Integration with Identity and Access Management Tools9.30 Ratings00 Ratings
Custom dashboards and workspaces9.40 Ratings00 Ratings
Host and network-based intrusion detection9.20 Ratings00 Ratings
Data integration/API management5.30 Ratings00 Ratings
Behavioral analytics and baselining5.40 Ratings00 Ratings
Rules-based and algorithmic detection thresholds5.30 Ratings00 Ratings
Response orchestration and automation6.30 Ratings00 Ratings
Reporting and compliance management8.40 Ratings00 Ratings
Incident indexing/searching6.40 Ratings00 Ratings
Best Alternatives
AlienVault OSSIM (discontinued)Darktrace
Small Businesses
LevelBlue USM Anywhere
LevelBlue USM Anywhere
Score 3.7 out of 10
Auvik
Auvik
Score 9.9 out of 10
Medium-sized Companies
Sumo Logic
Sumo Logic
Score 9.4 out of 10
SolarWinds NetFlow Traffic Analyzer (NTA)
SolarWinds NetFlow Traffic Analyzer (NTA)
Score 9.0 out of 10
Enterprises
Sumo Logic
Sumo Logic
Score 9.4 out of 10
SolarWinds NetFlow Traffic Analyzer (NTA)
SolarWinds NetFlow Traffic Analyzer (NTA)
Score 9.0 out of 10
All AlternativesView all alternativesView all alternatives
User Ratings
AlienVault OSSIM (discontinued)Darktrace
Likelihood to Recommend
9.3
(0 ratings)
8.7
(0 ratings)
Likelihood to Renew
-
(0 ratings)
9.7
(0 ratings)
Usability
8.0
(0 ratings)
9.0
(0 ratings)
Support Rating
7.9
(0 ratings)
9.4
(0 ratings)
User Testimonials
AlienVault OSSIM (discontinued)Darktrace
Likelihood to Recommend
The most obvious scenario in which OSSIM is well suited is in a single office/home office (SOHO) or small business, in which budget is reduced but asset discovery and vulnerability management are greatly needed and appreciated. OSSIM is lightweight and free, so the real challenge to face is to hire or assign an administrator to manage and operate it, instead of any investment on an expensive appliance. Also, as resellers, promoting usage of OSSIM to customers charging for professional services for installation, administration, and maintenance (remember that OSSIM doesn't have official support from AlienVault) is a great asset for the organization.
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Darktrace would be well suited to any environment really; the only constraint would be the budget. The cost scales on the number of devices to be monitored by the product, so it can be quite expensive in larger environments. Any company that would benefit from having 24/7 monitoring of their network would find that this product would suit that need perfectly. It can also create a number of reports, which is useful if you have any requirement to present periodic figures and statistics for your network. There are also additional features available and in development such as Antigena, which can be configured to allow potential threats to be automatically mitigated; it can block connections to a certain address, using certain ports, or it can enforce "normal behaviour" where it will only allow a machine to communicate in a way that Darktrace has observed before and considers normal. This has huge benefits particularly for 24/7 organisations where you don't have the ability to have someone monitoring the network personally at all times, as it could stop a malware outbreak in its tracks.
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Pros
  • Threat analysis. It can correlate different events happening to detect a pattern or an attack.
  • Dashboard provides a clean, single location to see what is going on in our environment.
  • Up to date open threat exchange means everything new popping up out there is included and watched for in our environment.
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  • Uses it Al model UEBA to detect anomalies in the behaviour of not only the users in a corporate network but also the routers, servers, and endpoints in that network.
  • Provides a visualisation of both egress and outbound network traffics flowing in and out of the organisation.
  • Darktrace comes with it autonomous AI model detection and responses capabilities.
  • Darktrace as an AI next generation NDR solution, prevents ,contains and quarantines malicious traffics from and into the corporate network.
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Cons
  • Creating custom rules is a bit complicated
  • Reporting could be improved
  • Agent has caused conflicts with a couple of our other applications
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  • The system has so many features and places to tweak we found it hard to tune for our use.
  • We met regularly with someone from Darktrace to assist us in processing the alerts
  • The process for mail scanning requires you to reroute mail traffic
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Likelihood to Renew
No answers on this topic
It's a powerfull product that help administrators to provide email security to our organization.
Good metrics about received emails that help us to determine in doubt case if the email is a false positive or it's malware.
They're improving the product releasing continuous updates and have mobile phone app to manage it.
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Usability
AlienVault OSSIM is far easy to use and manage - provided you know what you're doing. As any SIEM application, there is some background knowledge required in order to take advantage of the product's functionalities, such as the log correlation and analysis. Other than that, the application is quite usable and robust.
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The Darktrace toolset is very expansive, allowing it to handle many different tasks, but this leads to a user interface that is sometimes not at all intuitive. Icons don't always make sense visually, and the associated tool tips do not always provide enough detail on what action the button performs
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Support Rating
Everything is done through MSSP and installation pro services. Once those hours are burned up, then you're on your own without a lot of help. Typically the pro services hours aren't enough to get past 60 days and MSSP are hit and miss. We had a miss for installation helpers.
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Darktrace support is excellent in my experience. They send a competent engineer on-site to provide on-boarding training. They were also very responsive in responding to questions and concerns. Having an individual point of contact who is a competent network and security engineer is not a common experience, at least for me.
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Alternatives Considered
AlienVault OSSIM as the first experience with a SIEM is very fine, especially if your company is an SMB. Every SIEM shares some features in common with other products, features such as log retrieval and normalization. So if you stick with principles, you can learn other SIEM products as well. If your environment is not of a minimum size, LogRhythm might be overkill for your network, same with McAfee Enterprise Security Manager.
Read full review
We did NOT select Darktrace. OSSIM/AlienVault is a more mature product and it provided better intelligence and reporting. The end user interface is much easier to use - and you can tell built form engineers who have had to do the work. My suggestion for anyone considering Darktrace, is to get the price upfront; do a 30/60 onsite trail; and do the same thing, at the same time, with AlienVault. AlientVault will win every time. I say that because that's exactly what I did.
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Return on Investment
  • OSSIM and the installers didn't really help us optimize at installation. OSSIM went without optimization for almost two years before that fact was noticed. I think this decreased ROI.
  • Finding and researching incidents is much faster with all data available. Sometimes too much data, though.
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  • One big positive is how it helps us with the security assessments that clients have done on us. They are looking to see if we know how we might have unusual/malicious traffic running on the network.
  • If you have a small network and only need 1 appliance, it can be a good ROI and peace of mind.
  • You could go down a hole in trying to spend time looking at all of your traffic with this software. You need to focus only on what it is showing as potential bad traffic.
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ScreenShots