A factual comparison of OT network security monitoring approaches. Different organizations have different needs -- here is how Kyntic fits.
| Kyntic | Claroty / Nozomi / Dragos | Fortinet FortiNAC | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Deployment | Plug-and-play appliance. No software to install, no agents, no network reconfiguration. | Typically requires sensors, agents, network TAPs, and cloud or on-prem management servers. | Requires network infrastructure changes, agent deployment, and FortiGate integration. |
| Time to Deploy | Under 1 hour. Ship, plug in two cables, power on. | Days to weeks. Requires network assessment, sensor placement, and policy tuning. | Days to weeks. Requires integration with existing Fortinet infrastructure. |
| Ongoing Management | Fully managed. No dashboard to monitor, no analyst to hire. | Requires dedicated security staff to monitor dashboards, tune policies, and investigate alerts. | Requires security team to manage policies, review events, and maintain integrations. |
| Cost | $2,500/month all-inclusive. Hardware, monitoring, reports, and 7-year log retention. | Typically $50,000 to $200,000+ per year. Hardware, software licenses, and professional services sold separately. | Varies widely. FortiNAC licensing plus FortiGate infrastructure. Typically $30,000+ per year. |
| Compliance Reporting | Automatic quarterly NERC CIP evidence packages. No manual work. | Manual report generation or additional compliance modules at extra cost. | Manual. Compliance mapping requires professional services engagement. |
| Detection Approach | Deterministic YAML rules. Every alert has a clear, auditable reason. No black-box ML. | Varies. Typically combines ML-based anomaly detection with signature rules. Can produce false positives from model drift. | Network access control with policy enforcement. Detection is secondary to access management. |
| Protocol Support | Modbus, DNP3, EtherNet/IP. Covers the majority of water, power, and manufacturing environments. | Broad protocol support (50+ industrial protocols). More complex to configure and maintain. | Limited native OT protocol awareness. Primarily IT network access control. |
| Offline Operation | Fully functional offline. Detection, alerting, and log storage continue indefinitely without cloud connectivity. | Varies. Some require continuous cloud connectivity for updates and management. | Requires network connectivity to FortiGate and management infrastructure. |
OT environments need certainty, not complexity. When a Modbus write command comes from an unauthorized source at 2 AM, the operator needs to know exactly what happened and exactly why the alert fired. Not a confidence score from an ML model.
Every Kyntic alert has a clear, auditable reason tied to a specific detection rule. There are no false positives from a misbehaving model that drifted during a firmware update. There is no dashboard to check because there is nothing to interpret -- you get a text message with the facts.
The appliance works with zero internet connectivity because industrial networks should not depend on cloud services for security. If AWS goes down, your water plant is still monitored. If your ISP has an outage, your substation is still protected.
We built Kyntic for the operators who cannot afford a six-figure security platform and a dedicated SOC team, but whose infrastructure is just as critical as any Fortune 500 company's.
View a sample compliance report or start monitoring your OT network today.
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