Where CybrIQ fits in a stack you've already built. Not a replacement for your existing tools, a layer that closes a specific path none of them watch.
Most SMB Directors arrive at this page with two questions: "where does CybrIQ fit alongside the categories of tool I already own?" and "how does it stack against the named vendors my team or my consultants will compare it to?" This page answers both, in that order. Category comparison first, named-vendor comparison second. Both are written so you can forward them to procurement or your audit-and-risk committee without engineering translation.
Part 1: five categories of tool, and where each one stops.
Each of these does something CybrIQ doesn't. Each of them stops at a boundary CybrIQ specifically picks up on the other side.
NAC (network access control): Forescout, Aruba ClearPass, Cisco ISE, Portnox
What it does well. Authentication-driven enforcement: 802.1X, MAC-auth bypass, posture checks at connection time. Where it stops. Identity is what the device claims. NAC operates on the device's self-reported identity (MAC, certificate, agent attestation). When that identity is spoofed (relabeled hardware, MAC clone, hardware emulation), NAC admits the device because it can't tell. Why CybrIQ fits alongside. CybrIQ produces a Layer 1 fingerprint that doesn't depend on the device telling the truth; you keep NAC for enforcement and add CybrIQ for spoof-resistant identity verification.
EDR / MDR (endpoint protection): CrowdStrike, SentinelOne, Microsoft Defender, Sophos
What it does well. Software-side threat detection on managed endpoints: malware, behavioral anomaly, ransomware indicators, software-side exploits. Where it stops. EDR only sees what's on a device with the agent installed. Unmanaged switches, IoT devices, conference-room AV equipment, biomedical equipment, plant-floor sensors: none of those run EDR agents. Hardware-side attacks (USB injection, BadUSB-class devices) are also outside EDR's design surface. Why CybrIQ fits alongside. EDR for software-side, CybrIQ for hardware-side and unmanaged-device visibility. The two are complementary, not overlapping.
NDR (network detection and response): Vectra, Darktrace, ExtraHop, Corelight
What it does well. Behavioral anomaly detection on network traffic: lateral movement, command-and-control, data exfiltration patterns. Requires SPAN or mirror-port traffic visibility. Where it stops. NDR works on traffic; CybrIQ works on identity. NDR can flag "this device is talking to a strange destination" but can't answer "is this device the device the asset register says it is?" Also, NDR requires SPAN-port infrastructure; many SMB networks don't have the SPAN capacity for full coverage. Why CybrIQ fits alongside. Different question. NDR watches what the device does; CybrIQ verifies what the device is. Both useful, no overlap.
Asset management / CMDB: ServiceNow CMDB, Atlassian Insight, Lansweeper, RunZero
What it does well. Authoritative inventory of records (the things the CMDB knows about). Often the system of record for change management, lifecycle, and ownership. Where it stops. The CMDB is a record system. It captures what people put into it. Devices on the network that nobody created a CMDB record for are invisible to the CMDB by definition. The 10 to 28 percent gap most SMBs see between CMDB and reality is the boundary. Why CybrIQ fits alongside. CybrIQ produces the ground-truth network inventory; you reconcile that against the CMDB and either bring missing devices into the CMDB or retire devices the CMDB has that aren't actually on the network.
Active discovery scanners: Tenable, Qualys, Rapid7, RunZero
What it does well. Network-side discovery via probe-and-respond: nmap-style port scans, banner grabs, OS fingerprinting. Vulnerability scanning often bundled. Where it stops. The device controls the responses. Devices that don't respond to probes, devices that respond falsely, devices that respond with one identity at scan time and operate as another the rest of the time. Also: scanners run periodically (hours to weeks between scans); the period is the visibility gap. Why CybrIQ fits alongside. Scanners answer "what's there to probe right now?" CybrIQ answers "what's connected, continuously, regardless of what it tells the probe." Scanners are useful for vulnerability data, weak for inventory ground truth.
Part 2: named-vendor comparison.
Five vendors most often appear in the bake-off when an SMB Director starts evaluating device-visibility tools: Forescout, Armis, Asimily, Claroty, and Nozomi. Each is credible at what they do; none of them does the specific thing CybrIQ does, and CybrIQ does not replicate the specific things they do. Most stacks running CybrIQ also run one or two of these, by design.
The matrix below shows the OSI layer where each tool primarily operates. Filled circle is primary detection. Half-filled is partial. Empty is out of scope.
The L1 row is empty across the named vendors because none of them built for that layer. That's the gap CybrIQ closes. It's also why CybrIQ doesn't replace any of them.
What to know about each vendor, in plain language.
If your senior engineer or your consultants raise any of these vendors during evaluation, here's the calibrated read.
Forescout
NAC done well, deployed at enterprise scale. Strong on 802.1X enforcement, MAB for agentless devices, and quarantine policy. Most environments running Forescout aren't replacing it when they add CybrIQ; they're adding L1 visibility underneath it and wiring CybrIQ events into Forescout's quarantine API. The combination is common: Forescout pushes policy, CybrIQ produces the evidence and the spoof-resistant identity layer.
Armis
IoT-visibility platform with ML-based device classification built on years of customer-deployment data. Strong on devices that produce enough traffic for ML classification to work. Weaker on devices that are quiet, agentless, or short-lived. Particularly common in healthcare and manufacturing. Armis customers running CybrIQ alongside typically do so to cover the classes of devices Armis's traffic-based inference doesn't reach.
Asimily
Built specifically for medical IoT (infusion pumps, MRI, patient telemetry). If your environment is biomed-heavy, Asimily has the protocol depth the other platforms don't have for that segment. Outside healthcare and healthcare-adjacent regulated industries, Asimily is the wrong choice. The CybrIQ overlap is minimal; Asimily covers the biomed plane, CybrIQ covers the non-medical infrastructure (clinic-side networks, conference rooms, finance areas, ambulatory sites).
Claroty
OT and ICS deep-packet inspection. The serious answer for SCADA, PLCs, DNP3, Modbus, and other plant-floor protocols. Strong in manufacturing and critical-infrastructure environments. Claroty is purely scoped to industrial-control protocols; for the corporate IT network (conference rooms, executive offices, desktops), you need something else. CybrIQ is often that something else; the boundary between the two tools maps onto the IT/OT segmentation you already maintain.
Nozomi
OT visibility plus ML for behavioral anomaly. Same scope as Claroty, different center of gravity. Nozomi leans into ML-based behavioral analytics; Claroty leans into protocol-knowledge depth. Both credible. The ML angle is worth noting if adversarial-evasion resistance matters to your environment; behavioral models have a different threat-surface profile than deterministic detection. Otherwise, pick by procurement preference and existing vendor relationships.
CybrIQ
Layer 1, deterministic, no ML model. CybrIQ does one specific thing none of the vendors above does: derive a spoof-resistant identity for every device from signals the switch supplies, which the device cannot fake. We don't replicate what the others do. If your problem is OT protocols, Claroty or Nozomi. If your problem is medical IoT behavioral profiling, Asimily. If your problem is NAC enforcement, Forescout or Cisco ISE. If your problem is "I don't actually know what's on my network and the asset register has been wrong for years, and my carrier and auditor want continuous evidence on that question," that's us.
Where each tool lives in your environment.
A second axis the OSI matrix doesn't capture: deployment footprint. Hardware appliances are a different procurement and security conversation than software you run yourself.
Footprint matters for three Director-level conversations: procurement (hardware budget vs. software license), security review (supply-chain story differs between hardware and software vendors), and operational ownership (who pages who when the box breaks). CybrIQ sits in the on-prem-software band, which is the smallest procurement conversation in this comparison and the simplest software-supply-chain story.
How most stacks actually combine these tools.
Single-vendor coverage across all of these layers is mostly a procurement aspiration. The stacks that work pair two or three of these tools by design.
Manufacturing or industrial
Claroty or Nozomi for the OT plane. CybrIQ for the IT side (conference rooms, executive offices, anywhere wired infrastructure that isn't a PLC). Two tools, two clean jobs. The boundary is the air gap or VLAN segmentation between IT and OT that already exists for reasons that aren't us.
Healthcare
Asimily or Armis for the biomed plane. CybrIQ for HIPAA-mandated inventory accuracy on the non-medical infrastructure: clinic-side networks, conference rooms, finance areas, ambulatory sites. The biomed tools don't have coverage there. The split usually maps onto how the hospital network is already segmented.
Corporate enterprise
Forescout for NAC enforcement. CybrIQ for the Layer 1 visibility and audit-evidence path Forescout's 802.1X view doesn't produce. Forescout pushes policy; CybrIQ generates the evidence. The integration is one syslog stream into Forescout plus the SOAR-action endpoint that asks Forescout to quarantine a port when CybrIQ detects a substitution.
Federal contractor or NDAA scope
CybrIQ as primary detection for banned-vendor hardware (Layer 1 fingerprint catches relabeled hardware when higher-layer markers are forged). Forescout or Cisco ISE for the quarantine path. CybrIQ pages; the NAC isolates.
Pure AV / conference-room environments
RoomIQ specifically (CybrIQ's per-room product). None of the other tools were built for AV networks. They'll see traffic if there's enough of it. They won't catch a swapped codec, an unmanaged switch behind a dealer board, or a banned-vendor camera that procurement bought without realizing it was on the NDAA list.
When the answer is one of the others, not CybrIQ.
A short list. We turn away pilots that land in any of these buckets.
- Your primary need is OT protocol analysis. Claroty or Nozomi. CybrIQ doesn't do DNP3 or Modbus inspection.
- Your primary need is medical IoT behavioral profiling. Asimily. CybrIQ doesn't profile infusion-pump behavior.
- Your primary need is NAC enforcement. Forescout or Cisco ISE. CybrIQ can take optional SNMP-driven actions (quarantine, disable interface) if configured, but it isn't designed as a full NAC policy engine.
- You operate a wireless-only environment. Armis. CybrIQ needs wired switch ports to observe from.
- You're trying to consolidate to fewer tools. None of the answers on this page will do that. Security stacks have specialized gaps. Anyone selling single-vendor coverage across all of these is selling wishful thinking.
If procurement asks "isn't this just NAC?" or "isn't this just asset management?", point them at Part 1 above. If procurement asks "how is this different from Armis or Forescout?", point them at Part 2. The boundaries are real. The simplest test for any of these: ask the existing tool vendor "if a device with a spoofed MAC, a cloned certificate, and a forged software-side identity joins the network, would you flag it?" If the answer is no (it usually is), that's the path CybrIQ closes.
Want the comparison scoped to your current stack?
A live demo of the platform and a conversation about whether CybrIQ fits your environment. Mention what you already have in place; we'll be clear about where we sit alongside vs. where we don't fit.
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