Compare Trout & Dragos
Dragos has the strongest OT threat intelligence in the market, and a staffed incident response practice. Access Gate ships detection too, but it sits in the path, so it can contain an incident rather than only report it.
The problem
Detection answers a question that only matters once something has already reached your network: what is it doing? Enforcement answers the question before that: is this session allowed at all? Most plants have bought the first and not the second, which is why the alert usually arrives when a vendor laptop is already talking to a PLC.
Trout Access Gate
An appliance in the data path. It ships Snort flow rules and a curated industrial alert library, flags behaviour changes such as a new asset or a service that starts listening, and prioritises with a likelihood-by-impact risk matrix, forwarding all of it to Splunk, Elastic or Wazuh. Because it is in the path, it also acts: quarantine an asset from the console, block the session, and follow a documented detect, quarantine, recover runbook.
Dragos
An OT detection and response platform backed by a threat-intelligence practice that tracks named adversary groups targeting industrial control systems, plus a staffed incident-response retainer. Sensors monitor traffic passively and raise analytics-driven alerts with playbooks. On adversary research and on having people to call at 3am, it leads, and Access Gate does not compete there.
| Feature | Access Gate | Dragos |
|---|---|---|
| Deploys without re-cabling or re-addressing | Assets keep their IP, gateway and VLAN; inserted with a routing or DNS change | Sensors plus SPAN or TAP per segment |
| OT threat intelligence practice | Dedicated research on named OT adversary groups | |
| Detection rules out of the box | Snort flow rules plus a curated industrial alert library | Adversary-specific analytics and playbooks |
| Asset-behaviour anomaly detection | New asset, silent asset, new listening service, weak TLS | |
| Risk-based alert prioritisation | Likelihood x impact matrix carried through every view | |
| SIEM forwarding | Splunk, Elastic, Wazuh, generic forwarder | |
| Documented incident response process | Detection, quarantine, recovery runbook | |
| Quarantine an asset from the console | In-path, so containment is a policy change | Passive; containment happens on other equipment |
| Incident response retainer (people) | Staffed IR practice on retainer | |
| Blocks an unauthorised session | In-path, per-session enforcement | Passive monitoring; alerts, does not block |
| Network segmentation | Overlay enclaves, no VLAN redesign | |
| Zero-trust access control and MFA for legacy OT | ||
| Deployment footprint | One appliance, in-path, hours | Sensors per segment plus platform |
Containment, not just the alert
Both products detect. Passive monitoring then hands you an alert and stops. Access Gate is in the path, so quarantining an asset is a policy change rather than a call to the network team.
Research and people versus enforcement
Dragos leads on adversary research and staffed incident response. Access Gate leads on deciding who may touch what, and on acting when something is wrong. Plenty of sites run both.
Footprint
Detection platforms need sensors at each monitored segment plus a platform to feed them into. Access Gate is one appliance in the path per site.
Access Gate vs Dragos FAQ
Most mature OT programmes run detection and enforcement together. This page is about which job each product does.
Not on threat intelligence or staffed incident response, and it would be dishonest to claim so. Dragos researches named OT adversary groups and sells an IR retainer with people on it. Access Gate ships its own detection rules and alert library, but its distinctive contribution is enforcement and containment: it is in the path, so it can block and quarantine rather than only alert.
Yes, and they complement each other well. Access Gate reduces what is reachable, which cuts the alert volume detection has to triage, and its session records give an investigation a clean account of who connected to what.
Yes. It ships Snort flow rules for known-bad payloads and protocol abuse, a curated alert library tuned for industrial networks, zone-boundary violation detection, and asset-behaviour alerts such as a new asset appearing or a device going silent. Alerts are prioritised through a risk matrix and forwarded to Splunk, Elastic or Wazuh. What it does not have is a threat-intelligence research practice tracking named adversary groups.
The ability to act on what Dragos tells you, in the same place you were told. Detection surfaces that a vendor laptop reached a controller it had no business reaching. Access Gate is what stops it being possible next time, through identity-based access and default-deny enclaves, and what lets you quarantine the asset now rather than opening a change request.
Access Gate is typically cabled and steering traffic within a day, because it is one appliance per site and nothing changes on the assets. Detection deployments scale with the number of segments you want visibility into.