Comparison

Caver vs Dragos

Caver compared to Dragos Platform for OT/ICS buyers. Where Dragos's decade of OT focus wins, where unified IT plus OT in one stack wins.

Dragos is the established OT/ICS security platform. A decade of industrial focus, deep ICS-vendor relationships, well-known threat research (the WorldView intel, the CHERNOVITE / VOLTZITE attributions), and a large federal customer base. If you’re an OT-only buyer evaluating OT-only platforms, Dragos is the incumbent.

Caver answers a different procurement question: do you want one stack that covers IT and OT, or two stacks? caver-industrial extends the same Caver lakehouse SIEM with passive industrial-protocol decoders and OT-aware detection content, so OT and IT events land in one analytics tier with one query language.

At a glance

	Dragos Platform	Caver (caver-industrial + caver-collector)
Buyer focus	OT-only specialist.	IT and OT in one stack (convergence buyer).
Deployment model	Appliance and virtual sensor; vendor-managed and on-prem options.	On-prem lakehouse, air-gap friendly. caver-collector pipeline on the OT side, caver storage and analytics on the IT side.
Passive protocol coverage	Broad and mature: 25+ industrial protocols including DNP3, Modbus, IEC 60870-5-104, IEC 61850 GOOSE/SV, S7Comm, EtherNet/IP, OPC-UA, BACnet, plus vendor-specific dialects.	Active decoders for BACnet/IP, S7Comm, IEC 60870-5-104, DNP3, Modbus TCP, EtherNet/IP, OPC-UA. Roadmap aligns with the published industrial integration order.
Asset inventory	First-class, mature, with vendor-firmware mapping.	Native asset inventory built from passive decoder output and partner ingestion.
Industrial threat intel	WorldView intel program with named-threat attribution and quarterly releases.	Curated TI feeds focused on industrial CVEs and adversary TTPs. Updates daily through the Caver content pipeline rather than quarterly.
Framework alignment	NIST 800-82, IEC 62443, NERC CIP.	NIST 800-82, IEC 62443. Roadmap includes NERC CIP content.
IT-side coverage	Limited; integrates with IT SIEMs rather than being one.	Native. Caver is an IT SIEM that also covers OT. No second stack.
AI security visibility	None.	caver-aisec: prompt-injection detection, AI Observatory, NIST AI 100-2 + OWASP feeds.
Query languages	Platform-native UI and queries.	SPL, KQL, SQL natively against the Parquet lake. AI agents over MCP.
Pricing model	Enterprise procurement; per-asset and per-site licensing typical.	Transparent per-deployment license-key. Industrial pricing marketed Custom.
Update cadence	Quarterly platform releases plus intel updates.	Daily content updates through the pipeline.

Where Dragos wins

A decade of OT-only focus. When the entire product roadmap is industrial, the depth shows. Protocol coverage, vendor-firmware mappings, and threat research are mature in a way a younger product cannot match.
Named-threat attribution. WorldView’s adversary profiles (CHERNOVITE, VOLTZITE, ELECTRUM, and others) carry weight with executive readers and federal buyers.
Established federal and asset-owner base. If your procurement requires Dragos-by-name references in critical infrastructure, that’s a real moat.
OT-vendor relationships. Deep integrations with Schneider, Siemens, GE, Honeywell, Rockwell, ABB built over years of co-engagement.
OT-only specialization is sometimes the right answer. Some buyers do not want their OT analytics commingled with IT log volume; Dragos lets them buy an OT-only platform without that tradeoff.

Where Caver wins

One stack, not two. Caver is an IT SIEM that also handles OT. You don’t run separate query languages, separate dashboards, separate alerting tiers for the IT and OT halves of the same investigation.
Transparent licensing. Per-deployment license-key with a published model on the Caver landing page. Dragos requires enterprise procurement.
Lakehouse economics. Caver stores everything as Parquet on object storage. The cost ceiling that keeps OT teams from keeping more than 90 days of historian data does not apply.
Native AI security. caver-aisec is part of the same stack. OT teams that are starting to deploy LLM-assisted maintenance copilots have one place to monitor that traffic.
Daily content updates. Caver’s content pipeline ships daily. Dragos’s platform releases are quarterly.
Convergence is the trend. OT and IT are merging operationally (remote engineering access, cloud-connected historians, IT-IDS in the OT DMZ). Buyers who plan for the convergence buy convergence-native tools.

How to decide

For OT-only shops with a mature, separately-staffed OT security program and no plans to converge with IT: Dragos is the safer pick. A decade of OT focus is hard to argue with.

For shops where the same team owns IT and OT, or where the IT SOC is being asked to cover OT events as part of the convergence push: Caver removes a stack. One query language, one analytics tier, one license.

For shops doing a competitive bake-off: the honest comparison is depth-of-OT vs breadth-of-coverage. Dragos is deeper on OT specifically. Caver is broader across IT, OT, and AI security in one place. Map that to which procurement question is louder for you.

For shops where industrial pricing is a budget blocker: Caver’s per-deployment license-key is published, and industrial pricing is quoted Custom but built on the same transparent model rather than enterprise per-asset arithmetic.

Talk to us about scoping — or read about caver-industrial.

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