I wouldn't say better. More of a lighter weight alternative. Fail2ban can do lots of stuff. You can define fail2ban rules for any service that writes login failures to a log file. Sshguard, on the other hand, endeavors only to monitor ssh. This makes it more focused, and therefore smaller.

Whether this is "better", depends on what you need. I don't know about your systems, but I use fail2ban for protecting several different administrative systems, so I'd still need it. Thus, I won't be switching. However, if you only need SSH monitoring, this is worth a close look.

>> sshguard is different from the other two in that it is written in C, is lighter and

>> simpler to use with fewer features while performing its core function equally well.[1]

[1] https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Sshguard

Based on the feature set it looks like a me-too of fail2ban. I'd be interested in seeing a comparison. The site's FAQ has no mention of fail2ban.

After a 5s read of the page, it looks like fail2ban, but with less features...

sshguard can protect IPv6 as well.