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 fail

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.