An explosive growth in the field of wireless sensor networks (WSNs) has been achieved in the past few years. Due to its important wide range of applications especially military applications, environments monitoring, health care application, home automation, etc., they are exposed to security threats. Intrusion detection system (IDS) is one of the major and efficient defensive methods against attacks in WSN. Therefore, developing IDS for WSN have attracted much attention recently and thus, there are many publications proposing new IDS techniques or enhancement to the existing ones. This paper evaluates and compares the most prominent anomaly-based IDS systems for hierarchical WSNs and identifying their strengths and weaknesses. For each IDS, the architecture and the related functionality are briefly introduced, discussed, and compared, focusing on both the operational strengths and weakness. In addition, a comparison of the studied IDSs is carried out using a set of critical evaluation metrics that are divided into two groups; the first one related to performance and the second related to security. Finally based on the carried evaluation and comparison, a set of design principles are concluded, which have to be addressed and satisfied in future research of designing and implementing IDS for WSNs.