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Binary Defense MDR vs IBM Security QRadar comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Jan 5, 2025

Review summaries and opinions

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:
 

Categories and Ranking

Binary Defense MDR
Ranking in Managed Detection and Response (MDR)
7th
Average Rating
9.2
Reviews Sentiment
7.7
Number of Reviews
16
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
IBM Security QRadar
Ranking in Managed Detection and Response (MDR)
9th
Average Rating
8.0
Reviews Sentiment
6.8
Number of Reviews
207
Ranking in other categories
Log Management (6th), Security Information and Event Management (SIEM) (4th), User Entity Behavior Analytics (UEBA) (1st), Endpoint Detection and Response (EDR) (17th), Security Orchestration Automation and Response (SOAR) (4th), Extended Detection and Response (XDR) (11th)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of April 2025, in the Managed Detection and Response (MDR) category, the mindshare of Binary Defense MDR is 0.6%, up from 0.5% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of IBM Security QRadar is 0.8%, up from 0.5% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Managed Detection and Response (MDR)
 

Featured Reviews

Rich Ullom - PeerSpot reviewer
Worth the money, fantastic communication, and fast service with an average response time of about four minutes on an alert
This is my third SOC. I have never had anybody react as well. So, it's hard for me to provide something that they could do better because I'm really happy with them. I just signed another three-year contract with them. I don't find any downside to them, but if I have to put one, it would be consistent manpower or staffing. The only area where the solution can be improved is going to be with people. As they grow, they are struggling with the same thing that every other company is, which is getting talent and getting that talent to stay, but they've just revised their tiering system to go from a flat analyst and manager to a three-tier solution where it goes through two or three before it gets elevated. That seems to have worked out well, so if one level misses it, the next one picks it up, and it works out fine. Consistent staffing is the only challenge they have because when you're hiring level-one analysts, you go through them pretty quickly. You'll probably hire them at 50K or 55K, and after they do it for a year, they find out they can make 85K somewhere else, and they bounce. So, their turnover is a little high, but that's it.
Md. Shahriar Hussain - PeerSpot reviewer
Real-time incident detection and user-friendly dashboard benefit daily operations
There are many types of AI, and this AI is very limited in SQL and features. There may be potential for improvement. So far, it seems very limited. It shows some good features in the correlation part, but I think there is room for improvement. For instance, when creating rules, it can suggest more rules, reducing the effort needed. If AI-related support can suggest rules and integrate with existing security devices like MD, IPS, this SIM can create more relevant rules. Sometimes logs I receive don't mean anything, and I need technical stakeholders to share or forward logs, but these are sometimes inadequate. Keywords can help identify insufficient logs. I often lack time to verify logs. Sharing false positive results could be reduced to help my team.

Quotes from Members

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:
 

Pros

"Our mean time to response has gone down. We're much faster with direct response and have more investigative capabilities than we did before."
"Binary Defense's most valuable feature is the 24/7 monitoring and threat hunting. Their team checks the latest breaches and how they're done."
"The biggest aspect for us is that they are able to conform to our environment and utilize our tools. That way, we still maintain ownership of all the data and access to the applications, and we never lose control of the ability to run the solution ourselves if we need to."
"Among the valuable features are the agent, continuous reporting, and dashboard. It has all the features we need and we haven't had to customize it, other than turning on certain features that we wanted."
"Binary Defense has a human service department that provides live monitoring for our systems."
"With Binary Defense, we don't just get an alert, but also a detailed rundown of why they're alerting us on it. They tell us what was executed, or the username, script, or IP. That way, we're not wasting time investigating."
"The most valuable part of Binary Defense is its team of cybersecurity analysts. Their analysts filter out the noise and only forward the critical threats that require a response instead of false positives."
"The most valuable feature is reviewing tickets and the notes added by technicians."
"It integrates very easily with other solutions. The solution is flexible. We can add anything to it, as it is a good companion to other tools."
"think QRadar is great overall. We’ve had a positive experience with it and recommend it for deployment. However, there are areas for improvement. The technical support is good, and the documentation is valuable, but it could be enhanced, especially regarding integration with other systems. In terms of support and updates, QRadar’s capabilities are crucial for maintaining high security standards. Network and software administrators can monitor all traffic effectively, which reassures clients and drives further adoption."
"There are a lot of features in QRadar. App Exchange is the most valuable feature. User behavior analytics (UBA) is also a very good feature. Watson is also there, but we are not currently using Watson. It is versatile and quite easy. It also has an all-in-one-box feature and good integration with AWS."
"I like that it's easy to use and the performance is good."
"It saves a lot of time. We integrate the customer's firewall with all their networking devices."
"The most valuable features are all the implementations, the plug-ins, and the User Behavior Analytics (UBA)."
"The solution is quite flexible."
"It protect us from multiple authentication values, unauthorized access and antivirus threats."
 

Cons

"We found that an earlier version of the agent had high memory usage and that was a bit concerning, but we raised the concern with their support team and they immediately replied that they had noticed the same thing and had a candidate fix already available... it totally fixed the issue."
"The only area I see for improvement with Binary Defense is their service portal. It could benefit from some enhancements."
"The current reporting system could benefit from improvement."
"It's hard to think of anything that they need to improve on, but just to point out something, I would like to see them provide advanced XDR."
"If I were shopping for an MDR solution today, I would not only look for a company that has the ability to alert, detect, and remediate, but also the ability to integrate vulnerability management. That's a big thing that they're lacking today."
"The most significant area for improvement is in support for non-English speakers; we're a global organization, so many of our users are not English speakers, which can make interacting with them a challenge. There's no Chinese language support, so we must rely on what we can do with the internet. We don't expect Binary Defense to build a language staff, but details can get lost in translation when we assume the whole world speaks English."
"I would like to get more reports from Binary Defense about what they're blocking."
"It's sometimes difficult to know when to engage Binary Defense or TrustedSec, their sister company. TrustedSec is more focused on offensive security, as opposed to the defensive security that the MDR solution provides. It would be awesome if there were a better bridge between that relationship for when we need to get more proactive services or when we need to do a penetration test."
"The product needs to improve its GUI."
"The quoting and the dashboard session could be improved. It should be more user-friendly."
"The API integration for AD is a problem when it comes to vulnerability management. If you want to incorporate multiple factor authentication it becomes a problem with the AD. It doesn't integrate well. That needs to be improved."
"GUI needs to be improved."
"SOAR is what is expected the most from QRadar. They have something called SOAR Resilient, and it would be great if that gets induced in SIEM. IBM QRadar (as well as McAfee ESM) should have analytics platform integration. Currently, SIEMs don't have full-fledged integration with analytics where we are able to dump our data in SIEM, and the same data can be called from different analytics applications. We should be able to bring this data to a platform like Hadoop for big data and run the analytics there. Currently, people are seeing the past data and taking some actions in the present, but when it comes to analytics, there should be futuristic data where you can predict something out of your present and past data. Apart from that, I would like to see a full-fledged ITSM tool in QRadar. It sometimes has some technical issues that need to be checked. It requires a dedicated QRadar engineer to completely manage it. It has different module sets, such as event collector and event processor, and some technical glitches come in between. It takes the log but doesn't exactly process it in the way we want."
"Certain updates—especially when using Azure—don't apply directly. Our engineering team must invest additional effort to implement these updates. However, the tool's cloud-based version poses no issues. However, upgrading the product can sometimes be challenging for on-premises instances."
"I would like for them to develop a detection management solution. It does not have a detecting management solution in it, you have to buy it as it is, on top of the extended solution."
"IBM QRadar has outdated technology, and this is its area for improvement. When you try to implement an analytic expression, it's not updated. The solution doesn't support newer technologies, and it doesn't update regularly. For example, around the world, others implement new technologies, while IBM updates later than others."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"From the initial cost that Binary Defense came in with, we pared it down quite a bit over the course of 30 or 60 days. My leadership would say that their cost was high, but realistically, they were in line with the market."
"Binary Defense MDR is priced competitively and may be slightly lower than CrowdStrike."
"After we acquired this platform, we met with a number of different vendors. Binary Defense came in with a proposal that was surprisingly affordable. In fact, we were able to recoup the cost of their services within a short period of time. This is because Binary Defense is able to provide the same level of security as a team of two or three in-house analysts but at a fraction of the cost. As a result, Binary Defense is saving us an estimated $250,000 to $300,000 per year."
"It has been good. We have saved money, and we have a better product."
"It's valued at the right price. Even with the number of endpoints we have, we don't feel that it's a lot more than any competitor. In fact, it might be less expensive when you look at the fact that you're getting a full flex SOC out of it along with the tools."
"The pricing is on target. Working with their sales team on pricing negotiations was a pleasant process. They were very respectful of the constraints we had and I feel that we're paying a fair price."
"Binary Defense has changed its pricing model from being primarily based on the volume of data to one based on escalations and incidents they handle."
"The pricing is very good. They are definitely competitive and they were lower at the time that we went with them."
"Licensing can be costly depending on your architecture."
"As for licensing costs, I haven't seen the exact figures, but it is considered somewhat costly. On a scale from one to ten, where one is very expensive and ten is very cheap, I would rate it a six—it’s costly but worth the money."
"found other solutions, with more features at the same cost or less. You don’t have to leave the Gartner Magic Quadrant to beat their price."
"The tool's on-premise version is expensive. However, it is cheaper than Splunk. The hybrid model offers shared instances for customers, which is not expensive. Customers with a limited budget can opt for it. You can get premium support with licenses. However, if you need customized integration, you need to buy it."
"It's free of charge."
"The license is not subscription-based."
"It's not expensive for the resources that it gives you."
"It's very expensive but it fits our budget."
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Comparison Review

VS
Jun 28, 2015
Qradar vs. ArcSight
Continuing with the SIEM posts we have done at Infosecnirvana, this post is a Head to head comparison of the two Industry leading SIEM products in the market – HP ArcSight and IBM QRadar Both the products have consistently been in the Gartner Leaders Quadrant. Both HP and IBM took over niche SIEM…
 

Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Computer Software Company
17%
Healthcare Company
8%
Financial Services Firm
7%
Manufacturing Company
7%
Educational Organization
23%
Computer Software Company
14%
Financial Services Firm
10%
Government
6%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
 

Questions from the Community

What do you like most about Binary Defense MDR?
The most valuable feature is reviewing tickets and the notes added by technicians.
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Binary Defense MDR?
It has been good. We have saved money, and we have a better product. We are a company that has become an enterprise from a small medium business in two years. Our company passed a certain dollar ma...
What needs improvement with Binary Defense MDR?
We are going to have a meeting with them the following Monday. It will be our first quarterly business review. Half of it is going to be looking at new products and new functions that they are brin...
What are the biggest differences between Securonix UEBA, Exabeam, and IBM QRadar?
It mostly depends on your use-cases and environment. Exabeam and Securonix have a stronger UEBA feature set, friendlier GUI and are not licensed based on capacity (amount of logs and information in...
What SOC product do you recommend?
For tools I’d recommend: -SIEM- LogRhythm -SOAR- Palo Alto XSOAR Doing commercial w/o both (or at least an XDR) is asking to miss details that are critical, and ending up a statistic. Also, rememb...
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for IBM Security QRadar?
The cost depends. The price I negotiated varies by region and relationship with the OEM. Cost is not shared due to another procurement team handling negotiations, but it was reasonable as far as I ...
 

Also Known As

Binary Defense Vision, Binary Defense Managed Detection and Response, Binary Defense Managed Detection & Response
IBM QRadar, QRadar SIEM, QRadar UBA, QRadar on Cloud, IBM QRadar Advisor with Watson
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Securitas USA, Black Hills Energy, Lincoln Electric,The J.M. Smuckers Company, New York Community Bank, State of Connecticut, NCR
Clients across multiple industries, such as energy, financial, retail, healthcare, government, communications, and education use QRadar.
Find out what your peers are saying about Binary Defense MDR vs. IBM Security QRadar and other solutions. Updated: March 2025.
845,406 professionals have used our research since 2012.