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Fortinet FortiSIEM 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

Fortinet FortiSIEM
Ranking in Security Information and Event Management (SIEM)
8th
Average Rating
7.6
Reviews Sentiment
6.7
Number of Reviews
73
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
IBM Security QRadar
Ranking in Security Information and Event Management (SIEM)
4th
Average Rating
8.0
Reviews Sentiment
6.8
Number of Reviews
207
Ranking in other categories
Log Management (6th), User Entity Behavior Analytics (UEBA) (1st), Endpoint Detection and Response (EDR) (18th), Security Orchestration Automation and Response (SOAR) (4th), Managed Detection and Response (MDR) (10th), Extended Detection and Response (XDR) (13th)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of January 2025, in the Security Information and Event Management (SIEM) category, the mindshare of Fortinet FortiSIEM is 3.3%, up from 3.3% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of IBM Security QRadar is 10.3%, up from 10.1% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Security Information and Event Management (SIEM)
 

Featured Reviews

Oliver Jackson - PeerSpot reviewer
Systems monitoring enhanced by firewall and intrusion detection features
My primary use case for Fortinet FortiSIEM is systems monitoring and alerting. I use it for standard functions like log monitoring, incident detection, and notification.  My customers are mostly medium-sized enterprises ranging from engineering companies, mining companies, independent schools, and…
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

"The most valuable features for us are the built-in reports and alerts, along with the extreme flexibility in reporting and rule generation."
"The most valuable features of Fortinet FortiSIEM are the SD-WAN, Global LAN, and application controls."
"Analytics. It can provide log information from the device. With log information, I can see if there is a threat"
"The product is quite well-organized. The GUI makes it easy to navigate."
"AccelOps can handle a lot of data and it's just so important to true monitoring. Also, I can create a lot of rules to detect anything I like."
"Our customer did not have security monitoring in the first place. With this solution, it provided security posture management and visibility about the security landscape and threats that they had."
"The most valuable features of the solution is its integration with other technologies, especially its ability to collect logs from Cisco and Aruba devices along with Fortinet products."
"The most fascinating aspect of FortiSIEM is its integration with the MITRE ATT&CK framework."
"We are using the platform version, which I like."
"The solution is flexible and easy to use."
"The UBA feature is the most valuable because you can see everything about users' activities."
"The interface is good."
"Stability-wise, I rate the solution a ten out of ten."
"The visibility it gives you into your infrastructure has been great."
"We get events and make the correlation, or rules. In IBM, we can implement our customer's rules. We can have very clear status threats and severity of antigens."
"An engineer can live-monitor all the flow happening in real-time. This would help us a lot while investigating a case, and it would even help us with preventive actions."
 

Cons

"It lacks a "wizard" that shows a particular user's activity or particular circumstance. I think the interface is intimidating because there's so much information there."
"The solution needs to do a better job with third party integration. Right now, that's lacking on the solution. I specifically am talking about the AWS environment. Most of the AWS environment products do not have that capability to integrate."
"Fortinet FortiSIEM could improve to extend to several locations or sites."
"The graphs on the user interface could be improved as we often experience glitches."
"Creating parsers to try make unknown events or currently unsupported devices produce meaningful information is extremely cumbersome."
"If there is a configuration on the wrong side of the network or there are changes that result in harm to our IT infrastructure, the solution should immediately fix it."
"It would be good if the solution offered even more configuration options, especially in relation to the VPN so that it continues to be a very flexible option."
"An improvement would be if FortiSIEM's licensing was based on the number of nodes rather than the EPS."
"The technical support can be improved a little bit, and the price could be cheaper."
"The tech support is not that good."
"The initial setup was complex, and it took six months."
"QRadar log integration of various applications can be a tough job at times. There may be occasions when you will not find any QRadar guide on adding logs of a particular application. Even if you come across one, adding a log process is not an easy one."
"The product is good, but one feature they should have is an Elasticsearch. Currently, in QRadar, there are no Elasticsearch criteria."
"Pricing model could be more cost-effective."
"Needs better visualization options beyond the time series charts and a few other options that they have."
"They should introduce some automation into the product."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The solution is available for both, perpetual and subscription licenses."
"Fortinet's products are not expensive, it is less than the competition."
"This is probably more on the lower cost end of the spectrum compared to competing products. Fortinet's license model is based on events per second, which makes sense, but that's not typical. It makes it very hard to calculate what your costs are going to be as you scale the platform because some log sources, such as firewall logs, are very noisy, and there are lots and lots of events per second, but some of them are not. So, it becomes a bit of a science experiment trying to guess what your costs are going to be as you scale the solution. This is where other competing products perhaps have a more straightforward license model."
"The price is competitive."
"Pricing is acceptable for more than 90% of our customers, as they normally get discounts."
"We bought the perpetual license, so we own the product, but there is a three-year support renewal fee for that."
"Fortinet FortiSIEM is very cost-efficient compared to other SIEM solutions."
"The tool is really expensive. For what the tool does for our team, the price is fair."
"They can give us some scalability and flexibility on pricing. If its pricing can be reduced, it would help a lot of customers in bringing in a new SIEM environment and grow business in the market. If I start a license today and take around 10,000 EPS, and after a month, there is an increase in the number of clients on my platform, I can increase the number of licenses. I can add 5,000 EPS on a yearly basis."
"IBM QRadar is a little bit expensive compared to other products."
"The tool is priced in a competitive manner. The tool's price is dependent on the installation and the product size, but it is competitive in the marketplace."
"When it comes to the initial pricing there can be a huge discount from there side and also I think they are open to competing with other products."
"Its price is good in terms of efficiency and the number of people required for implementing various things. You might pay more in terms of money, but you might save on the number of people. For example, if you are using Kibana, you have to pay more for people or experts, which is not the case with IBM QRadar."
"It's too expensive. The licensing is also a little bit difficult to understand because you have to license it per event and per number of flows."
"I feel that the price is reasonable but compared to other products that are on the market, such as an offering by Microsoft, it is more expensive."
"Pricing (based on EPS) will be more accurate."
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Use our free recommendation engine to learn which Security Information and Event Management (SIEM) solutions are best for your needs.
831,158 professionals have used our research since 2012.
 

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%
Financial Services Firm
9%
Government
7%
Manufacturing Company
7%
Educational Organization
24%
Computer Software Company
14%
Financial Services Firm
10%
Manufacturing Company
6%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
 

Questions from the Community

What do you like most about Fortinet FortiSIEM?
Fortinet FortiSIEM needs to provide better API integrations to users.
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Fortinet FortiSIEM?
As a service, the cost is reasonable and affordable with scalable pricing based on the number of monitored devices. However, setting it up for oneself as an enterprise-licensed product can be quite...
What needs improvement with Fortinet FortiSIEM?
The built-in APIs in Fortinet FortiSIEM are somewhat lacking and could be improved for better integration with external ITSM products. Improving software stability and reducing bugs will make it a ...
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 do you like most about IBM QRadar?
The event collector, flow collector, PCAP and SOAR are valuable.
 

Also Known As

FortiSIEM, AccelOps
IBM QRadar, QRadar SIEM, QRadar UBA, QRadar on Cloud, QRadar, IBM QRadar User Behavior Analytics, IBM QRadar Advisor with Watson
 

Learn More

 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

FortiSIEM has hundreds of customers worldwide in markets including managed services, technology, financial services, healthcare, and government. Customers include Aruba Networks, Compushare, Port of San Diego, Cleveland Indians, Infoblox, Healthways, and Referentia.
Clients across multiple industries, such as energy, financial, retail, healthcare, government, communications, and education use QRadar.
Find out what your peers are saying about Fortinet FortiSIEM vs. IBM Security QRadar and other solutions. Updated: January 2025.
831,158 professionals have used our research since 2012.