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Graylog vs IBM Security QRadar comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Jan 12, 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

Graylog
Ranking in Log Management
16th
Average Rating
8.0
Reviews Sentiment
6.7
Number of Reviews
19
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
IBM Security QRadar
Ranking in Log Management
6th
Average Rating
8.0
Reviews Sentiment
6.8
Number of Reviews
207
Ranking in other categories
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), Managed Detection and Response (MDR) (10th), Extended Detection and Response (XDR) (12th)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of March 2025, in the Log Management category, the mindshare of Graylog is 6.4%, up from 5.6% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of IBM Security QRadar is 3.9%, down from 5.2% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Log Management
 

Featured Reviews

Andrey Mostovykh - PeerSpot reviewer
Real-time analysis, easy setup, and open source
We stopped using it for analytics because of its price, and at the moment, we are using it mostly for log centralization. If you use it with high traffic for analytical purposes, as well as for the logs, the infrastructure costs are unbelievable. Graylog is a great product backed by Elasticsearch as the storage and query engine. It is just an interface on top of Elasticsearch and some Elasticsearch management. The indexes that are kept in Elasticsearch are managed by Graylog software. Elasticsearch is a decent product, but it's very infrastructure-heavy. It requires lots of resources, and if you make a mistake with provisioning, you are likely to not get a cluster back. We had a couple of outages like that, and we hated that. So, we ended up over-provisioning resources just to avoid such situations from happening. If you have a whole team trying to fix the Graylog instance for two days, that's a bit too much. That may be my Norwegian take on it, but the engineering resources are expensive. It's better to just provision the infrastructure. Overall, the product is great, and the features are just fine, but the infrastructure cost is what is killing it. The infrastructure cost is the main issue. I like the rest. If the infrastructure costs could be lower, it would be fantastic. I'm not sure if they can improve the infrastructure cost with the way Elasticsearch is. If they keep using Elasticsearch, maybe there are some opportunities there, or they can support other backends with cheaper storage. They could have a different backend to replace Elasticsearch or do some tweaks to Elasticsearch to reduce the costs. There could be partial parsing of logs or parsing on demand so that when you write data through Graylog to Elasticsearch, it doesn't need to crunch in every detail requiring that much CPU.
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

"UDP is a fast and lightweight protocol, perfect for sending large volumes of logs with minimal overhead."
"The build is stable and requires little maintenance, even compared to some extremely expensive products."
"Open source and user friendly."
"Graylog is very handy."
"What I like about Graylog is that it's real-time and you have access to the raw data. So, you ingest it, and you have access to every message and every data item you ingest. You can then build analytics on top of that. You can look at the raw data, and you can do some volumetric estimations, such as how big traffic you have, how many messages of data of a type you have, etc."
"We're using the Community edition, but I know that it has really good dashboarding and alerts."
"Allowing us to set up alerts and integrate with platforms we already use, such as Slack and OpsGenie to alert users of these errors proactively, is also a very useful feature."
"I am very proud of how very stable the solution is."
"The ability to transition from microscopic to macroscopic view, instantly, is very good."
"The scalability is very good. It's not a problem."
"The most valuable features are the AI assistant, which is good at detecting known types of behavior."
"Most valuable features include the granularity of information."
"I think it's a very stable product that provides much more visibility than the other product."
"I like the graphical interface. It's so good and easy."
"It saves a lot of time. We integrate the customer's firewall with all their networking devices."
"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."
 

Cons

"I would like to see a default dashboard widget that shows the topology of the clusters defined for the graylog install."
"Its scalability gets complicated when we have to update or edit multiple nodes."
"When it comes to configuring the processing pipeline, writing the rules can be very tedious, especially since the documentation isn't extensive on how the functions provided for these rules work."
"It would be great if Graylog could provide a better Python package in order to make it easier to use for the Python community."
"Over six months, I had two similar issues where searches were performed on field "messages". It exhausted all the memory of the ES node causing an ES crash and a Graylog halt."
"There should be some user groups and an auto sign-in feature.​"
"Lacks sufficient documentation."
"More customization is always useful."
"It is very difficult to activate all of the network equipment, and it would help if it were made easier."
"IMB should reduce the pricing, or reduce some of the features for a more economical solution for the customer."
"The quoting and the dashboard session could be improved. It should be more user-friendly."
"In a future release, the solution could provide malware analysis."
"There are areas in IBM Security QRadar that could benefit from improvement. Its ability to customize knowledge for specific purposes could be enhanced. Also, it lacks clarity in presenting details. It is also difficult to see the reports."
"The pricing of the solution is a bit high. If they could lower it, that would be ideal."
"There should be an extension where we can get the reports. This could be an extension to the dashboard with the Guardian or another product with limited technology, for example IPS. Now, we only have IBM. Basically, it needs more and more integration models."
"The user interface and configurability of IBM QRadar User Behavior Analytics can be improved. It has a lot of pre-configured settings and not many things can be changed. It also needs more integrations. Currently, User Behavior Analytics is integrated only with IBM QRadar. It could have deeper integrations. It can also have more complicated scoring models. Currently, it has a very simple linear scoring model for users."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"I am using a community edition. I have not looked at the enterprise offering from Graylog."
"We are using the free version of the product. However, the paid version is expensive."
"Graylog is a free open-source solution. The free version has a capacity limitation of 2 GB daily, if you want to go above this you have to purchase a license."
"Consider Enterprise support if you have atypical needs or setup requirements.​"
"If you want something that works and do not have the money for Splunk or QRadar, take Graylog.​​"
"​You get a lot out-of-the-box with the non-enterprise version, so give it a try first."
"Having paid official support is wise for projects."
"It's an open-source solution that can be used free of charge."
"The price could be better. I bought a subscription for three years."
"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."
"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."
"The solution is priced fairly, there is a license for the solution, and we pay annually."
"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."
"IBM's Qradar is not for small companie. Unfortunately, it would be 'overkill' to place it plainly. The pricing would be too much."
"The solution is costly and the price differs depending on the vendor you use."
"The pricing is good."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Computer Software Company
17%
Comms Service Provider
10%
Government
8%
University
7%
Educational Organization
24%
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 Graylog?
The product is scalable. The solution is stable.
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Graylog?
We are using the free version of the product. However, the paid version is expensive.
What needs improvement with Graylog?
When it comes to configuring the processing pipeline, writing the rules can be very tedious, especially since the documentation isn't extensive on how the functions provided for these rules work. P...
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 ...
 

Comparisons

 

Also Known As

Graylog2
IBM QRadar, QRadar SIEM, QRadar UBA, QRadar on Cloud, IBM QRadar Advisor with Watson
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Blue Cross Blue Shield, eBay, Cisco, LinkedIn, SAP, King.com, Twilio, Deutsche Presse-Agentur
Clients across multiple industries, such as energy, financial, retail, healthcare, government, communications, and education use QRadar.
Find out what your peers are saying about Graylog vs. IBM Security QRadar and other solutions. Updated: January 2025.
841,004 professionals have used our research since 2012.