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IBM Security QRadar vs i-SIEM [EOL] comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Oct 7, 2024
 

Categories and Ranking

i-SIEM [EOL]
Average Rating
9.0
Number of Reviews
1
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
IBM Security QRadar
Average Rating
8.0
Reviews Sentiment
7.5
Number of Reviews
204
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) (18th), Security Orchestration Automation and Response (SOAR) (4th), Managed Detection and Response (MDR) (10th), Extended Detection and Response (XDR) (14th)
 

Featured Reviews

DC
The alert fatigue and false positive rates have just plummeted, which is really exciting.
empow has a few areas of improvement as with any other technology, such as continuing to drive innovation in the dashboard. While we've been extremely impressed with the dashboard's ease of use, flexibility, ability to drill down deeply, and focus very intently on an area of interest, there will always be opportunities to be more innovative and open it up to a wider audience than just the operations group, for example. With reporting, there is always a desire to have custom reporting for every client of empow. Relative to keeping up with the sheer pace of cloud-native technologies, it should provide more options for clients to deploy their technologies in unique ways. This is an area that I recommend that they maintain focus.
Muzzamil Hussain - PeerSpot reviewer
Is easy to integrate and doesn't require maintenance
One major drawback we are facing is in the area of IBM Security QRadar integration with flat file databases. IBM Security QRadar does not support flat file database integration. We are currently facing an issue with respect to the database, which you normally call a NoSQL database. There is no direct integration mechanism available with IBM Security QRadar. We have to approach IBM and generate a ticket so that they can develop a custom method for the integration. In database integration, we are facing issues with IBM Security QRadar. The solution does not support the integration of flat file databases. Certain organizations have flat file databases. IBM does not support direct integration with some databases. We had to create a plug, and we requested IBM to develop a parser, but it is taking IBM a couple of months to develop it. I think a flat-file database should be supported directly instead of developing a parser plugin. There should be a more refined threat intelligence platform, and cross-integration should be possible with locally available threat intelligence platforms.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"As a result of the automation, we are able to manage SIEM with a small security team. I'm in a unique position where we have been growing the security organization quite rapidly over the last three and a half years. But, as a direct result of the empow transition and legacy collection of tools towards the empow platform, we've been able to keep that head count flat. We've been able to redirect a lot of the security team's time away from the wash, rinse, repeat activities of responding to alarms where we have a high degree of confidence that they will be false positives, adjusting the rules accordingly. This can be a bit frustrating for the analyst when they have to spend hours a day dealing with these types of probable false positives. So, it has helped not only us keep our headcount flat relative to the resources necessary to provide the assurances that our executives expect of us for monitoring, but allows our analyst team to spend the majority of their time doing what they love. They are spending their time meaningfully with a higher degree of confidence and enjoying getting into the incident response type activity."
"QRadar, Splunk, and ArcSight are SIEM solutions with built-in AI/ML features. They can do the complete investigation and alert the admin about what is happening. They can also do the root cause analysis. There are many other features that come with QRadar. It has a more granular log, so you can integrate with various non-IT as well as IT-based components. You can get unstructured data to the SIEM data, and you can identify more what is happening in the network or what is happening in the central head office. You can also identify what is happening between your remote offices. You can also use it to identify what the users in the field are doing on their devices and how things are moving. From the integration point of view, it is very centric. It gives complete control centrally. If a user is not connected to the system, whenever he comes online, we can see the policy updates over the Internet, and we can ensure that the data that is supposed to be protected is protected."
"We find predictive analysis capabilities valuable."
"Flexible and valuable product that is modular, so you can easily set up a roadmap for your clients."
"The most valuable thing about QRadar is that you have a single window into your network, SIEM, network flows, and risk management of your assets. If you use Splunk, for instance, then you still need a full packet capture solution, whereas the full packet capture solution is integrated within QRadar. Its application ecosystem makes it very powerful in terms of doing analysis."
"The threat hunting capabilities in general are great."
"It is really helpful to us from the compliance point of view."
"There are a lot of great out-of-the-box features included."
"Provided that the report is prebuilt and I can find what I am looking for, the reporting is the most valuable feature in this solution."
 

Cons

"Relative to keeping up with the sheer pace of cloud-native technologies, it should provide more options for clients to deploy their technologies in unique ways. This is an area that I recommend that they maintain focus."
"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."
"The user interface is a bit difficult to get used to."
"The implementation of the solution's technology needs to be simplified."
"Their technical support is not good. We opened a lot of cases and from my experience, they are not complicated issues but it takes forever to get an answer."
"The solution is expensive compared to other products."
"IBM needs to invest more into the collaboration with other vendors."
"What needs to be improved in IBM QRadar User Behavior Analytics is the user experience. It's not optimal. Some screens are a bit clunky. The solution needs to be more user-friendly."
"If you have too many events that occur, then the storage capacity becomes a problem. You need to have more storage."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"With a higher degree of fidelity in the alarms, we were able to avoid adding additional resources to our teams. We take into account the cost of security resources in the market and the significantly higher fidelity from the alarms that are being generated. This drove down our costs with our MSSP. It drove down my cost for human capital internally. It drove down our need to have multiple resources supporting the underlying infrastructure and health and maintenance of empow as a platform from several resources down to one. Therefore, human capital costs were significantly reduced. Our operating expenses were significantly reduced. Our capital costs were significantly reduced while tripling our capacity and our run rate reduced. It was almost a "too good to be true" situation. Fortunately, for us, it worked out very nicely."
"I don't have to put up with any longer with these hypercomplex licensing agreements. Every time I want to add some additional reporting as a compliance centric or regulatory specific, e.g., GDPR, PCI, or Sarbanes-Oxley, many providers would have an additional license for this, which felt a bit ridiculous to me. With the simplified licensing architecture, there were no hidden "gotchas" down the road with empow. Something I have experienced with other providers that I've worked with in the past."
"The pricing is good."
"The price could be better. I bought a subscription for three years."
"Most of the time, it is easier and cheaper to buy a new product or the QRadar box."
"The pricing is higher but cheaper than others and there are no additional costs."
"There is a license required for this solution. There are some limitations depending on what license you purchase."
"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 price of this solution is a little bit expensive, so if it were cheaper then it would help."
"An X-Force feed is free with QRadar."
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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
15%
Financial Services Firm
15%
Healthcare Company
11%
Real Estate/Law Firm
11%
Educational Organization
23%
Computer Software Company
14%
Financial Services Firm
10%
Government
6%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
No data available
 

Questions from the Community

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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

No data available
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

University of Oklahoma, Donnelley
Clients across multiple industries, such as energy, financial, retail, healthcare, government, communications, and education use QRadar.
Find out what your peers are saying about Splunk, Microsoft, Wazuh and others in Security Information and Event Management (SIEM). Updated: November 2024.
816,406 professionals have used our research since 2012.