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IBM Security QRadar vs i-SIEM [EOL] comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Nov 2, 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

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
6.7
Number of Reviews
217
Ranking in other categories
Log Management (7th), Security Information and Event Management (SIEM) (3rd), User Entity Behavior Analytics (UEBA) (1st), Endpoint Detection and Response (EDR) (17th), Security Orchestration Automation and Response (SOAR) (4th), Managed Detection and Response (MDR) (7th), Extended Detection and Response (XDR) (11th)
 

Featured Reviews

Dannie Combs - PeerSpot reviewer
Senior Vice President and Chief Information Security Officer at Donnelley Financial Solutions
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.
HarshBhardiya - PeerSpot reviewer
SOC Engineer at a outsourcing company with 10,001+ employees
Have managed daily asset and alert monitoring effectively but have encountered limitations with manual processes and interface usability
It's still very manual and doesn't work on its own. It's still in an early stage and not on par where we can consider it a really successful detection system. The accuracy is not there. The UI could be better when compared to Sentinels where we can use flags and tagging. It could be much more user-friendly. IBM Security QRadar has all features and is fully competitive with other SIEM tools, but when it comes to user-friendliness, a new user takes time to get used to it. More intuitive, user-friendly interfaces and more helpful documentation would be beneficial. The query searching and data fetching could be faster. In large to very large organizations with around 5,000 or 6,000 assets or beyond, even with proper configurations and RAM and hardware backing up, the query is fairly slow.

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."
"It is really helpful to us from the compliance point of view."
"Providing real-time visibility for threat detection and prioritization - QRadar SIEM provides contextual and actionable surveillance across the entire IT infrastructure."
"Since using IBM Security QRadar, it has helped reduce security risks as we have a risk manager module, which is really helpful for us, and the response to an incident is very quick, so we have reduced the mean time to detect attacks."
"The pre-canned rules and reports in this product are a huge plus."
"What's most valuable in IBM QRadar User Behavior Analytics is its higher availability than other tools."
"It protect us from multiple authentication values, unauthorized access and antivirus threats."
"The solution can scale."
"It showed us where weaknesses were in our environment, so we could actively target those patches first."
 

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."
"There is a lot of manual configuration required in order for the product to run smoothly, and I think that it could be made more automatic."
"It's still very manual and doesn't work on its own. It's still in an early stage and not on par where we can consider it a really successful detection system."
"I think QRadar is very complex. It's a distributed system and IBM QRadar has an all-in-one solution which is not like that distributed solution but it's a good product. IBM needs to consider the user interface because if we compare it with AlienVault, the AlienVault user interface is fantastic but the IBM QRadar user interface is very complex. They should focus on how to make it easier for the client."
"The custom rules could be simplified more or it should be possible to use a different language, other than the ones that the solution is already using. They should add other languages into the mix."
"The usability of interfaces could be improved."
"I would like for Yara to be supported by all components."
"The initial setup requires that you have somebody with the proper skill set, and it would help if the configuration were easier."
"I think the support for IBM Security QRadar needs improvement as it is a big product and needs more support engineers to help customers."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"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."
"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."
"IBM's Qradar is not for small companie. Unfortunately, it would be 'overkill' to place it plainly. The pricing would be too much."
"The price of this solution is a little high."
"There is a license required for this solution and it is an annual payment. I have found all solutions in the category to be expensive, including Splunk."
"I think that the price is fair, but we can always say that the price could be cheaper."
"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."
"QRadar's price is reasonable compared to LogRhythm."
"IBM QRadar is a little bit expensive compared to other products."
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Comparison Review

VS
Manager, Enterprise Risk Consulting at a tech company with 1,001-5,000 employees
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
Performing Arts
11%
Legal Firm
9%
Manufacturing Company
7%
Financial Services Firm
7%
Computer Software Company
13%
Financial Services Firm
11%
Manufacturing Company
7%
Government
6%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
No data available
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business91
Midsize Enterprise39
Large Enterprise105
 

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 is your experience regarding pricing and costs for IBM Security QRadar?
My experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing is great compared to the other vendor.
 

Also Known As

No data available
IBM QRadar, QRadar SIEM, QRadar UBA, QRadar on Cloud, IBM QRadar Advisor with Watson
 

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, Wazuh, IBM and others in Security Information and Event Management (SIEM). Updated: January 2026.
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