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Cribl vs IBM Security QRadar comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Jul 13, 2025

Review summaries and opinions

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

ROI

Sentiment score
4.3
Cribl offers cost-effective solutions with potential 30%-50% returns, reducing operational costs through log optimization and automation.
Sentiment score
7.1
IBM Security QRadar offers high ROI through cost-effectiveness, threat mitigation, SOAR integration, and valuable data insights, satisfying users.
In the case of optimization, it has helped return on investment to somewhere close to 50%.
we have saved a significant amount of time and resources moving from a manual approach to something that's more automated.
With SOAR, the workflow takes one minute or less to complete the analysis.
Investing this amount was very much worth it for my organization.
 

Customer Service

Sentiment score
5.0
Cribl's customer support is highly responsive with quick issue resolution, knowledgeable staff, and strong technical assistance despite minor improvements needed.
Sentiment score
6.1
IBM Security QRadar's customer service effectiveness varies with regional differences, personnel expertise, and response times impacting user satisfaction.
They had extensive expertise with the product and were able to facilitate everything we needed.
If they could enhance their internal logging, we won't require Cribl support to engage.
The community, including the engineering and sales teams, is available on Slack and is very supportive.
They assist with advanced issues, such as hardware or other problems, that are not part of standard operations.
Support needs to understand the issue first, then escalate it to the engineering team.
The support is really good; for instance, if a critical ticket is submitted, you will get paged right away as it gets logged, and their analyst will look into it, letting you know as soon as possible so you can work on it.
 

Scalability Issues

Sentiment score
5.9
Cribl offers scalable, automated deployment and seamless growth for efficient data handling, suitable for businesses of all sizes.
Sentiment score
7.4
IBM Security QRadar offers strong scalability and flexibility, adapting effortlessly to diverse security needs across various industries.
It's an enterprise version, and we have a good amount of users using this solution.
I don't need to talk to a Cribl engineer to connect a new log source.
Cribl is quite scalable, as we could add worker nodes as our data grows.
For EPS license, if you increase or exceed the EPS license, you cannot receive events.
 

Stability Issues

Sentiment score
6.3
Cribl is stable and reliable, with minor bugs quickly resolved, earning stability ratings between six and nine.
Sentiment score
7.6
QRadar is reliable and efficient, with stability issues often linked to misconfigurations or updates rather than the software itself.
I would rate the stability as ten out of ten.
If the pipeline is down and we receive an alert that it's not sending information to the log collection platform for more than one or two hours, if we receive an alert, it would be great.
Cribl is quite stable and doesn't crash; there's no unusual behavior.
I think QRadar is stable and currently satisfies my needs.
The product has been stable so far.
 

Room For Improvement

Cribl struggles with legacy integration, advanced customization, and documentation, while users seek better logging, indexing, and Microsoft connectors.
IBM Security QRadar users seek better third-party integration, usability, enhanced AI, reporting, support, visualization, and API/cloud features.
If we can have more internal logs and more debug logs to validate the error, that would be beneficial because instead of reaching out to Cribl support, we can troubleshoot and find the root cause ourselves.
In terms of large datasets—whether they originated from network inputs, virtual machines, or cloud instances—ingesting the data into the destination was relatively easy.
Since Cribl is such a large platform with numerous features, having a clear, structured approach would make it easier for me and others to understand and utilize its capabilities.
We receive logs from different types of devices and need a way to correlate them effectively.
If AI-related support can suggest rules and integrate with existing security devices like MD, IPS, this SIM can create more relevant rules.
IBM Security QRadar does not support Canvas, so we had to create custom scripts and workarounds to pull logs from Canvas.
 

Setup Cost

Enterprise users find Cribl cost-effective, offering good value and savings, despite its complex credit-based billing and yearly price increases.
IBM Security QRadar is pricey, ideal for large enterprises, with flexible EPS-based pricing, often more costly than competitors.
Over time, the licensing cost has increased.
Cribl is very inexpensive, with enterprise pricing around 30 cents per GB, which is really decent.
Splunk is more expensive than IBM Security QRadar.
It was costly mainly because of the value you can get right now compared to other solutions.
 

Valuable Features

Cribl excels in real-time data transformation, routing, and management with user-friendly tools, cost efficiency, and extensive integration support.
IBM Security QRadar offers scalable, user-friendly security with advanced analytics, seamless integrations, and effective threat detection capabilities.
The data reduction and preprocessing capabilities make Cribl really unique.
Cribl has a feature called JSON Unroll or Unroll function that allows you to differentiate the events; each event will come ingested as a single log instead of piling it up with multiple events.
The community on Slack is excellent for solving questions and getting ideas.
Recently, I faced an incident, a cyber incident, and it was detected in real time.
IBM is seeking information about IBM QRadar because a part of QRadar, especially in the cloud, has been sold to Palo Alto.
We have FortiSOAR and IBM Resilient for IBM Security QRadar orchestration.
 

Categories and Ranking

Cribl
Ranking in Log Management
6th
Ranking in Security Information and Event Management (SIEM)
10th
Average Rating
8.4
Reviews Sentiment
6.5
Number of Reviews
20
Ranking in other categories
Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability (12th), Observability Pipeline Software (1st)
IBM Security QRadar
Ranking in Log Management
7th
Ranking in Security Information and Event Management (SIEM)
4th
Average Rating
8.0
Reviews Sentiment
6.7
Number of Reviews
211
Ranking in other categories
User Entity Behavior Analytics (UEBA) (1st), Endpoint Detection and Response (EDR) (18th), Security Orchestration Automation and Response (SOAR) (4th), Managed Detection and Response (MDR) (8th), Extended Detection and Response (XDR) (11th)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of October 2025, in the Security Information and Event Management (SIEM) category, the mindshare of Cribl is 1.2%, up from 0.2% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of IBM Security QRadar is 7.0%, down from 9.4% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Security Information and Event Management (SIEM) Market Share Distribution
ProductMarket Share (%)
IBM Security QRadar7.0%
Cribl1.2%
Other91.8%
Security Information and Event Management (SIEM)
 

Featured Reviews

Manoj Gowda J - PeerSpot reviewer
Helps reduce log ingestion cost by dropping unnecessary events and customizing pipelines
The best feature in Cribl, when getting logs from some custom application, is the ability to break up logs that pile up together and come as one event. Cribl has a feature called JSON Unroll or Unroll function that allows you to differentiate the events; each event will come ingested as a single log instead of piling it up with multiple events. This is critical as this generally happens in CrowdStrike. This feature helps us significantly. When the ingestion is high from unwanted logs, logs not related to security purposes can be dropped by writing the parser function. By dropping events that are not required for security purpose monitoring, we can reduce the ingestion, which drastically reduces the cost as well. Cribl gives another option where I can store some logs, and when needed, I can pick them up from there. The interface is very handy and not very complicated, yet there are many functions you can perform. You can play around with numerous functions, parse there, and add UDMs to SecOps, which makes it really easy. To simplify the pipeline, when we go to the pipelines, there are vast options. We can make it specific requirements based on the customers. I would prefer a customized or simplified version. Cribl is a very good platform to work with, with lots of features that other platforms don't provide.
Mahmoud Younes - PeerSpot reviewer
Reliable installation and diverse use cases provide strong value
IBM Security QRadar has some areas for improvement. We have missed some DSM components. We need to customize logs where there is no DSM or connector for certain products. We can integrate but we have missed the DSM, which is the connector to pass logs coming from different applications. For example, with a university customer, we tried onboarding Canvas service. IBM Security QRadar does not support Canvas, so we had to create custom scripts and workarounds to pull logs from Canvas.
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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
Financial Services Firm
16%
Computer Software Company
9%
Manufacturing Company
8%
Healthcare Company
7%
Computer Software Company
15%
Financial Services Firm
11%
Government
7%
Manufacturing Company
7%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business9
Midsize Enterprise4
Large Enterprise8
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business89
Midsize Enterprise36
Large Enterprise102
 

Questions from the Community

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Cribl?
Cribl is very inexpensive, with enterprise pricing around 30 cents per GB, which is really decent. Organizations looking to ingest terabytes or petabytes of data each day find it quite an inexpensi...
What needs improvement with Cribl?
They've already done many good things with the product, but perhaps they could implement a temporary SIEM solution where we could store logs and display them as a SIEM, though I think that's not th...
What is your primary use case for Cribl?
Our main use case for Cribl was SIEM migration, where we merged multiple SIEM solutions to a single SIEM solution. SIEM migration was the most major use case we were looking for. The second use cas...
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?
When comparing with Splunk, IBM Security QRadar's cost is reasonable. Splunk is more expensive than IBM Security QRadar.
 

Comparisons

 

Also Known As

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

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Information Not Available
Clients across multiple industries, such as energy, financial, retail, healthcare, government, communications, and education use QRadar.
Find out what your peers are saying about Cribl vs. IBM Security QRadar and other solutions. Updated: September 2025.
869,566 professionals have used our research since 2012.