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Devo vs IBM Watson for Cyber Security comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Sep 18, 2024

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

Devo
Ranking in Security Information and Event Management (SIEM)
25th
Average Rating
8.4
Reviews Sentiment
7.1
Number of Reviews
22
Ranking in other categories
Log Management (25th), IT Operations Analytics (9th), AIOps (18th)
IBM Watson for Cyber Security
Ranking in Security Information and Event Management (SIEM)
58th
Average Rating
8.0
Number of Reviews
4
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
 

Mindshare comparison

As of August 2025, in the Security Information and Event Management (SIEM) category, the mindshare of Devo is 1.1%, up from 0.9% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of IBM Watson for Cyber Security is 0.3%, up from 0.2% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Security Information and Event Management (SIEM)
 

Featured Reviews

Michael Wenn - PeerSpot reviewer
Has cloud-first architecture with SIEM technology to run security operations
When it comes to scale, they're architected quite well. They handle some of the biggest customers globally, with significant throughput on their platform, managing thousands of customers. One of the most impressive aspects of Devo is its customer community. A large majority, over 80 percent of their customers, actively participate on a Devo-specific community page. They're contributing to product development and support, events, and user group information, helping each other out. This high level of engagement is rare and demonstrates both the loyalty of their customer base and the quality of their product. They offer a range of small, medium, and large options to cater to everyone. I sold Devo products while working with them, focusing on enterprise solutions. However, as a small reseller, my customers were typically smaller businesses. I rate the solution's scalability a nine out of ten.
Elena Stefanovska - PeerSpot reviewer
Knowledgeable support, reliable, and useful compliance policies
IBM Watson for Cyber Security can be deployed on-premise or in the cloud and it is used as a SIEM solution The most valuable features of IBM Watson for Cyber Security are ease of use and out-of-the-box reports and compliance policies. Additionally, if there are aspects that are missing IBM add…

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 feature is definitely the ability that Devo has to ingest data. From the previous SIEM that I came from and helped my company administer, it really was the type of system where data was parsed on ingest. This meant that if you didn't build the parser efficiently or correctly, sometimes that would bring the system to its knees. You'd have a backlog of processing the logs as it was ingesting them."
"Those 400 days of hot data mean that people can look for trends and at what happened in the past. And they can not only do so from a security point of view, but even for operational use cases. In the past, our operational norm was to keep live data for only 30 days. Our users were constantly asking us for at least 90 days, and we really couldn't even do that. That's one reason that having 400 days of live data is pretty huge. As our users start to use it and adopt this system, we expect people to be able to do those long-term analytics."
"The thing that Devo does better than other solutions is to give me the ability to write queries that look at multiple data sources and run fast. Most SIEMs don't do that. And I can do that by creating entity-based queries. Let's say I have a table which has Okta, a table which has G Suite, a table which has endpoint telemetry, and I have a table which has DNS telemetry. I can write a query that says, 'Join all these things together on IP, and where the IP matches in all these tables, return to me that subset of data, within these time windows.' I can break it down that way."
"Devo has a really good website for creating custom configurations."
"The strength of Devo is not only in that it is pretty intuitive, but it gives you the flexibility and creativity to merge feeds. The prime examples would be using the synthesis or union tables that give you phenomenal capabilities... The ability to use a synthesis or union table to combine all those feeds and make heads or tails of what's going on, and link it to go down a thread, is functionality that I hadn't seen before."
"Being able to build and modify dashboards on the fly with Activeboards streamlines my analyst time because my analysts aren't doing it across spreadsheets or five different tools to try to build a timeline out themselves. They can just ingest it all, build a timeline out across all the logging, and all the different information sources in one dashboard. So, it's a huge time saver. It also has the accuracy of being able to look at all those data sources in one view. The log analysis, which would take 40 hours, we can probably get through it in about five to eight hours using Devo."
"Devo helps us to unlock the full power of our data because they have more than 450 parsers, which means that we can ingest pretty much any type of log data."
"Devo provides a multi-tenant, cloud-native architecture. This is critical for managed service provider environments or multinational organizations who may have subsidiaries globally. It gives organizations a way to consolidate their data in a single accessible location, yet keep the data separate. This allows for global views and/or isolated views restricted by access controls by company or business unit."
"The most valuable feature of this product is innovation, where the research and upgrading of technology never ends."
"The customer support is very good."
"The most valuable features of IBM Watson for Cyber Security are ease of use and out-of-the-box reports and compliance policies. Additionally, if there are aspects that are missing IBM add them in the next release."
"IBM Watson for Cyber Security is very stable."
 

Cons

"Some of the documentation could be improved a little bit. A lot of times it doesn't go as deep into some of the critical issues you might run into. They've been really good to shore us up with support, but some of the documentation could be a little bit better."
"There are some issues from an availability and functionality standpoint, meaning the tool is somewhat slow. There were some slow response periods over the past six to nine months, though it has yet to impact us terribly as we are a relatively small shop. We've noticed it, however, so Devo could improve the responsiveness."
"One major area for improvement for Devo... is to provide more capabilities around pre-built monitoring. They're working on integrations with different types of systems, but that integration needs to go beyond just onboarding to the platform. It needs to include applications, out-of-the-box, that immediately help people to start monitoring their systems. Such applications would include dashboards and alerts, and then people could customize them for their own needs so that they aren't starting from a blank slate."
"There is room for improvement in the ability to parse different log types. I would go as far as to say the product is deficient in its ability to parse multiple, different log types, including logs from major vendors that are supported by competitors. Additionally, the time that it takes to turn around a supported parser for customers and common log source types, which are generally accepted standards in the industry, is not acceptable. This has impacted customer onboarding and customer relationships for us on multiple fronts."
"An admin who is trying to audit user activity usually cannot go beyond a day in the UI. I would like to have access to pages and pages of that data, going back as far as the storage we have, so I could look at every command or search or deletion or anything that a user has run. As an admin, that would really help. Going back just a day in the UI is not going to help, and that means I have to find a different way to do that."
"The biggest area with room for improvement in Devo is the Security Operations module that just isn't there yet. That goes back to building out how they're going to do content and larger correlation and aggregation of data across multiple things, as well as natively ingesting CTI to create rule sets."
"Where Devo has room for improvement is the data ingestion and parsing. We tend to have to work with the Devo support team to bring on and ingest new sources of data."
"From our experience, the Devo agent needs some work. They built it on top of OS Query's open-source framework. It seems like it wasn't tuned properly to handle a large volume of Windows event logs. In our experience, there would definitely be some room for improvement. A lot of SIEMs on the market have their own agent infrastructure. I think Devo's working towards that, but I think that it needs some improvement as far as keeping up with high-volume environments."
"This is an expensive product, so making it more cost-effective would be an improvement."
"The dashboard could improve in IBM Watson for Cyber Security."
"They need to continue to build the AI capabilities."
"In the future, I would like to see threat intelligence included."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"It's a per gigabyte cost for ingestion of data. For every gigabyte that you ingest, it's whatever you negotiated your price for. Compared to other contracts that we've had for cloud providers, it's significantly less."
"[Devo was] in the ballpark with at least a couple of the other front-runners that we were looking at. Devo is a good value and, given the quality of the product, I would expect to pay more."
"I rate the pricing a four on a scale of one to ten, where one is cheap, and ten is expensive."
"Devo is a hosted or subscription-based solution, whereas before, we purchased QRadar, so we owned it and just had to pay a maintenance fee. We've encountered this with some other products, too, where we went over to subscription-based. Our thought process is that with subscription based, the provider hosts and maintains the tool, and it's offsite. That comes with some additional fees, but we were able to convince our upper management it was worth the price. We used to pay under 10k a year for maintenance, and now we're paying ten times that. It was a relatively tough sell to our management, but I wonder if we have a choice anymore; this is where the market is."
"The way Devo prices things is based on the amount of data, and I wish the tiers had more granularity. Maybe at this point they do, but when we first negotiated with them, there were only three or four tiers."
"I'm not involved in the financial aspect, but I think the licensing costs are similar to other solutions. If all the solutions have a similar cost, Devo provides more for the money."
"Devo was very cost-competitive... Devo did come with that 400 days of hot data, and that was not the case with other products."
"Our licensing fees are billed annually and per terabyte."
"IBM Watson for Cyber Security is very simple to license and is priced well."
"The price of this solution should be lower, although I understand why IBM charges a premium price."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
16%
Computer Software Company
11%
University
9%
Government
6%
No data available
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
No data available
 

Questions from the Community

What do you like most about Devo?
Devo has a really good website for creating custom configurations.
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Devo?
Compared to Splunk or SentinelOne, it is really expensive. I rate the product’s pricing a nine out of ten, where one is cheap and ten is expensive.
What needs improvement with Devo?
They can improve their AI capabilities. If you look at some integrations like XDR or AI, which add to the platform to correlate situations in events, there are areas for enhancement. For instance, ...
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Overview

 

Sample Customers

United States Air Force, Rubrik, SentinelOne, Critical Start, NHL, Panda Security, Telefonica, CaixaBank, OpenText, IGT, OneMain Financial, SurveyMonkey, FanDuel, H&R Block, Ulta Beauty, Manulife, Moneylion, Chime Bank, Magna International, American Express Global Business Travel
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