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Elastic Beats vs IBM Security QRadar comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Oct 19, 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

Elastic Beats
Average Rating
8.0
Number of Reviews
2
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
IBM Security QRadar
Average Rating
8.0
Reviews Sentiment
6.6
Number of Reviews
217
Ranking in other categories
Log Management (7th), Security Information and Event Management (SIEM) (3rd), User Entity Behavior Analytics (UEBA) (2nd), Endpoint Detection and Response (EDR) (16th), Security Orchestration Automation and Response (SOAR) (4th), Managed Detection and Response (MDR) (6th), Extended Detection and Response (XDR) (11th)
 

Featured Reviews

it_user1269834 - PeerSpot reviewer
I.T. Manager at a healthcare company with 51-200 employees
A great addition to our security monitoring system
We haven't to this point had to scale very large, we want to continue to evolve, but it's a slow process for us. From what I've used so far, and my reading on it, I don't think we're going to have any problems scaling to really whatever size we need.
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

"There's a whole spectrum of features on the solution that users can take advantage of. It's a very robust product."
"There's a whole spectrum of features on the solution that users can take advantage of, and it's a very robust product."
"The security aspects in general have been very useful to use."
"Improved our organization's TCO."
"The solution can scale."
"Most of our clients are interested in automation. The automation part is good because they are able to detect threats and vulnerabilities in real time. It's very fast."
"The tool's most valuable feature is log source management. It enables us to connect to various log sources, including content, authentications, or other customized integrations. These integrations can be tailored for use with other platforms that don’t already have built-in IBM add-ons."
"IBM QRadar has improved my organization by introducing many functions; it collects logs from all of our systems in the organization and has functioned very well, alerting and correlating the aggregate events or offenses we receive through all the applications we use."
"This solution provides me with various alarms, and I have found security issues with some of my other products."
"The visibility it gives you into your infrastructure has been great."
"The most valuable feature currently is security behaviors and the pdf files."
 

Cons

"The dashboard is not user-friendly. The solution, in general, isn't great from a user's perspective."
"The dashboard is not user-friendly. The solution, in general, isn't great from a user's perspective."
"At some level, the documentation, the information as far as the components, it's sometimes a little difficult to find the information necessary to implement aspects."
"The technical support is poor. Mostly because when I open a PMR for IBM, I am stuck with Level 1 staff."
"For us, it's kind of wonky because we always try to be bleeding edge and always try to do updates."
"IBM QRadar has outdated technology, and this is its area for improvement. When you try to implement an analytic expression, it's not updated. The solution doesn't support newer technologies, and it doesn't update regularly. For example, around the world, others implement new technologies, while IBM updates later than others."
"The setup was a bit complex. It was complex because you need to understand the product and they need to understand our business requirements, as all of this is in the setup."
"IBM is going through some problems with its resources currently making its support response time slow."
"Before we didn't have any security issues but recently a few of the user emails were hacked. We had to actually recreate their emails for them."
"The Indian tech support is not helpful."
"The solution is expensive compared to other products."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"It wasn't cheap, but it was cost-effective compared to many of the other solutions."
"QRadar UBA's price is a little more than street price and could be reduced."
"Licensing is very expensive, IBM QRadar is a very expensive solution. If you want to minimize costs then IBM QRadar is not for you."
"The cost of this product is expensive."
"IBM QRadar User Behavior Analytics is an application framework and you can install many applications without any additional costs."
"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."
"It is costlier as compared to the other alternatives available in the market."
"There are different types of subscriptions available. We were on an annual subscription, but our customers typically choose the two years subscription option."
"You have a one-time payment, and you also can purchase it for one year as a subscription. We have it on-premise, and we have a permanent license for it. We have to pay for the support on a yearly basis. If you compare its cost with Sentinel for one year, QRadar would seem more expensive, but if you compare its cost over five or ten years, Azure Sentinel will be more expensive than QRadar. If you compare its cost with Sentinel for one year, QRadar would seem more expensive, but if you compare its cost over five or 10 years, Azure Sentinel can be more expensive than QRadar."
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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
No data available
Computer Software Company
12%
Financial Services Firm
10%
Manufacturing Company
8%
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?
Pricing and the license of EPS were managed by the governance team. I was not responsible for managing those. I was supposed to put up the requirement of the license needed to integrate that amount...
 

Also Known As

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

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Sprint
Clients across multiple industries, such as energy, financial, retail, healthcare, government, communications, and education use QRadar.
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