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Elastic Security 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:
 

ROI

Sentiment score
6.0
Elastic Security provides satisfactory ROI and cost savings, though users experience varied support levels and payback periods.
Sentiment score
6.8
IBM Security QRadar offers strong ROI and efficiency, valued for security monitoring, cost-effectiveness, and quick cloud-based implementation.
It does not require hefty security budgets and can be deployed for enterprise security effectively.
With SOAR, the workflow takes one minute or less to complete the analysis.
AWS gives the chance to implement a solution out of the box with use cases that are already in IBM Security QRadar.
Investing this amount was very much worth it for my organization.
 

Customer Service

Sentiment score
6.4
Elastic Security support is inconsistent; users favor community and documentation, while premium users seek more responsive and personalized help.
Sentiment score
6.1
IBM Security QRadar support is praised for responsiveness, but users note delays and inconsistencies, with helpful documentation available.
Support is prompt and helpful.
Most of the time when my team encounters issues, they receive responses within 24 hours.
I have not faced any difficulties with Elastic Security, as we have a pretty good support service from them.
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
7.3
Elastic Security offers scalable solutions adaptable to various environments, praised for flexibility and requiring careful planning for integration.
Sentiment score
7.3
QRadar offers seamless scalability and flexibility, efficiently accommodating various organizational sizes and event volumes through easy license upgrades.
It allows us to think about specific use cases, such as gathering malicious IPs in a single view and analyzing threats based on geolocation.
Elastic Security is quite scalable.
For EPS license, if you increase or exceed the EPS license, you cannot receive events.
 

Stability Issues

Sentiment score
7.7
Elastic Security is generally stable and reliable but can face challenges with big data and requires careful configuration.
Sentiment score
7.6
IBM Security QRadar is generally stable, with some patching issues; IBM's support is praised for effective, prompt resolutions.
In terms of stability, I would rate Elastic a solid eight out of ten.
I think QRadar is stable and currently satisfies my needs.
The product has been stable so far.
 

Room For Improvement

Elastic Security needs improvements in authentication, usability, automation, scalability, integration, and pricing, with user-friendly dashboards and documentation.
IBM QRadar users seek improvements in graphing, integration, user interface, updates, cost, reporting, AI, automation, and support.
CrowdStrike and Defender have more established threat intelligence integration due to having a larger client base.
My security testing team continuously reports vulnerabilities, and we have to fix and update the versions frequently.
Machine learning algorithms become better with time; as they ingest a huge volume of data, they become better.
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

Elastic Security provides a free open-source option, competitive pricing, and subscription plans, appealing to cost-conscious enterprises.
IBM Security QRadar offers valuable but costly pricing, depending on EPS/FPS, with possible discounts and alternatives considered.
The pricing is reasonable, especially for Small Medium Enterprises (SMEs), making it a viable option for businesses building their security infrastructure.
This is beneficial for SMEs as they do not need extensive budgets for security solutions.
Elastic Security is considered cost-effective, especially at lower EPS levels.
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.
It depends on how much you want to spend.
 

Valuable Features

Elastic Security provides scalable, customizable threat response with fast search, real-time analysis, and strong community support for actionable insights.
IBM Security QRadar provides scalable, user-friendly security insights, integrating AI and third-party solutions for enhanced threat detection and management.
Elastic Security offers good insight regarding alerts, reports, and cases.
Elastic Security offers advanced features such as machine learning and integration with ChatGPT.
We require rapid processing speed for alerts and event data, and Elastic Security is very efficient at handling this level of data.
Recently, I faced an incident, a cyber incident, and it was detected in real time.
IBM Security QRadar gives the opportunity to improve the time to market of the releases with a great evaluation of cybersecurity breaches.
IBM is seeking information about IBM QRadar because a part of QRadar, especially in the cloud, has been sold to Palo Alto.
 

Categories and Ranking

Elastic Security
Ranking in Log Management
7th
Ranking in Security Information and Event Management (SIEM)
5th
Ranking in Endpoint Detection and Response (EDR)
16th
Ranking in Security Orchestration Automation and Response (SOAR)
5th
Ranking in Extended Detection and Response (XDR)
8th
Average Rating
7.8
Reviews Sentiment
6.8
Number of Reviews
66
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
IBM Security QRadar
Ranking in Log Management
6th
Ranking in Security Information and Event Management (SIEM)
4th
Ranking in Endpoint Detection and Response (EDR)
17th
Ranking in Security Orchestration Automation and Response (SOAR)
4th
Ranking in Extended Detection and Response (XDR)
11th
Average Rating
8.0
Reviews Sentiment
6.7
Number of Reviews
212
Ranking in other categories
User Entity Behavior Analytics (UEBA) (1st), Managed Detection and Response (MDR) (8th)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of November 2025, in the Security Information and Event Management (SIEM) category, the mindshare of Elastic Security is 4.7%, down from 7.8% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of IBM Security QRadar is 6.5%, down from 9.2% 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 QRadar6.5%
Elastic Security4.7%
Other88.8%
Security Information and Event Management (SIEM)
 

Featured Reviews

Laurentiu Popescu - PeerSpot reviewer
Has improved threat detection with deep log analysis and streamlined investigation workflows
The most useful features I find in Elastic Security are the forensic ones that allow us to carry deeper analysis into the logs for in-depth investigations, and the dashboards, with the reporting dashboard being quite user-friendly. Elastic Security is quite good at identifying threats, as it is part of the deep investigation tool that I mentioned before. Unless we need to look further into a certain log, we can carry out a deeper analysis and forensics on those particular logs. I can assess the impact of Elastic Security's real-time data analysis on our threat response efficiency as working pretty good. We are looking for real-time analysis because we have a continuous inflow of logs from different sources: from our cloud, from Active Directory, from our network. So it works pretty well.
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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Use our free recommendation engine to learn which Security Information and Event Management (SIEM) solutions are best for your needs.
872,922 professionals have used our research since 2012.
 

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
14%
Government
10%
Comms Service Provider
8%
Financial Services Firm
7%
Computer Software Company
14%
Financial Services Firm
11%
Manufacturing Company
7%
Government
7%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business40
Midsize Enterprise11
Large Enterprise15
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business90
Midsize Enterprise36
Large Enterprise103
 

Questions from the Community

Datadog vs ELK: which one is good in terms of performance, cost and efficiency?
With Datadog, we have near-live visibility across our entire platform. We have seen APM metrics impacted several times lately using the dashboards we have created with Datadog; they are very good c...
What do you like most about Elastic Security?
Elastic provides the capability to index quickly due to the reverse indexes it offers. This data is crucial as it contains critical information. The reverse index allows fast data indexing because ...
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Elastic Security?
I am satisfied with the pricing, setup cost, and licensing cost. It is a pure 10.
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?
The pricing, setup cost, or licensing with IBM Security QRadar was costly. It was costly mainly for the things we used to use it for. The customers used to pay the price, but it was one of the prob...
 

Also Known As

Elastic SIEM, ELK Logstash
IBM QRadar, QRadar SIEM, QRadar UBA, QRadar on Cloud, IBM QRadar Advisor with Watson
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Texas A&M, U.S. Air Force, NuScale Power, Martin's Point Health Care
Clients across multiple industries, such as energy, financial, retail, healthcare, government, communications, and education use QRadar.
Find out what your peers are saying about Elastic Security vs. IBM Security QRadar and other solutions. Updated: October 2025.
872,922 professionals have used our research since 2012.