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Fortra's Alert Logic MDR 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:
 

Categories and Ranking

Fortra's Alert Logic MDR
Ranking in Managed Detection and Response (MDR)
19th
Average Rating
8.0
Reviews Sentiment
6.9
Number of Reviews
11
Ranking in other categories
Vulnerability Management (28th), SOC as a Service (4th)
IBM Security QRadar
Ranking in Managed Detection and Response (MDR)
9th
Average Rating
8.0
Reviews Sentiment
6.8
Number of Reviews
209
Ranking in other categories
Log Management (5th), Security Information and Event Management (SIEM) (4th), User Entity Behavior Analytics (UEBA) (1st), Endpoint Detection and Response (EDR) (18th), Security Orchestration Automation and Response (SOAR) (4th), Extended Detection and Response (XDR) (13th)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of August 2025, in the Managed Detection and Response (MDR) category, the mindshare of Fortra's Alert Logic MDR is 1.1%, up from 1.1% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of IBM Security QRadar is 0.8%, up from 0.7% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Managed Detection and Response (MDR)
 

Featured Reviews

reviewer2191746 - PeerSpot reviewer
It's a highly mature, competitively priced solution that provides total visibility into your ecosystem. FORTRA's Alert Logic has the only Cybersecurity Platform that integrates XDR+WAF+VM+DLP in one.
Alert Logic offers total visibility into the client's IT ecosystem. The solution's intrusion detection system inspects 100 percent of the network packets and installs universal agents on all physical and virtual servers for log collection. Alert Logic also aggregates logs of the client's various 3rd Party security tools into a single pane of glass. All of the analytics from those data feeds got to a 24/7 SOC with sophisticated resources. Alert Logic has massive threat intelligence resources to provide additional context to the incident response declarations. They do all the heavy lifting for clients who lack the technology and resources to operate their own SOC. The client is solely responsible for the incident response component. The macro analytics resides on Alert Logic's cloud. You have the ECM response and business application team on the client side. Everything works in tandem, which is the only way you can deal with the advanced threats we face today, especially the ransomware families. If you don't respond in minutes, you're in trouble.
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.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"Notifications and the detail of notifications are most valuable. It is a user-friendly solution."
"The most valuable aspect of Alert Logic is its technology platform. They have SOCs in the US and Europe, giving them global visibility of the threat landscape. They detect and respond to threats in minutes. Their biggest value is human expertise. You're being attacked by a human, and you cannot respond to it unless you have a human on the other side. They have the human and technological resources to respond."
"Everything is in one dashboard; I'm notified when there's an incident and advised on what steps to take."
"The initial setup is pretty straightforward."
"It is a very stable product."
"It has the ability to install agents. It is pretty straightforward. You can automate the process pretty easily."
"The installation and configuration were slick."
"It improves our security. Before, we didn't have anything scanning our containers. We had software scanning all the physical servers, but we had nothing to scan our containers. With Alert Logic, we can do that."
"It is suitable for large companies with critical infrastructure. For our clients, robustness, availability at a high level, and the level of references and experiences connected to the solution are important."
"The correlation and the parsing are important features, since it is very important for a SIEM to have a good scalability and performance."
"I like that it's easy to use and the performance is good."
"IBM Qradar's ability to simplify the number of events, not only on a technical level but by making that information easy to pan through the orchestration deduplication. It is very impressive given that we have hundreds of devices that send event logs through."
"The playbook engine is flexible and allows for the graphical visualization of processes, enabling the implementation of dynamic playbooks for incident response or testing."
"IBM Security QRadar has significantly improved our incident response procedures."
"In terms of the most valuable features, the log collections and log processing mechanisms are good. They have good dashboards."
"The threat protection network is the most valuable feature, because when you get an offense, you can actually trace it back to where it originated from, how it originated, and why."
 

Cons

"I would like more data on the alert payload. It would be good to have the ability to customize the alert payload to add whatever data that we want on there. Right now, it is a bit limited."
"Alert Logic needs to expand its SOCs to serve more markets, such as the Middle East and Asia. There should be infrastructure that covers more time zones. The company should also develop an EDR that is natively integrated into their solution. Currently, a client must buy another EDR solution like CrowdStrike or Sophos. I think Alert Logic is developing this. Built-in email security could also be developed and integrated."
"As a user involved with the user interface, I believe there is a need to continue improving it based on feedback from our customers."
"This product needs to mature more. While it is a good product, there are some areas where it needs work."
"The setup process was complex."
"They have ideas and email you whatever they find, but they don't have a dedicated security team who will work on an attack or a specific security instance."
"The documentation, especially with the initial setup, needs improvement."
"I would like to see it do initial scans and start capturing data, which it will truly analyze, not just be a reporting system saying, "Here is an email. Here is an email. Here is an email.""
"It's resource-intensive."
"I would like for Yara to be supported by all components."
"QRadar UBA only keeps the data for a short while (it's refreshed every five minutes) and would be improved if this were extended to a week or month."
"It is very difficult to activate all of the network equipment, and it would help if it were made easier."
"I would like for them to develop a detection management solution. It does not have a detecting management solution in it, you have to buy it as it is, on top of the extended solution."
"IBM QRadar Advisor with Watson could be more user-friendly. You need some skills and understanding of what you're looking at, especially if you're going to draw down specific information."
"The solution is expensive compared to other products."
"They need to improve their threat intelligence feed and they need to improve their user behavior analytics modules."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"Our ROI would probably be zero. We don't even use it. It sits in there. We get emails and just delete them. Around the world, we don't even use it."
"Alert Logic has better competitive pricing than some of its competitors."
"Almost any product that is on the AWS Marketplace is super easy to subscribe to."
"Its pricing is very reasonable considering what you get for what you pay. There is quite a good value there. Its licensing is also very logical. They've got the licensing price points at a reasonable level. It is on a monthly license but a yearly contract. There are no additional costs to the standard licensing fees."
"Price of the solution was very reasonable considering the size of our organization at the time, and so it worked out perfectly."
"We pay approximately $40,000 to use the solution annually. This solution is a lot less expensive than Splunk."
"IBM QRadar is a little bit expensive compared to other products."
"The tool's price is high."
"As for licensing costs, I haven't seen the exact figures, but it is considered somewhat costly. On a scale from one to ten, where one is very expensive and ten is very cheap, I would rate it a six—it’s costly but worth the money."
"I would like for them to lower the price."
"It is very expensive."
"The solution is priced fairly, there is a license for the solution, and we pay annually."
"Go through a vulnerability assessment review for price breaks. A virtualized solution will also cut down on cost."
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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
Computer Software Company
23%
Manufacturing Company
12%
Financial Services Firm
5%
Performing Arts
5%
Computer Software Company
16%
Financial Services Firm
11%
Government
7%
Manufacturing Company
7%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
 

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?
When comparing with Splunk, IBM Security QRadar's cost is reasonable. Splunk is more expensive than IBM Security QRadar.
 

Also Known As

Alert Logic MDR, Alert Logic Managed Detection and ResponseAlert Logic Threat Manager, Alert Logic Cloud Defender, Critical Watch FusionVM
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 Fortra's Alert Logic MDR vs. IBM Security QRadar and other solutions. Updated: July 2025.
865,384 professionals have used our research since 2012.