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Google Cloud's operations suite (formerly Stackdriver) vs IBM Security QRadar vs USM Anywhere comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive Summary

Review summaries and opinions

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

Mindshare comparison

As of May 2025, in the Log Management category, the mindshare of Google Cloud's operations suite (formerly Stackdriver) is 0.6%, down from 0.9% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of IBM Security QRadar is 3.7%, down from 5.0% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of USM Anywhere is 0.4%, down from 1.0% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Log Management
 

Featured Reviews

Anand_Patel - PeerSpot reviewer
Offers reliable Ops Agent and logging transport feature with easy third-party integrations
As part of our company, we implemented several changes in our log analytics pattern, including the storage and procurement process. Earlier, before implementing the solution, our company was able to procure only one year of data, but later, we came to the three-year mark. Around 15-20% reduction has been witnessed in the total analytic consumption of our company. The aforementioned result was possible because the solution allowed the creation of a dashboard where factors like storage costs, proportion of logs, and logs presence in a storage bucket or BigQuery can all be checked. Earlier all logs were stored in a raw storage, but currently our company is able to move logs in table bucket that contributes towards cost savings.
Md. Shahriar Hussain - PeerSpot reviewer
Real-time incident detection and user-friendly dashboard benefit daily operations
There are many types of AI, and this AI is very limited in SQL and features. There may be potential for improvement. So far, it seems very limited. It shows some good features in the correlation part, but I think there is room for improvement. For instance, when creating rules, it can suggest more rules, reducing the effort needed. If AI-related support can suggest rules and integrate with existing security devices like MD, IPS, this SIM can create more relevant rules. Sometimes logs I receive don't mean anything, and I need technical stakeholders to share or forward logs, but these are sometimes inadequate. Keywords can help identify insufficient logs. I often lack time to verify logs. Sharing false positive results could be reduced to help my team.
Kris Nawani - PeerSpot reviewer
Offers complete coverage without the need to install additional software
USM Anywhere is used for threat detection and investigation. It provides a solution with built-in threat intelligence and various other investigation tools The solution offers complete coverage without the need to install additional software, as it is maintained by the vendor. It helps in saving…

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"Provides visibility into the performance uptime."
"The features that I have found most valuable are its graphs - if I need any statistics, in Kubernetes or Kong level or VPN level, I can quickly get the reports."
"Our company has a corporate account for Google Cloud and so our systems and clusters integrate really well."
"The most valuable feature is the multi-cloud integration, where there is support for both GCP and AWS."
"I like the monitoring feature."
"The cloud login enables us to get our logs from the different platforms that we currently use."
"Google's technical support is very good."
"We find the solution to be stable."
"The features that I have found most valuable in QRadar are its data enrichment, use case creations, and adding references - those kinds of features are very good. Also QRadar's event filtration and device integration are perfect."
"The product provides a complete platform for ingesting the log, doing the correlations and handling the runtime."
"The most valuable feature is the QRadar Vulnerability Manager which provides vulnerability scans. In addition, I like the way QRadar generates alerts."
"The scalability is good."
"I think this is a good product for enterprises because of the performance and out-of-the-box rules and use cases. If they want to reach the maturity level early, they can use these out-of-the-box rules and use cases. That will help them a lot."
"The scalability is very good. It's not a problem."
"I have used IBM QRadar User Behavior Analytics in a Cloud Pak on Amazon, and there it runs on top of it and is easy to assess. Additionally, I have installed processes and characters."
"IBM QRadar Advisor with Watson is a stable solution."
"Any unusual behaviour, we can monitor. We have alerts set up to be sent when we receive signs of any unusual behaviour."
"We had used previous products and found AlienVault centralized the logging for our security."
"The most valuable feature is vulnerability management because it gives you insight into your environment to know what systems need to be updated or patched."
"The vulnerability manager and the file integration are very good."
"The most valuable feature of the solution is the ease of deployment that it provides to users. The integrations that the product has with third-party applications are useful."
"Log-monitoring and alerting enable us to know when things happen that we need to know about."
"The IDS and the threat intelligence are very useful. They are very intuitive and data-rich."
"AlienVault's reporting is good. I like that vulnerability assessment is part of the solution, and the UI is intuitive. Also, the overhead is low, which is to say we don't need a dedicated SOC team to manage and analyze things constantly. We're a small company that doesn't have those resources."
 

Cons

"It is difficult to estimate in advance how much something is going to cost."
"While we are satisfied with the overall performance, in certain cases we must add additional metrics and additional tools like Grafana and Dynatrace."
"The logging functionality could be better."
"This solution could be improved if it offered the ability to analyze charts, such as a solution like Kibana."
"If I want to track any round-trip or breakdowns of my response times, I'm not able to get it. My request goes through various levels of the Google Cloud Platform (GCP) and comes back to my client machine. Suppose that my request has taken 10 seconds overall, so if I want to break it down, to see where the delay is happening within my architecture, I am not able to find that out using Stackdriver."
"It could be more stable."
"Lacking sufficient operations documentation."
"The product provides minimal metrics that are insufficient."
"The user interface needs improvement."
"Solution has too many menus that require going to two or three sub-monitors to enter the QRadar."
"The only problem is that if you have too many events that occur, then the storage capacity becomes a problem. We would need to increase the storage capacity."
"The Indian tech support is not helpful."
"The tech support is not that good."
"The initial setup was complex, and it took six months."
"The technical support can be improved a little bit, and the price could be cheaper."
"I have also been working with other SIEM solutions, and I have observed that they have extensive Linux-based and Unix-based integrations. They have been able to support some of the Linux-based agents, which is useful to investigate and process the information on the Linux and Unix side."
"There are scalability issues due to a 60 TB limit, which restricts its use for large customers like banks."
"We would like more plugins. This being the main point of improvement which would benefit the users."
"AlienVault must improve their correlation feature. Some of the events do not match with the correlation rules and some of the correlation events are false-positive."
"Its reporting tools need improvements. It would be good if they can provide integration with other ticketing systems. Currently, we only have integration with Slack and Jira. It is also a bit slow, and its replication engine can be improved."
"I'd like to see a dashboard that's a little more descriptive."
"The reporting tools are a bit lacking for building reports to give directly to customers, but support has been helpful in giving our requests for new features to the development team and following up with us."
"Their threat intelligence platform needs to be broadened. They should integrate it with more threat intelligence platforms. For the threat feed that they get from open intelligence, I would like them to add a few premium threat intelligence platforms. They can provide a bundle in which AlienVault has the threat intelligence background of other premium products."
"Search performance can be slow. The Raw Logs feature is painfully slow. And if we're talking about the newer, the Anywhere product, you can't even schedule reports on the thing. There are probably a dozen other features I'd really like to see there, but that would be one of the biggies."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"We have a basic standard license without any additional costs."
"The cost could be lower."
"The cost of using Stackdriver depends on usage."
"The maintenance costs are high."
"On a scale from one to ten, where one is cheap and ten is expensive, I rate IBM Security QRadar's pricing a five out of ten."
"It's too expensive."
"The price of this solution is a little bit expensive, so if it were cheaper then it would help."
"It is overly expensive and overly complex in terms of licensing. They have many different appliances, which makes it extremely difficult to choose the technology. It is very difficult to choose the technology or QRadar components that you should be deploying. They have improved some of it in the last few years. They have made it slightly easy with the fact that you can now buy virtual versions of all the appliances, which is good, but it is still very fragmented. For instance, on some of the smaller appliances, there is no upgrade path. So, if you exceed the capacity of the appliance, you have to buy a bigger appliance, which is not helpful because it is quite a major cost. If you want to add more disks to the system, they'll say that you can't."
"It's too expensive. The licensing is also a little bit difficult to understand because you have to license it per event and per number of flows."
"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."
"The tool's price is high."
"QRadar, ArcSight and Splunk are some of the most expensive SIEM products out there in the market and not everyone has the budget to buy them. In such cases, AV USM is a very cost effective alternative."
"Do the one month trial and try to work out the kinks during it, as it has free support and service hours."
"I don't think the product's pricing is a good value because they try to raise the price 50 percent every year... AlienVault needs to understand that not all customers are huge enterprises... Their sales team is way too aggressive. The price they advertise is not always the price you get."
"Pricing is very competitive with other products and you get much more functionality from AlienVault."
"Its price is much lower than McAfee ESM."
"​The price point is good.​"
"We checked out several competitors. For what it can do and the cost, it was the best option!"
"It's saved security costs."
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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
20%
Computer Software Company
13%
Manufacturing Company
7%
Retailer
6%
Educational Organization
24%
Computer Software Company
14%
Financial Services Firm
10%
Government
6%
Computer Software Company
20%
Financial Services Firm
9%
Comms Service Provider
8%
Educational Organization
7%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
 

Questions from the Community

What needs improvement with Google Stackdriver?
If the errors are caught early in the interface, it would be easier for users to manage. The process of logging analy...
What is your primary use case for Google Stackdriver?
I use the solution for logging, defining alerts, and monitoring. Our company's Java and Python logging teams mainly u...
What advice do you have for others considering Google Stackdriver?
The Ops Agent and logging transport feature of the solution have had a major impact on improving application performa...
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, friendli...
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 a...
What do you like most about AT&T AlienVault USM?
The most valuable feature of the solution is the ease of deployment that it provides to users. The integrations that ...
What needs improvement with AT&T AlienVault USM?
There are scalability issues due to a 60 TB limit, which restricts its use for large customers like banks. It is also...
 

Also Known As

Google Stackdriver, Stackdriver Monitoring, Stackdriver Logging, Google Cloud Monitoring
IBM QRadar, QRadar SIEM, QRadar UBA, QRadar on Cloud, IBM QRadar Advisor with Watson
AT&T AlienVault USM, AlienVault, AlienVault USM, Alienvault Cybersecurity
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Uber, Batterii, Q42, Dovetail Games
Clients across multiple industries, such as energy, financial, retail, healthcare, government, communications, and education use QRadar.
Abel & Cole, Bank of Ireland, Bluegrass Cellular, CareerBuilder, Claire's, Hays Medical Center, Hope International, McCurrach, McKinsey & Company, Party Delights, Pepco Holdings, Richland School District, Ricoh, SaveMart, Shake Shack, Steelcase, TaxAct, Taylor Morrison, Vonage and Zoom
Find out what your peers are saying about Wazuh, Splunk, Datadog and others in Log Management. Updated: April 2025.
849,686 professionals have used our research since 2012.