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OpenText Enterprise Security Manager vs i-SIEM [EOL] comparison

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Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Sep 21, 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

i-SIEM [EOL]
Average Rating
9.0
Number of Reviews
1
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
OpenText Enterprise Securit...
Average Rating
7.8
Reviews Sentiment
6.7
Number of Reviews
99
Ranking in other categories
Security Information and Event Management (SIEM) (20th)
 

Featured Reviews

Dannie Combs - PeerSpot reviewer
Senior Vice President and Chief Information Security Officer at Donnelley Financial Solutions
The alert fatigue and false positive rates have just plummeted, which is really exciting.
empow has a few areas of improvement as with any other technology, such as continuing to drive innovation in the dashboard. While we've been extremely impressed with the dashboard's ease of use, flexibility, ability to drill down deeply, and focus very intently on an area of interest, there will always be opportunities to be more innovative and open it up to a wider audience than just the operations group, for example. With reporting, there is always a desire to have custom reporting for every client of empow. Relative to keeping up with the sheer pace of cloud-native technologies, it should provide more options for clients to deploy their technologies in unique ways. This is an area that I recommend that they maintain focus.
SM
Cloud Security Archirect at IBM
Unified log analysis has strengthened incident detection and supports continuous attack simulation
I do not have any areas for improvement in ArcSight Enterprise Security Manager (ESM) as I have not delved deeply into it; overall, it is a good package. I would like to see the detection and response features included in the next release of ArcSight Enterprise Security Manager (ESM), as security orchestration and automation are increasingly important.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"From a monitoring and incident response perspective, empow is the most valuable asset we have in our toolkit."
"As a result of the automation, we are able to manage SIEM with a small security team. I'm in a unique position where we have been growing the security organization quite rapidly over the last three and a half years. But, as a direct result of the empow transition and legacy collection of tools towards the empow platform, we've been able to keep that head count flat. We've been able to redirect a lot of the security team's time away from the wash, rinse, repeat activities of responding to alarms where we have a high degree of confidence that they will be false positives, adjusting the rules accordingly. This can be a bit frustrating for the analyst when they have to spend hours a day dealing with these types of probable false positives. So, it has helped not only us keep our headcount flat relative to the resources necessary to provide the assurances that our executives expect of us for monitoring, but allows our analyst team to spend the majority of their time doing what they love. They are spending their time meaningfully with a higher degree of confidence and enjoying getting into the incident response type activity."
"ArcSight gives us better visibility into threats that were unknown earlier."
"The user interfaces are quite good and speedy, and I like the consoles too."
"The webpage algorithm is the most valuable feature because it was the fastest feature for searching the logs, events, and correlation."
"The filters and the ability to do what you want are the most valuable features; there is nothing that you cannot do in this solution, and it has all the features, which makes it very dynamic."
"Customization. ArcSight gives you a platform to on-board out-of-the-box devices with a more accurate way of collecting desired logs/events."
"The most important feature is ArcSight's event correlation capabilities. It's powerful and easy. I also like the flex connector capability. It's easy to develop a new connector that isn't fully supported out of the box. For example, say you created a solution internally that's completely different, and it's not unsupported by the solution. You can write your own connector using the flex connector."
"Very good real-time reporting with a good dashboard."
"This product is one of the best SIEM solutions, which helps SOC analysts to consolidate all security-relevant logs of many products into one place in a common format."
 

Cons

"Relative to keeping up with the sheer pace of cloud-native technologies, it should provide more options for clients to deploy their technologies in unique ways. This is an area that I recommend that they maintain focus."
"We are decommissioning HPE ArcSight as it is getting impractical to manage and maintain the solution."
"The correlation and storage have to be improved."
"The way that scaling is set up isn't very cost-effective."
"It is quite complex and could use a better UI. So the improvement would be a simplification. It is pretty complicated to use. The architecture is not complex but the setup and use are."
"Sometimes, it takes ages to get an issue resolved. I have ArcSight experience, so I normally try to fix things on my own or find a workaround, but it's tough to get support when I need it."
"The solution itself is very scalable, but it is also a lot more expensive than other players."
"The weakness in this system comes about because, with so many different logs, it is possible that the security analyst will lose information."
"Best SIEM product but it's high on pricing and licensing."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"I don't have to put up with any longer with these hypercomplex licensing agreements. Every time I want to add some additional reporting as a compliance centric or regulatory specific, e.g., GDPR, PCI, or Sarbanes-Oxley, many providers would have an additional license for this, which felt a bit ridiculous to me. With the simplified licensing architecture, there were no hidden "gotchas" down the road with empow. Something I have experienced with other providers that I've worked with in the past."
"With a higher degree of fidelity in the alarms, we were able to avoid adding additional resources to our teams. We take into account the cost of security resources in the market and the significantly higher fidelity from the alarms that are being generated. This drove down our costs with our MSSP. It drove down my cost for human capital internally. It drove down our need to have multiple resources supporting the underlying infrastructure and health and maintenance of empow as a platform from several resources down to one. Therefore, human capital costs were significantly reduced. Our operating expenses were significantly reduced. Our capital costs were significantly reduced while tripling our capacity and our run rate reduced. It was almost a "too good to be true" situation. Fortunately, for us, it worked out very nicely."
"​It is best to be an institutional buyer and directly contact the sales team, as they can provide over-the-top discounts for bulk orders.​"
"The pricing is great compared to others."
"The pricing model is expensive compared to open-source alternatives."
"There is a license required for this solution."
"Aggregation can help a lot in pushing down licensing costs."
"Customers without a ton of resources to dedicate to deployment may be better served by a managed ArcSight service."
"We're paying a fee for an MSSP, and the cost of the total cost of ArcSight ESM was approximately three to four million dollars a year. The price was less than similar solutions. We did not have additional fees."
"ArcSight can be a little bit expensive because of the area that we work in and the cost. Licensing is mostly on a yearly basis, not monthly."
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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
Outsourcing Company
16%
Construction Company
13%
Comms Service Provider
9%
Performing Arts
9%
Outsourcing Company
14%
Financial Services Firm
12%
Construction Company
10%
Manufacturing Company
7%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
No data available
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business37
Midsize Enterprise14
Large Enterprise59
 

Questions from the Community

Ask a question
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Which is the best SIEM tool for a mid-sized financial services firm: Arcsight or Securonix?
In my market, a lot of financial companies had or have an ArcSight installation. Just because in former times it was pretty good. Now a lot of them are looking for a more effective solution due to ...
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for ArcSight Enterprise Security Manager (ESM)?
I would rate the pricing of ArcSight Enterprise Security Manager (ESM) around seven, as it varies based on features and demand, making it more affordable for larger organizations, while smaller one...
What needs improvement with ArcSight Enterprise Security Manager (ESM)?
I do not have any areas for improvement in ArcSight Enterprise Security Manager (ESM) as I have not delved deeply into it; overall, it is a good package. I would like to see the detection and respo...
 

Also Known As

No data available
Micro Focus ArcSight, HPE ArcSight, ArcSight
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

University of Oklahoma, Donnelley
Lake Health, U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, Bank AlJazira, Banca Intesa, and Obrela.
Find out what your peers are saying about Splunk, IBM, Microsoft and others in Security Information and Event Management (SIEM). Updated: October 2026.
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