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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) (27th)
 

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

"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."
"From a monitoring and incident response perspective, empow is the most valuable asset we have in our toolkit."
"The most valuable feature for us is its ability to correlate security events and then allowing us to take action to address those events."
"It has absolutely improved the efficiency of our security team. We use it internally as well. It is such a powerful tool that our internal security team became a customer of our ArcSight managed service."
"If you know how to work it, and how to configure it properly, then it can give you lots and lots of information."
"It is a robust product and has multiple valuable features."
"It allows us to be in better compliance with security protocols, and it also gives us a better global vision of what is happening in the organization in terms of security threats and how best to analyze and mitigate them."
"The solution has gone beyond signature-based monitoring and analysis and is AI-powered. It is good enough to cover the full range of cybersecurity services."
"ArcSight ESM provides us the flexibility to write our own passwords and customize the solution. It lets us search and log a variety of SmartConnectors. It has 480-plus SmartConnectors."
"Feature-rich solution which provides better network visibility for improved security"
 

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."
"Honestly, I won't recommend the ArcSight to another person."
"Licensing is straightforward, but the solution is fairly pricey."
"There could be more API features for extracting logs on different devices included in the product."
"There are several improvements that we would like to see, including: Building a system based on a log collection (SOC), a scenario for external encroachment, and Operator training."
"The hardware requirements are very high and the solution has poor stability when they are not met."
"The initial setup is very complex. We had to architect a deployment which allowed us to incorporate an ever growing number of customers into our hosted instance of ArcSight."
"ArcSight ESM could improve by adding more features and documentation. There needs to be more documentation."
"Administration of ArcSight is not an easy job. The admin needs to be well experienced in it to identify the root cause and fix it."
 

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."
"The product licenses are inexpensive."
"There is a license required for this solution."
"Thanks to Micro Focus's licensing model, as an MSSP, we are able to see a complete return on our investment almost immediately."
"It's a good price, it's one of the cheaper solutions."
"Aggregation can help a lot in pushing down licensing costs."
"The pricing is great compared to others."
"We have a license to use this solution. The price of ArcSight Enterprise Security Manager is expensive."
"​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.​"
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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
10%
Performing Arts
10%
Outsourcing Company
16%
Financial Services Firm
11%
Construction Company
11%
Comms Service Provider
8%
 

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
Earn 20 points
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: September 2026.
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