We performed a comparison between IBM QRadar and Microsoft Sentinel based on our users’ reviews in five categories. After reading all of the collected data, you can find our conclusion below.
Comparison Results: Microsoft Sentinel is the clear winner in this comparison. Compared to IBM QRadar, it is easier to deploy, more powerful, and has superior customer support. In addition, Microsoft Azure Sentinel users are happier with the price.
"The most valuable feature is that it has native MSSP capabilities and maintains perfect data separation. It does all of that in a very easy-to-manage cloud-based solution."
"The ability to have high performance, high-speed search capability is incredibly important for us. When it comes to doing security analysis, you don't want to be doing is sitting around waiting to get data back while an attacker is sitting on a network, actively attacking it. You need to be able to answer questions quickly. If I see an indicator of attack, I need to be able to rapidly pivot and find data, then analyze it and find more data to answer more questions. You need to be able to do that quickly. If I'm sitting around just waiting to get my first response, then it ends up moving too slow to keep up with the attacker. Devo's speed and performance allows us to query in real-time and keep up with what is actually happening on the network, then respond effectively to events."
"The thing that Devo does better than other solutions is to give me the ability to write queries that look at multiple data sources and run fast. Most SIEMs don't do that. And I can do that by creating entity-based queries. Let's say I have a table which has Okta, a table which has G Suite, a table which has endpoint telemetry, and I have a table which has DNS telemetry. I can write a query that says, 'Join all these things together on IP, and where the IP matches in all these tables, return to me that subset of data, within these time windows.' I can break it down that way."
"The strength of Devo is not only in that it is pretty intuitive, but it gives you the flexibility and creativity to merge feeds. The prime examples would be using the synthesis or union tables that give you phenomenal capabilities... The ability to use a synthesis or union table to combine all those feeds and make heads or tails of what's going on, and link it to go down a thread, is functionality that I hadn't seen before."
"The most valuable feature is definitely the ability that Devo has to ingest data. From the previous SIEM that I came from and helped my company administer, it really was the type of system where data was parsed on ingest. This meant that if you didn't build the parser efficiently or correctly, sometimes that would bring the system to its knees. You'd have a backlog of processing the logs as it was ingesting them."
"Devo provides a multi-tenant, cloud-native architecture. This is critical for managed service provider environments or multinational organizations who may have subsidiaries globally. It gives organizations a way to consolidate their data in a single accessible location, yet keep the data separate. This allows for global views and/or isolated views restricted by access controls by company or business unit."
"Those 400 days of hot data mean that people can look for trends and at what happened in the past. And they can not only do so from a security point of view, but even for operational use cases. In the past, our operational norm was to keep live data for only 30 days. Our users were constantly asking us for at least 90 days, and we really couldn't even do that. That's one reason that having 400 days of live data is pretty huge. As our users start to use it and adopt this system, we expect people to be able to do those long-term analytics."
"The user interface is really modern. As an end-user, there are a lot of possibilities to tailor the platform to your needs, and that can be done without needing much support from Devo. It's really flexible and modular. The UI is very clean."
"The initial setup of QRadar is not complex because we have done it before and we are used to the development. It is getting easier all the time."
"There are a lot of features in QRadar. App Exchange is the most valuable feature. User behavior analytics (UBA) is also a very good feature. Watson is also there, but we are not currently using Watson. It is versatile and quite easy. It also has an all-in-one-box feature and good integration with AWS."
"QRadar, Splunk, and ArcSight are SIEM solutions with built-in AI/ML features. They can do the complete investigation and alert the admin about what is happening. They can also do the root cause analysis. There are many other features that come with QRadar. It has a more granular log, so you can integrate with various non-IT as well as IT-based components. You can get unstructured data to the SIEM data, and you can identify more what is happening in the network or what is happening in the central head office. You can also identify what is happening between your remote offices. You can also use it to identify what the users in the field are doing on their devices and how things are moving. From the integration point of view, it is very centric. It gives complete control centrally. If a user is not connected to the system, whenever he comes online, we can see the policy updates over the Internet, and we can ensure that the data that is supposed to be protected is protected."
"The product has plenty of features and capabilities."
"The most valuable feature is the integration with the GRD, for banking."
"The solution can scale."
"I have found visibility very helpful for analytics."
"It has a lot of good correlation rules. From a customer's point of view, it is one of the best solutions because you don't need to create correlation rules from scratch. You just review them and customize them as you want."
"Azure Application Gateway makes things a lot easier. You can create dashboards, alert rules, hunting and custom queries, and functions with it."
"It's pretty powerful and its performance is pretty good."
"We didn't have anything similar. So, it really provides value from the incidents and automation point of view. The overview of the security fabric is most valuable."
"We have no complaints about the features or functionality."
"It is always correlating to IOCs for normal attacks, using Azure-related resources. For example, if any illegitimate IP starts unusual activity on our Azure firewall, then it automatically generates an alarm for us."
"Sentinel has features that have helped improve our security poster. It helped us in going ahead and identifying the gaps via analysis and focusing on the key elements."
"Sentinel uses Azure Logic Apps for automation, which is really powerful. This allows us to easily automate responses to incidents."
"There are a lot of things you can explore as a user. You can even go and actively hunt for threats. You can go on the offensive rather than on the defensive."
"The overall performance of extraction could be a lot faster, but that's a common problem in this space in general. Also, the stock or default alerting and detecting options could definitely be broader and more all-encompassing. The fact that they're not is why we had to write all our own alerts."
"One major area for improvement for Devo... is to provide more capabilities around pre-built monitoring. They're working on integrations with different types of systems, but that integration needs to go beyond just onboarding to the platform. It needs to include applications, out-of-the-box, that immediately help people to start monitoring their systems. Such applications would include dashboards and alerts, and then people could customize them for their own needs so that they aren't starting from a blank slate."
"Devo has a lot of cloud connectors, but they need to do a little bit of work there. They've got good integrations with the public cloud, but there are a lot of cloud SaaS systems that they still need to work with on integrations, such as Salesforce and other SaaS providers where we need to get access logs."
"The Activeboards feature is not as mature regarding the look and feel. Its functionality is mature, but the look and feel is not there. For example, if you have some data sets and are trying to get some graphics, you cannot change anything. There's just one format for the graphics. You cannot change the size of the font, the font itself, etc."
"There is room for improvement in the ability to parse different log types. I would go as far as to say the product is deficient in its ability to parse multiple, different log types, including logs from major vendors that are supported by competitors. Additionally, the time that it takes to turn around a supported parser for customers and common log source types, which are generally accepted standards in the industry, is not acceptable. This has impacted customer onboarding and customer relationships for us on multiple fronts."
"The biggest area with room for improvement in Devo is the Security Operations module that just isn't there yet. That goes back to building out how they're going to do content and larger correlation and aggregation of data across multiple things, as well as natively ingesting CTI to create rule sets."
"I would like to have the ability to create more complex dashboards."
"An admin who is trying to audit user activity usually cannot go beyond a day in the UI. I would like to have access to pages and pages of that data, going back as far as the storage we have, so I could look at every command or search or deletion or anything that a user has run. As an admin, that would really help. Going back just a day in the UI is not going to help, and that means I have to find a different way to do that."
"This solution is on-premise and many customers are moving to the cloud base solution."
"Technical support really needs to be improved. Right now, they aren't where they need to be at all."
"They need to improve their threat intelligence feed and they need to improve their user behavior analytics modules."
"There are a lot of things they are working on and a lot of technologies that are not yet there. They should probably work out a better reserve with their ecosystem of business partners and create wider and more in-depth qualities, third-party tools, and add-ons. These things really give immediate business value. For instance, there are many limitations in using SAP, EBS, or Micro-Dynamics. A lot of things that are happening in those platforms could also be monitored and allowed from the cybersecurity risks perspective. IBM might be leaving this gap or empty space for business partners. Some larger organizations might already be doing this. It would be very nice if IBM can make some artificial intelligence part free of charge for all current QRadar users. This would be a big advantage as compared to other competitors. There are companies that are going in different directions. Of course, you can't do everything inside QRadar. In general, it might be very good for all players to provide more use cases, especially regarding data protection and leakage prevention. There are some who are already doing some kind of file integrity or gathering some more information from all possible technologies for building anything related to the user and data analysis, content analysis, and management regarding the data protection."
"The modularity could be improved."
"I need a solution which will send alerts in the event of any behavior."
"IBM is going through some problems with its resources currently making its support response time slow."
"The user interface is a bit difficult to get used to."
"The on-prem log sources still require a lot of development."
"I can't think of anything other than just getting the name out there. I think a lot of customers don't fully understand the full capabilities of Azure Sentinel yet. It is kind of like when they're first starting to use Azure, it might not be something they first think about. So, they should just kind of get to the point where it is more widely used."
"Multi-tenancy, in my opinion, needs to be improved. I believe it can do better as a managed service provider."
"I would like to be able to monitor applications outside of the Azure Cloud."
"They should just add more and more out-of-the-box connectors. It is quite a new product, and it has a lot of connectors, and even more would be good."
"The solution could improve the playbooks."
"It has been a challenge with Azure Sentinel to onboard the Syslog server from FortiGate. Azure Sentinel can work better on that shift between the Syslog server and a firewall."
"It would be good to have some connectors for third-party SIEM solutions. Many customers are struggling with the integration of Azure Sentinel with their on-premise SIEM. Microsoft is changing the log structure many times a year, which can corrupt a custom integration. It would be good to have some connectors developed by Microsoft or supply vendors, but they are not providing such functionality or tools."
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IBM QRadar is ranked 2nd in Security Information and Event Management (SIEM) with 71 reviews while Microsoft Sentinel is ranked 3rd in Security Information and Event Management (SIEM) with 26 reviews. IBM QRadar is rated 8.0, while Microsoft Sentinel is rated 8.0. The top reviewer of IBM QRadar writes "Provides a single window into your network, SIEM, network flows, and risk management of your assets". On the other hand, the top reviewer of Microsoft Sentinel writes "Easy to manage with good automation and machine learning capabilities ". IBM QRadar is most compared with Splunk, Elastic Security, LogRhythm NextGen SIEM, Exabeam Fusion SIEM and Wazuh, whereas Microsoft Sentinel is most compared with AWS Security Hub, Splunk, Elastic Security, Rapid7 InsightIDR and AlienVault OSSIM. See our IBM QRadar vs. Microsoft Sentinel report.
See our list of best Security Information and Event Management (SIEM) vendors.
We monitor all Security Information and Event Management (SIEM) reviews to prevent fraudulent reviews and keep review quality high. We do not post reviews by company employees or direct competitors. We validate each review for authenticity via cross-reference with LinkedIn, and personal follow-up with the reviewer when necessary.
