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 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 querying and the log-retention capabilities are pretty powerful. Those provide some of the biggest value-add for us."
"It's very, very versatile."
"One of the biggest features of the UI is that you see the actual code of what you're doing in the graphical user interface, in a little window on the side. Whatever you're doing, you see the code, what's happening. And you can really quickly switch between using the GUI and using the code. That's really useful."
"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 experience [is] well thought out and the workflows are logical. The dashboards are intuitive and highly customizable."
"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."
"In traditional BI solutions, you need to wait a lot of time to have the ability to create visualizations with the data and to do searches. With this kind of platform, you have that information in real-time."
"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."
"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 best feature of IBM QRadar is visualization which shows you when there's a spike in the system, and this makes you realize that there's something wrong with the log."
"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."
"One of the most valuable features of this solution is it has very good data correlation."
"We have worked with other solutions, such as LogRhythm and Splunk. Compared to others, IBM QRadar has the best price-performance ratio so that you are able to reserve minimum costs. It starts settling in fast and gets the first results very quickly. It is also very scalable."
"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 most valuable thing about QRadar is that you have a single window into your network, SIEM, network flows, and risk management of your assets. If you use Splunk, for instance, then you still need a full packet capture solution, whereas the full packet capture solution is integrated within QRadar. Its application ecosystem makes it very powerful in terms of doing analysis."
"The native integration of the Microsoft security solution has been essential because it helps reduce some false positives, especially with some of the impossible travel rules that may be configured in Microsoft 365. For some organizations, that might be benign because they're using VPNs, etc."
"Investigations are something really remarkable. We can drill down right to the raw logs by running different queries and getting those on the console itself."
"The ability of all these solutions to work together natively is essential. We have an Azure subscription, including Log Analytics. This feature automatically acts as one of the security baselines and detects recommendations because it also integrates with Defender. We can pull the sysadmin logs from Azure. It's all seamless and native."
"The most valuable features in my experience are the UEBA, LDAP, the threat scheduler, and integration with third-party straight perform like the MISP."
"I like the unified security console. You can close incidents using Sentinel in all other Microsoft Security portals, when it comes to incident response."
"The pricing of the product is excellent."
"You can fine-tune the SOAR and you'll be charged only when your playbooks are triggered. That is the beauty of the solution because the SOAR is the costliest component in the market today... but with Sentinel it is upside-down: the SOAR is the lowest-hanging fruit. It's the least costly and it delivers more value to the customer."
"Its inbuilt Kusto Query Language is a valuable feature. It provides the flexibility needed to leverage advanced data analytics rules and policies and enables us to easily navigate all our security events in a single view. It helps any user easily understand the data or any security lags in their data and applications."
"Where Devo has room for improvement is the data ingestion and parsing. We tend to have to work with the Devo support team to bring on and ingest new sources of data."
"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."
"I would like to have the ability to create more complex dashboards."
"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."
"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."
"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."
"From our experience, the Devo agent needs some work. They built it on top of OS Query's open-source framework. It seems like it wasn't tuned properly to handle a large volume of Windows event logs. In our experience, there would definitely be some room for improvement. A lot of SIEMs on the market have their own agent infrastructure. I think Devo's working towards that, but I think that it needs some improvement as far as keeping up with high-volume environments."
"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."
"I'd like them to improve the offense. When QRadar detects something, it creates what it calls offenses. So, it has a rudimentary ticketing system inside of it. This is the same interface that was there when I started using it 12 years ago. It just has not been improved. They do allow integration with IBM Resilient, but IBM Resilient is grotesquely expensive. The most effective integration that IBM offers today is with IBM Resilient, which is an instant response platform. It is a very good platform, but it is very expensive. They really should do something with the offense handling because it is very difficult to scale, and it has limitations. The maximum number of offenses that it can carry is 16K. After 16K, you have to flush your offenses out. So, it is all or nothing. You lose all your offenses up until that point in time, and you don't have any history within the offense list of older events. If you're dealing with multiple customers, this becomes problematic. That's why you need to use another product to do the actual ticketing. If you wanted the ticket existence, you would normally interface with ServiceNow, SolarWinds, or some other product like that."
"IBM Qradar could improve the reporting. The tool is not designed to report. It's a great operational monitoring tool. You put it on a screen and you watch it. If you want to have analytics out of it, that's a whole different story. You're going to need more people and tools. What should be added is reporting and integration into Power BI, into some capability that produces analytical reports from the source data. IBM does not seem to care to add these features."
"When it comes to what could be better, it is always what others are trying to do and what is the roadmap. It can have more integration. It should have more flexible RESTful APIs for integration with applications. These are the things that are always in demand for any of the SIEM solutions, not only for QRadar. Integration is ever-evolving. Nowadays, different versions of mobile handsets are there and data is getting scattered. Users are using their personal handsets to keep the data of the organization. So, it should have a more flexible integration, irrespective of the flavor of the firmware and iOS or Android version. It should have an API that can seamlessly get integrated. It should also provide more flexible control and a more advanced or analytical view to see what exactly is happening across the globe or network. From wherever a user is connecting and accessing the enterprise data, it should give real-time visibility and predictive visibility about what exactly is happening. These things are already there, but there should be more advanced control in terms of managing the security."
"IBM QRadar could improve the plugins and threat detection."
"In terms of what could be improved, I would say the script which we have to create for custom actions. QRadar needs to improve that feature. Additionally, QRadar has to provide the playbooks designing features."
"IBM is going through some problems with its resources currently making its support response time slow."
"Right now, if you look at the compatibility, if you need to deploy QRadar in a physical appliance you have only two choices of server, their own or a Lenovo server. In today's world, you cannot keep something tied to such a big brand. Clients want to be able to use whatever type of server they want."
"Solution has too many menus that require going to two or three sub-monitors to enter the QRadar."
"The solution could improve the playbooks."
"The interface could be more user-friendly. It''s a small improvement that they could make if they wanted to."
"They should integrate it with many other software-as-a-service providers and make connectors available so that you don't have to do any sort of log normalization."
"Sentinel provides decent visibility, but it's sometimes a little cumbersome to get to the information I want because there is so much information. I would also like to see more seamless integration between Sentinel and third-party security products."
"Sentinel's alerts and notifications are not fully optimized for mobile devices. The overall reporting and the analytics processes for the end user should also be improved. Also, the compatibility and availability of data sources and reports are not always perfect."
"I think the number one area of improvement for Sentinel would be the cost."
"We do see continuous improvement all the time, however, I haven't got a specific feature that is lacking or not well designed."
"If their UI was a bit more streamlined and easy to find when I need it, then that would be a great improvement."
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IBM QRadar is ranked 2nd in Security Information and Event Management (SIEM) with 68 reviews while Microsoft Sentinel is ranked 3rd in Security Information and Event Management (SIEM) with 48 reviews. IBM QRadar is rated 8.0, while Microsoft Sentinel is rated 8.2. 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 "A straightforward solution that provides comprehensiveness and coverage of multiple different on-prem, and cloud solutions". IBM QRadar is most compared with Splunk, Elastic Security, LogRhythm SIEM, Wazuh and Fortinet FortiSIEM, whereas Microsoft Sentinel is most compared with AWS Security Hub, Splunk, Elastic Security, Rapid7 InsightIDR and AT&T AlienVault USM. 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.
