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IBM Security QRadar vs Microsoft Sentinel comparison

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Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Feb 8, 2026

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

Torq
Sponsored
Ranking in Security Orchestration Automation and Response (SOAR)
5th
Average Rating
8.6
Reviews Sentiment
6.4
Number of Reviews
6
Ranking in other categories
AI-SOC (3rd), AI-Powered Security Automation (2nd)
IBM Security QRadar
Ranking in Security Orchestration Automation and Response (SOAR)
4th
Average Rating
8.0
Reviews Sentiment
6.6
Number of Reviews
217
Ranking in other categories
Log Management (7th), Security Information and Event Management (SIEM) (3rd), User Entity Behavior Analytics (UEBA) (2nd), Endpoint Detection and Response (EDR) (16th), Managed Detection and Response (MDR) (6th), Extended Detection and Response (XDR) (11th)
Microsoft Sentinel
Ranking in Security Orchestration Automation and Response (SOAR)
1st
Average Rating
8.2
Reviews Sentiment
7.0
Number of Reviews
104
Ranking in other categories
Security Information and Event Management (SIEM) (4th), Microsoft Security Suite (6th), AI-Powered Cybersecurity Platforms (5th)
 

Featured Reviews

Nimrod Vardi - PeerSpot reviewer
Global IT Director at OpenWeb
Automation workflows have transformed our IT, enabling secure just-in-time access control
We work with them quite often, so we have a direct line regarding areas in Torq that have room for improvement. If we have a feature request, we can request it. I do not have anything in mind at the moment. We were a design partner for a short while, so we feel that they listen and that users of the system have an impact on the way the system is designed for the better. They have a new community, which is something that I personally suggested years ago. There are many people like me in different places and they might have already built the workflow that I need. Having the option to share workflows or to jump on a thread and say I have this need, did anyone ever build a workflow for it, is amazing. Someone would jump in and say yes, sure, here, take this workflow. I think this is an amazing thing and I really hope that the community will come alive because I think this is really powerful. This is something that I already suggested and it did happen eventually, and I am quite happy with it. I do not have any specific feature in mind that I have a need for at the moment.
HarshBhardiya - PeerSpot reviewer
SOC Engineer at a outsourcing company with 10,001+ employees
Have managed daily asset and alert monitoring effectively but have encountered limitations with manual processes and interface usability
It's still very manual and doesn't work on its own. It's still in an early stage and not on par where we can consider it a really successful detection system. The accuracy is not there. The UI could be better when compared to Sentinels where we can use flags and tagging. It could be much more user-friendly. IBM Security QRadar has all features and is fully competitive with other SIEM tools, but when it comes to user-friendliness, a new user takes time to get used to it. More intuitive, user-friendly interfaces and more helpful documentation would be beneficial. The query searching and data fetching could be faster. In large to very large organizations with around 5,000 or 6,000 assets or beyond, even with proper configurations and RAM and hardware backing up, the query is fairly slow.
Kallamuddin Ansari - PeerSpot reviewer
Cyber Security Consultant at ProTechmanize
Centralized monitoring has improved threat response but cost control still needs refinement
Based on real operations used in our corporate IT environment, the key features include log correlation and incident view. Microsoft Sentinel's biggest strength is how it correlates multiple related alerts into a single incident. This significantly reduces alert noise and helps the SOC focus on real threats instead of isolated events. Another valuable feature is KQL-based threat hunting with Kusto Query Language. The flexibility of this language allows us to build custom hunting queries based on our environment's behavior. This is extremely useful for detecting low and slow threats or hidden threats that default rules may miss. Cloud-native scalability and stability is another important feature. Being cloud-native, Microsoft Sentinel scales well for medium to large corporate environments without infrastructure management. Stability has been solid in day-to-day production. SOAR automation using playbooks is a feature we highly recommend. Microsoft Sentinel's SOAR functionality helps automate repetitive SOC tasks like alert enrichment and notification. This saves analyst time and improves response consistency.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"Once I started to use the system and I saw the potential, it changed all of our work in IT."
"What I appreciate most about Torq is that it is an essential part of our system."
"As an analyst, it has demonstrated potential to reduce workforce requirements and time needed for related activities."
"Using that one piece of AI, we auto-closed 511 cases in quarter four alone."
"Any request that comes in, regardless of how complex it is, I can accomplish it with Torq."
"If I review about 100 vendors that I might work with, Torq is definitely in the top five that gave me personally investment back, just because every bit of effort I put into Torq eventually became a workflow that gave it back to me."
"IBM QRadar is great help from its security event monitoring to data center and NOC troubleshooting of issues hard for other departments to spot."
"In addition to using this solution for our security operations center, we are using it for our other customers."
"It is a bit easier to use than other products, such as Splunk or ELK Elasticsearch."
"The UBA feature is the most valuable because you can see everything about users' activities."
"It integrates very easily with other solutions. The solution is flexible. We can add anything to it, as it is a good companion to other tools."
"It allows us to search data both on-premises and on the cloud."
"My overall rating for this solution is nine out of ten."
"QRadar has somewhat of a new structure recently from last gen. They have moved from the standard UI based infrastructure."
"The connectivity and analytics are great."
"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."
"Microsoft Sentinel's ability to correlate data from multiple sources has enhanced my threat detection capabilities beyond what simple data lake solutions offer."
"The scalability is great. You can put unlimited logs in, as long as you can pay for it. There are commitment tiers, up to six terabytes per day, which is nowhere close to what any one of our customers is running."
"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."
"We can use Sentinel's playbook to block threats. It covers all of the environment, giving us great visibility."
"The best feature of Microsoft Sentinel is its ability to unify all dashboards or functions into one modern SecOps dashboard."
"Sentinel pricing is good"
 

Cons

"It was able to capture data but was unable to differentiate between the agent hostname we are using and the hostname that resides on the back end of the Internet."
"Even now, we have workflows that are in production that use AI steps and I get different results, making it unusable to some degree."
"Regarding stability, I have noticed some lagging, crashing, and downtime, which is one of my largest gripes."
"Regarding the pricing of Torq, I would say it is expensive."
"The initial deployment of Torq was not easy."
"I would like to see more integration in place after the security lock."
"There could be improvements made to the UI, the user interface. Though the newer version, 7.3.2, might already have this improvement in place."
"The modularity could be improved."
"In a future release, the solution could provide malware analysis."
"I would like the rule creation interface to be much more user-friendly in the next release."
"Certain updates—especially when using Azure—don't apply directly. Our engineering team must invest additional effort to implement these updates. However, the tool's cloud-based version poses no issues. However, upgrading the product can sometimes be challenging for on-premises instances."
"IBM Security QRadar’s GUI could be improved."
"It's still very manual and doesn't work on its own. It's still in an early stage and not on par where we can consider it a really successful detection system."
"The on-prem log sources still require a lot of development."
"While I appreciate the UI itself and the vast amount of information available on the platform, I'm finding the overall user experience to be frustrating due to frequent disconnections and the requirement to repeatedly re-authenticate."
"We have been working with multiple customers, and every time we onboard a customer, we are missing an essential feature that surprisingly doesn't exist in Sentinel. We searched the forums and knowledge bases but couldn't find a solution. When you onboard new customers, you need to enable the data connectors. That part is easy, but you must create rules from scratch for every associated connector. You click "next," "next," "next," and it requires five clicks for each analytical rule. Imagine we have a customer with 150 rules."
"Given that I am in the small business space, I wish they would make it easier to operate Sentinel without being a Sentinel expert. Examples of things that could be easier are creating alerts and automations from scratch and designing workbooks."
"They only classify alerts into three categories: high, medium, and low. So, from the user's point of view, having another critical category would be awesome."
"Some of the data connectors are outdated, at least the ones that utilize Linux machines for log forwarding. I believe that Microsoft is already working on improving this."
"The solution could improve the playbooks."
"One key area that can be improved is by building a strong integration with our XDR platform."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

Information not available
"The pricing is always fine."
"It's free of charge."
"The maintenance costs are high."
"found other solutions, with more features at the same cost or less. You don’t have to leave the Gartner Magic Quadrant to beat their price."
"The tool's price is high."
"When it comes to the initial pricing there can be a huge discount from there side and also I think they are open to competing with other products."
"Licensing is very expensive, IBM QRadar is a very expensive solution. If you want to minimize costs then IBM QRadar is not for you."
"IBM QRadar User Behavior Analytics is an application framework and you can install many applications without any additional costs."
"It is consumption-based pricing. It is an affordable solution."
"In comparison to other security solutions, Microsoft Sentinel offers a reasonable price for the features included."
"It is priced fairly given the value that you get from the use of the product. The biggest mistake people make with Microsoft Sentinel is not understanding the pricing model and the amount of data that they are going to be running through the tool because you are paying based on the flow. You are paying based on the amount of data that is moving through the tool. People do not plan, and therefore, they get surprised by the cost associated with using the tool. They connect everything because they want to know everything, but connecting everything is very expensive."
"No license is required to make use of Sentinel, but you need to buy products to get the data. In general, the price of those products is comparable to similar products."
"Microsoft Sentinel can be costly, particularly for data management."
"I don't know yet because they gave us a 30-day test window for free."
"Microsoft Sentinel requires an E5 license."
"The pay-as-you-go model is beneficial to customers."
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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
Financial Services Firm
14%
Comms Service Provider
9%
Manufacturing Company
8%
Computer Software Company
6%
Computer Software Company
12%
Financial Services Firm
10%
Manufacturing Company
7%
Government
6%
Computer Software Company
12%
Financial Services Firm
10%
Manufacturing Company
9%
Government
7%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Midsize Enterprise3
Large Enterprise4
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business91
Midsize Enterprise39
Large Enterprise105
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business38
Midsize Enterprise22
Large Enterprise45
 

Questions from the Community

What needs improvement with Torq?
We do not utilize the AI features that much. When it comes to general AI features of Torq, we are just slowly startin...
What is your primary use case for Torq?
Torq markets itself as a security tool, and we do use them for security, but not in the traditional sense they market...
What advice do you have for others considering Torq?
I would rate Torq an eight overall. I feel that Torq is as good as the effort you put into it. The limitations are ve...
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 is your experience regarding pricing and costs for IBM Security QRadar?
Pricing and the license of EPS were managed by the governance team. I was not responsible for managing those. I was s...
Is there a common threat intelligence tool that aggregates multiple threat intelligence sources?
Yes, Azure Sentinel is a SIEM on the Cloud. Multiple data sources can be uploaded and analyzed with Azure Sentinel an...
What is a better choice, Splunk or Azure Sentinel?
It would really depend on (1) which logs you need to ingest and (2) what are your use cases Splunk is easy for ingest...
Which is better - Azure Sentinel or AWS Security Hub?
We like that Azure Sentinel does not require as much maintenance as legacy SIEMs that are on-premises. Azure Sentinel...
 

Also Known As

No data available
IBM QRadar, QRadar SIEM, QRadar UBA, QRadar on Cloud, IBM QRadar Advisor with Watson
Azure Sentinel
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Information Not Available
Clients across multiple industries, such as energy, financial, retail, healthcare, government, communications, and education use QRadar.
Microsoft Sentinel is trusted by companies of all sizes including ABM, ASOS, Uniper, First West Credit Union, Avanade, and more.
Find out what your peers are saying about IBM Security QRadar vs. Microsoft Sentinel and other solutions. Updated: March 2026.
884,012 professionals have used our research since 2012.