


IBM Security QRadar and Microsoft Sentinel are key players in the security monitoring and incident management sector. IBM Security QRadar appears to have the upper hand in comprehensive log management and integration with IBM products, whereas Microsoft Sentinel excels in AI-powered analytics and seamless integration with Microsoft solutions.
Features: IBM Security QRadar is strong in extracting information from raw logs and events, offering scalability and providing a user-friendly interface. It integrates smoothly with other IBM products. Microsoft Sentinel shines with its powerful integration with Microsoft products, automation capabilities, and advanced AI and machine learning analytics, making it well-suited for the Microsoft ecosystem.
Room for Improvement: IBM Security QRadar could enhance its incident management features, increase support for third-party integrations, and simplify its user interface. It also struggles with response times and complex pricing. Microsoft Sentinel would benefit from better third-party integrations, improved documentation, refined cost management, and enhancements to its query language and graphical interface. Pricing and licensing complexities remain a concern.
Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: IBM Security QRadar is often deployed on-premises or in hybrid environments, requiring more deployment planning due to complexity but offering global support. Microsoft Sentinel is mainly used in public cloud setups leveraging Microsoft's cloud infrastructure, making deployment straightforward and offering more accessible support.
Pricing and ROI: IBM Security QRadar is recognized for its high costs, which can deter small to mid-sized businesses, despite a good long-term ROI. The event-based pricing can be puzzling. Microsoft Sentinel follows a consumption-based pricing model, potentially becoming expensive quickly, yet justified by its robust features. Both solutions need careful management to optimize costs and achieve satisfactory ROI.
Since we started working with Torq, I am handling much fewer alerts. It is becoming really easy for me to handle an alert.
By the time we officially bought Torq, we already had two workflows that were very helpful to us.
It pretty much took until we got to our first renewal where we said that this is the value we see, this is the things we want more, but that is the first place where we said we are happy enough that we want to renew.
With SOAR, the workflow takes one minute or less to complete the analysis.
AWS gives the chance to implement a solution out of the box with use cases that are already in IBM Security QRadar.
Investing this amount was very much worth it for my organization.
If a customer is already using Microsoft’s ecosystem, the ROI can be positive due to seamless integration.
Our MTTR, mean time to response, improved by forty to fifty percent. Earlier, medium-severity incidents took two to three hours to resolve. Now, after Microsoft Sentinel, it is forty to fifty-five minutes.
We attribute our growth to Sentinel.
The speed and quality of their answers have been pretty good, as I usually get a response within 24 hours, and they follow up well.
We can always get an answer, and the support team are experts in their own system.
Nine out of ten times, they give me a solution even if it is not the solution I wanted, and I still can get to the result.
They assist with advanced issues, such as hardware or other problems, that are not part of standard operations.
Support needs to understand the issue first, then escalate it to the engineering team.
The support is really good; for instance, if a critical ticket is submitted, you will get paged right away as it gets logged, and their analyst will look into it, letting you know as soon as possible so you can work on it.
Microsoft invests significantly in support, which is crucial for companies.
I believe Microsoft could improve by keeping customer service within the US for Microsoft Sentinel customers who are within state and federal government sectors.
Working with a Sentinel engineer helped us tune settings effectively.
Our case management is super scalable.
In terms of scalability, you can do as long as you can build it, and they can support it.
Regarding the ability of the solution to grow in your work environment, if it is scalable, if it fits your business requirements, and if there is room to scale up, the answer is yes, for sure.
For EPS license, if you increase or exceed the EPS license, you cannot receive events.
There is no need to add hardware or redesign infrastructure because it is cloud-native.
As our organization uses Microsoft Azure and Defender, everything grows together, and we can integrate various features seamlessly.
Being a SaaS solution, the scalability of Microsoft Sentinel is robust.
Most of the time, the system is stable as long as the components that they integrate with are stable.
Regarding stability, I have noticed some lagging, crashing, and downtime, which is one of my largest gripes.
I would rate Torq's product stability at eight, acknowledging that there are bugs, glitches, and downtimes.
On cloud, you don't see any disconnections or instability.
I think QRadar is stable and currently satisfies my needs.
The product has been stable so far.
I have never experienced any downtime, crashes, or performance issues with Microsoft Sentinel because it is SOC as a Service, so it maintains 100% uptime and scaling.
In the past two years, our team hasn't encountered any issues with the stability of Microsoft Sentinel from an operations perspective.
I need to be aware of deprecated connectors as they may disconnect, but the data continues to be sent with a need for quick adaptation.
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.
From an engineering perspective, I think more error messages and error handling information for our engineering team would be very helpful.
If a step is failing, the system could try to autocorrect it with AI or open a ticket from the workflow itself.
We receive logs from different types of devices and need a way to correlate them effectively.
If AI-related support can suggest rules and integrate with existing security devices like MD, IPS, this SIM can create more relevant rules.
IBM Security QRadar does not support Canvas, so we had to create custom scripts and workarounds to pull logs from Canvas.
Log ingestion and retention costs can grow quickly, and understanding which data source is driving cost is not always straightforward.
We have some tools, such as our off-site Meraki firewalls, that have not fully integrated with Sentinel.
There are complexities in calculating the right pricing tier for different customers, which makes it difficult for me as a consultant during upfront pricing.
When they bring more and more value into the platform, it makes more sense to pay that price, but still, it is expensive.
Before deciding to implement Torq, I considered that compared to our old case management platform, Torq was a much better price and had a lot better value for what you get out of the platform, which was a key consideration for the company.
It is an expensive solution, not an inexpensive solution, but we get through the flexibility.
Splunk is more expensive than IBM Security QRadar.
It was costly mainly because of the value you can get right now compared to other solutions.
It depends on how much you want to spend.
It has been beneficial that Microsoft Sentinel is included as part of the Microsoft package, making it more cost-effective.
Microsoft Sentinel is not a low-cost SIEM.
Microsoft Sentinel is provided at no cost, so we didn't have any issues with the cost.
Torq's unified platform approach to AI SOC automation and case management has significantly benefited us by integrating the case management platform with the automation, which saves time compared to managing multiple point solutions across our security stack.
The fact that I can build whatever I want within my own imagination and skills without relying on code is the best thing about Torq.
You can copy and paste a cURL command. If you have documentation or APIs, you usually have an example on the side. You basically have all the information on how the API call should be. You can just copy that and paste it into a step, and it will just build the step for you.
Recently, I faced an incident, a cyber incident, and it was detected in real time.
IBM Security QRadar gives the opportunity to improve the time to market of the releases with a great evaluation of cybersecurity breaches.
Compared to ArcSight, Splunk, or any other SIEM tools where you need their processing language such as structured query language, SPL, and in Sentinel there is KQL query languages, IBM Security QRadar doesn't require reliance on query languages.
Microsoft Sentinel's ability to correlate data from multiple sources and its detection capabilities are essential.
Microsoft Sentinel has improved cost efficiency, which is one of the key areas we're able to win business against the ability to have threat intelligence.
Microsoft Sentinel's ability to correlate data from multiple sources enhances our threat detection capabilities beyond what is a simple data lake solution by filtering out the noise and consolidating the signal down to a meaningful level that is easier to investigate and see.



| Company Size | Count |
|---|---|
| Midsize Enterprise | 3 |
| Large Enterprise | 4 |
| Company Size | Count |
|---|---|
| Small Business | 91 |
| Midsize Enterprise | 39 |
| Large Enterprise | 105 |
| Company Size | Count |
|---|---|
| Small Business | 41 |
| Midsize Enterprise | 22 |
| Large Enterprise | 46 |
Torq is the enterprise AI SOC solution that effectively combines adaptive insights and automation to handle critical threats efficiently. It manages threat lifecycles, swiftly moving from triage to response, ensuring effective risk management.
Torq is designed to streamline security operations by aggregating telemetry across your security stack. It investigates significant risks and manages threats from triage to containment and remediation. This AI-driven tool enhances the capabilities of your SecOps team, allowing them to achieve more impactful results without introducing complicated processes.
What are the key features of Torq?In industries like finance and healthcare, Torq shows effectiveness by adapting to specific risk scenarios often encountered in these fields. Its integration with existing infrastructures makes it a valuable asset for maintaining stringent security standards, essential for protecting critical data and operations in diverse high-stakes environments.
IBM Security QRadar (recently acquired by Palo Alto Networks) is a security and analytics platform designed to defend against threats and scale security operations. This is done through integrated visibility, investigation, detection, and response. QRadar empowers security groups with actionable insights into high-priority threats by providing visibility into enterprise security data. Through centralized visibility, security teams and analysts can determine their security stance, which areas pose a potential threat, and which areas are critical. This will help streamline workflows by eliminating the need to pivot between tools.
IBM Security QRadar is built to address a wide range of security issues and can be easily scaled with minimal customization effort required. As data is ingested, QRadar administers automated, real-time security intelligence to swiftly and precisely discover and prioritize threats. The platform will issue alerts with actionable, rich context into developing threats. Security teams and analysts can then rapidly respond to minimize the attackers' strike. The solution will provide a complete view of activity in both cloud-based and on-premise environments as a large amount of data is ingested throughout the enterprise. Additionally, QRadar’s anomaly detection intelligence enables security teams to identify any user behavior changes that could be indicators of potential threats.
IBM QRadar Log Manager
To better help organizations protect themselves against potential security threats, attacks, and breaches, IBM QRadar Log Manager gathers, analyzes, preserves, and reports on security log events using QRadar Sense Analytics. All operating systems and applications, servers, devices, and applications are converted into searchable and actionable intelligent data. QRadar Log Manager then helps organizations meet compliance reporting and monitoring requirements, which can be further upgraded to QRadar SIEM for a more superior level of threat protection.
Some of QRadar Log Manager’s key features include:
Reviews from Real Users
IBM Security QRadar is a solution of choice among users because it provides a complete solution for security teams by integrating network analysis, log management, user behavior analytics, threat intelligence, and AI-powered investigations into a single solution. Users particularly like having a single window into their network and its ability to be used for larger enterprises.
Simon T., a cyber security services operations manager at an aerospace/defense firm, notes, "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."
A management executive at a security firm says, "What we like about QRadar and the models that IBM has, is it can go from a small-to-medium enterprise to a larger organization, and it gives you the same value."
Microsoft Sentinel is a scalable, cloud-native, security information event management (SIEM) and security orchestration automated response (SOAR) solution that lets you see and stop threats before they cause harm. Microsoft Sentinel delivers intelligent security analytics and threat intelligence across the enterprise, providing a single solution for alert detection, threat visibility, proactive hunting, and threat response. Eliminate security infrastructure setup and maintenance, and elastically scale to meet your security needs—while reducing IT costs. With Microsoft Sentinel, you can:
- Collect data at cloud scale—across all users, devices, applications, and infrastructure, both on-premises and in multiple clouds
- Detect previously uncovered threats and minimize false positives using analytics and unparalleled threat intelligence from Microsoft
- Investigate threats with AI and hunt suspicious activities at scale, tapping into decades of cybersecurity work at Microsoft
- Respond to incidents rapidly with built-in orchestration and automation of common tasks
To learn more about our solution, ask questions, and share feedback, join our Microsoft Security, Compliance and Identity Community.
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.