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IBM Security QRadar vs Rapid7 InsightIDR vs Vectra AI comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive Summary

Review summaries and opinions

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

Mindshare comparison

As of July 2025, in the Extended Detection and Response (XDR) category, the mindshare of IBM Security QRadar is 3.1%, up from 2.8% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Rapid7 InsightIDR is 2.8%, up from 2.0% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Vectra AI is 3.6%, up from 2.6% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Extended Detection and Response (XDR)
 

Featured Reviews

Mahmoud Younes - PeerSpot reviewer
Reliable installation and diverse use cases provide strong value
IBM Security QRadar has some areas for improvement. We have missed some DSM components. We need to customize logs where there is no DSM or connector for certain products. We can integrate but we have missed the DSM, which is the connector to pass logs coming from different applications. For example, with a university customer, we tried onboarding Canvas service. IBM Security QRadar does not support Canvas, so we had to create custom scripts and workarounds to pull logs from Canvas.
Asim Naeem - PeerSpot reviewer
Providing comprehensive insight into alerts while working towards AI enhancement
I definitely recommend Rapid7 InsightIDR. It is becoming better, with improvements being continuously made to the product. Right now, I do not have any advice about Rapid7 for other users because every organization or user has different criteria or multiple use cases, so I refrain from commenting on that. I rate the overall solution seven out of ten.
Mohammad Alkurdi - PeerSpot reviewer
Innovative detection features enhance monitoring
The advantages of the integration are not entirely out-of-the-box. You have to do it manually. When I'm doing tier response, an out-of-the-box solution is not available. You need to have a Linux server, and from the Linux server, you must perform AI tasks, and there is a lot to be handled in the back end. This is a major consideration about them. The recall feature, if it can be placed in some areas instead of the cloud, and charged for, would be better. Recall the storage where you watch all the traffic, and you can recall it and try to analyze it in the back end. It’s cloud-based. If they offer it on-prem, it would be better. I think they have a solution, but I have never tested it, to be honest with you.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"What I like the most about it is that you can very easily install and configure it. As compared to other SIEM solutions, for which you need to know and do a lot more to prepare your SIEM environment, QRadar is much simpler to install and configure. There are various options in the Admin console. In the Admin tab, you can design dashboards and view various graphs. It has a lot of attractive features, and you don't need to configure everything on your own."
"It's built around Red Hat Linux, which is highly robust."
"The support is very good. We get support whenever we need it. Sometimes they respond immediately and sometimes it will be within 24 hours. We can ask them to please do it right away and they can get a request done within an hour or two."
"The product provides a complete platform for ingesting the log, doing the correlations and handling the runtime."
"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."
"We find predictive analysis capabilities valuable."
"The solution is easy to use, manage, and review all incidents."
"Vulnerability data, network data and the like, are part of correlation and detection."
"Enables the use of honey pots, honey users, and honey files to monitor for suspicious patterns."
"The web interface is great — very useful and user-friendly."
"Very intuitive and easy to set up."
"Simple configuration and automatically syncs to the cloud platform."
"The solution is very stable and works very well for what I need it to do."
"The product works well. Stability-wise, I rate the solution a ten out of ten."
"Great coverage of all systems within our network from endpoint to firewall."
"Rapid7 InsightIDR integrates well with other solutions. It's also easy to configure because Rapid7 InsightIDR has a lot of instructions posted on their website that customers can follow if they need to get the source log."
"Vectra AI generates relevant information."
"The initial setup was pretty straightforward."
"There are many detection features available."
"We discovered a lot of things in our network and are correcting several misconfigurations. We are learning how some apps work together and how some things shouldn't happen. It's also easier for us to identify the source of a brute force, whereas before, we didn't even know we had a brute force."
"The UI is easy to use and when we send detection to everybody, they easily understand what we are asking at the time."
"I like the way that Vectra AI focuses on the internal network. Nowadays, most of the attackers are already inside, and they can be inside for many years before they start attacking. With normal monitoring, it's quite difficult to find them."
"Vectra is very compatible with various cloud providers, such as Amazon and Azure AD. This is helpful as customers often migrate their network infrastructure to the cloud."
"It provides various dashboards that facilitate the identification of connections and can detect data exfiltration, meaning data sent from your environment to another."
 

Cons

"The product is good, but one feature they should have is an Elasticsearch. Currently, in QRadar, there are no Elasticsearch criteria."
"It's resource-intensive."
"Needs better visualization options beyond the time series charts and a few other options that they have."
"There are many types of AI, and this AI is very limited in SQL and features. There may be potential for improvement."
"Their technical support is not good. We opened a lot of cases and from my experience, they are not complicated issues but it takes forever to get an answer."
"QVM is another instance where they need to revise the vulnerability scoring and the proper remediation details."
"Improving the integration with IBM Server for MetaMask for correlation rules would be beneficial. Currently, I use Sentinel in Azure, and I would prefer creating one rule to roll it out to both Sentinel and QRadar. However, this is not possible because QRadar lacks this capability."
"The architecture could be improved. I got stuck for a long time trying to understand the architecture, as it is quite challenging."
"The solution's XDR agents cannot compete with the XDR solutions out there yet."
"There are certain limitations with Rapid7 that I am working on."
"InsightIDR's integration with other solutions could be improved. Also, I'd like more control from the portal over what's happening on the endpoint side. For example, when I see an attack on an endpoint, I want to be able to stop it from the portal."
"Needs a better ability to customize the check within the console."
"It takes time for the product's support team to resolve issues, making it an area of concern where improvements are required."
"The APIs can be further improved in Rapid7."
"Rapid7 doesn't integrate well with all our security tools from various vendors, so we plan to switch. Many of our solutions work with Rapid7, but some do not. We are already searching for a replacement already."
"The reporting is the weakest aspect. There needs to be multi-level grouping for events (for example, group by user and destination). Right now, we can do a group by user and a separate table or group by destination. But I'd be more interested in where a person was logging into instead of who was logging in or where he was logging in."
"I would like to see data processed onshore. Right now, the cloud components, like Office 365, must be processed on servers outside of Australia. I would like to see a future adoption of onshore processing."
"One thing which I have found where there could be improvement is with regard to the architecture, a little bit: how the brains and sensors function. It needs more flexibility with regard to the brain. If there were some flexibility in that regard, that would be helpful, because changing the mode of the brain is complex. In some cases, the change is permanent. You cannot revert it."
"Multiple appliances are required for Vectra AI, making it less convenient compared to competitors."
"Vectra is still limited to packet management. It's only monitoring packet exchanges. While it can see a lot of things, it can't see everything, depending on where it's deployed. It has its limits and that's why I still have my SIEM."
"We have a lot of system solutions and integrations with system solutions. Vectra is a type of black box. It implements AI-informed detection mechanisms, but we cannot create system detections. I understand that the product is designed this way, but it would be great if we could create our own detections as well."
"We have had a few issues with the integration of Vectra AI with EDR. Some filters have not been working. We've also had issues with the brain not being powerful enough."
"It would be commercially beneficial if Vectra AI had something like Darktrace's Antigena Email or something similar to email protection."
"We had another product with Vectra AI and used the MDR solution as an add-on. Initially, it wasn't fully appropriately configured, so we didn't get the expected results. Even once configured correctly, we weren't fully satisfied with its response. The issue was both with their service response and the product's capabilities."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"There is a license required for this solution. There are some limitations depending on what license you purchase."
"I would like for them to lower the price."
"The price of this solution is a little high."
"It is cheaper than ArcSight."
"IBM QRadar User Behavior Analytics is an application framework and you can install many applications without any additional costs."
"Pricing is good."
"think the pricing is quite flexible."
"QRadar UBA's price is a little more than street price and could be reduced."
"Licensing is straightforward. If, for some reason, you don’t meet the minimum licensing requirements, there is a third-party managed service that can help."
"It is more reasonably priced than other vendors."
"Rapid7 InsightIDR charges us based on the endpoints we connect to."
"Rapid7 InsightIDR is priced very well and is cost-effective."
"Rapid7 InsightIDR's pricing is reasonable."
"It is a reasonably priced solution."
"It is on a yearly basis. For our own company, for about 250 users, it was 16,000 euros a year."
"Rapid7 InsightIDR's pricing is reasonable but we have challenges with the Minimum Order Quantity. It is not reasonable for customers who have less than one hundred devices. If they can reduce Minimum Order Quantity, it is good. You have to pay around 5000-6000 dollars per year for the product. The pricing includes maintenance and support costs."
"Vectra is a bit on the higher side in terms of price, but they have always been transparent. The reason that they are this good is that they invest, so they need to charge accordingly."
"The solution's pricing was 50 percent lower than the other vendors shortlisted."
"The license is based on the concurrent IP addresses that it's investigating. We have 9,800 to 10,000 IP addresses."
"We have a desire to increase our use. However, it all comes down to budget. It's a very expensive tool that is very difficult to prove business support for. We would like to have two separate networks. We have our corporate network and PCI network, which is segregated due to payment processing. We don't have it for deployed in the PCI network. It would be good to have it fully deployed there to provide us with additional monitoring and control, but the cost associated with their licensing model makes it prohibitively expensive to deploy."
"There are additional features that can be purchased in addition to the standard licensing fee, such as Cognito Recall and Stream."
"Their licensing model is antiquated. I'm not a fan of their licensing model. We have to pay for licensing based on four different things. You have to pay based on the number of unique IPs, the number of logs that we send through Recall and Stream, and the size of our environment. They need to simplify their licensing down to just one thing. It should be based on the amount of data, the number of devices, or something else, but there should be just one thing for everything. That's what they need to base their licensing on. Cost-wise, they're not cheap. They were definitely the most expensive option, but you get what you pay for. They're not the cheapest option."
"Vectra AI's pricing is cheaper than that of Darktrace."
"Vectra AI is not a cheap solution."
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Comparison Review

VS
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
Computer Software Company
16%
Financial Services Firm
12%
Government
7%
Manufacturing Company
7%
Computer Software Company
15%
Financial Services Firm
8%
Manufacturing Company
8%
Government
6%
Financial Services Firm
13%
Computer Software Company
12%
Manufacturing Company
8%
Government
7%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
 

Questions from the Community

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?
When comparing with Splunk, IBM Security QRadar's cost is reasonable. Splunk is more expensive than IBM Security QRadar.
What do you like most about Rapid7 InsightIDR?
During simulations or demonstrations, the tool generates alerts, providing details such as the specific application, ...
What needs improvement with Rapid7 InsightIDR?
There is a future in AI with Rapid7, however, it is not fully operated. There are certain limitations with Rapid7 tha...
What is the biggest difference between Corelight and Vectra AI?
The two platforms take a fundamentally different approach to NDR. Corelight is limited to use cases that require the ...
What do you like most about Vectra AI?
The solution is currently used as a central threat detection and response system.
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Vectra AI?
It is very acceptable when you compare it with Darktrace, for example.
 

Also Known As

IBM QRadar, QRadar SIEM, QRadar UBA, QRadar on Cloud, IBM QRadar Advisor with Watson
InsightIDR
Vectra Networks, Vectra AI NDR
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Clients across multiple industries, such as energy, financial, retail, healthcare, government, communications, and education use QRadar.
Liberty Wines, Pioneer Telephone, Visier
Tribune Media Group, Barry University, Aruba Networks, Good Technology, Riverbed, Santa Clara University, Securities Exchange, Tri-State Generation and Transmission Association
Find out what your peers are saying about CrowdStrike, SentinelOne, Microsoft and others in Extended Detection and Response (XDR). Updated: June 2025.
860,825 professionals have used our research since 2012.