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IBM Security QRadar vs Rapid7 InsightOps vs Splunk Enterprise Security 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 August 2025, in the Log Management category, the mindshare of IBM Security QRadar is 3.6%, down from 4.7% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Rapid7 InsightOps is 0.4%, down from 0.5% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Splunk Enterprise Security is 7.4%, down from 9.7% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Log Management Market Share Distribution
ProductMarket Share (%)
Splunk Enterprise Security7.4%
IBM Security QRadar3.6%
Rapid7 InsightOps0.4%
Other88.6%
Log Management
 

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.
Karthick Selvam - PeerSpot reviewer
A cloud solution to collect and analyse logs with timely support
We should understand the basic concepts of Rapid7 InsightOps. We are using Rapid7 InsightOps to collect and analyze data. We need to ensure that our environment is suitable before proceeding. The solution is user-friendly and support all environment like Linux, Windows, CentOS, etc. It is suitable for all. Overall, I rate the solution a nine out of ten.
ROBERT-CHRISTIAN - PeerSpot reviewer
Has many predefined correlation rules and is brilliant for investigation and log analysis
It is very complicated to write your own correlation rules without the help of Splunk support. What Splunk could do better is to create an API to the standard SIEM tools, such as Microsoft Sentinel. The idea would be to make it less painful. In ELK Stack, Kibana is the query language with which you can search log files. I believe Splunk has also a query language in which they search their log files, but once you have identified the log file that you want to use for further security correlation, you want to very quickly transport that into your SIEM tool, such as Microsoft Sentinel. That is something that Splunk could make a little bit less painful because it is a lot of effort to find that log file and forward it. An API with Microsoft Sentinel or a similar SIEM tool would be a good idea.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"The UBA feature is the most valuable because you can see everything about users' activities."
"I would rate IBM Security QRadar nine out of ten."
"Overall a great solution."
"It comes with many rules disabled. You can tune them and modify them according to your enterprise needs and avoid false positives."
"It allows us to search data both on-premises and on the cloud."
"IBM QRadar is great help from its security event monitoring to data center and NOC troubleshooting of issues hard for other departments to spot."
"There are other third-party plugins that we can use."
"IBM QRadar User Behavior Analytics's most important feature is its ease of use."
"The machine learning algorithms in Rapid7 InsightIDR for threat detection work quite effectively as part of the user entity behavior analytic model, allowing us to focus group normal typical behavior of users and then turn on the rule to spot any unexpected behavior."
"The most valuable feature of Rapid7 InsightOps is the search functionality."
"The ability to browse logs from multiple sources at the same time really speeds up root cause analysis."
"We can save logs as plain text."
"Integration of InsightOps with other tools, especially SIEM solutions, has generally improved operational efficiency."
"It has the ability to alert and track logs from different sources."
"Splunk works based on parsing log files."
"Deployment server for deploying changes in one go."
"The speed of the search engine"
"You can use it to gather syslog messages from anything."
"The solution's most valuable feature is its data modeling."
"It helped us consolidate all our solutions into an easy tool to use for various employees."
"I like Splunk's data aggregation and search capabilities."
"The solution has plenty of features that are good."
 

Cons

"They should provide more manual examples online so that I can learn it myself."
"There is one problem with QRadar in regards to the add-on apps. The apps can be frustrating. For example, when I add a big app like one of the add-ons for resiliency, add-on applications for QRadar, these applications require different hardware to implement and to deploy. The resiliency connector because there's a considerable amount of data scanning, operates for these apps correctly."
"QRadar needs a lot of fine tuning"
"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."
"IBM QRadar User Behavior Analytics could improve machine learning use cases because they are limited and most of the use cases are rule-based. They should develop more use cases, such as in Securonix or Exabeam because they will detect a threat. Using machine learning is mainly on the correlation rules, but if you think about Exabeam or Securonix, they detect using machine learning or machine learning-based algorithms."
"The solution is highly used here in Pakistan and in many sectors, they could improve it by having more SIEM connectors."
"IBM Security QRadar lacks automated response. With this feature, there's no need to visit VirusTotal or other sites for IP reputation. There should be a small plug-in where users can click to retrieve details about the reputation and organization of public IP."
"I have noticed the interface has room for improvement."
"There are a few things I would like to do with a few more complex queries which I am not able to do right now, because it is a SaaS solution."
"The solution takes a little bit of time when we load the website for the first time."
"Improvement is needed in the dashboard of InsightOps, especially for less technical users."
"Since I used the beta, improvements are to be expected. The dashboard options could have been clearer, but I believe it is more a problem with the limited documentation available at the time."
"Rapid7 InsightOps could improve by making the search query better. There are times when the search query is broken and it does not find anything."
"Regarding room for improvement, I expect Splunk to provide information about new features on a regular basis, such as notifications about enhancements that may improve security posture."
"It needs to improve the way to install third-party apps and enable installation without logging into splunk.com."
"The training was mostly sales-focused, like how to monitor your sales. It was hard to then come back from doing the training and try to switch it to a cybersecurity focus because all the training we did was sales oriented. The basic training didn't really touch on any kind of cybersecurity use cases or anything like that. That would have been great to see in the training."
"I would like to see future development in terms of ML (Machine Learning)."
"The solution could use a different licensing model."
"The solution's case management system could be further improved to make it easier for analysts to manage cases."
"I find that the learning curve for Splunk is relatively lengthy."
"Improving the infrastructure behind Splunk Enterprise Security is vital—enhanced cores, CPUs, and memory should be prioritized to support better processing power."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"IBM has subscriptions plans that run for one year."
"We pay approximately $40,000 to use the solution annually. This solution is a lot less expensive than Splunk."
"There are different types of subscriptions available. We were on an annual subscription, but our customers typically choose the two years subscription option."
"It is overly expensive and overly complex in terms of licensing. They have many different appliances, which makes it extremely difficult to choose the technology. It is very difficult to choose the technology or QRadar components that you should be deploying. They have improved some of it in the last few years. They have made it slightly easy with the fact that you can now buy virtual versions of all the appliances, which is good, but it is still very fragmented. For instance, on some of the smaller appliances, there is no upgrade path. So, if you exceed the capacity of the appliance, you have to buy a bigger appliance, which is not helpful because it is quite a major cost. If you want to add more disks to the system, they'll say that you can't."
"It is a perpetual license that we have for the event collector. The licensing is done based on the number of events and flows that you receive on this particular device. These are perpetual licenses, which means once you purchase them, they don't expire, which means that the support to IBM is definitely renewed after every one year. We have an enterprise agreement with IBM, which puts the cost in a totally different category as compared to someone who is not an IBM partner and is approaching IBM for this solution. We were able to get massive discounts. To give you an idea, we recently purchased 30,000 event licenses, and it costs around $480,000. It is definitely not a cheap product. We have licenses for about 270,000 events per second and 3 million flows per second. All the appliances and their events and flows are basically clubbed together and charged or rather calculated through a single source. The console receives all the details from all the event processes that we have globally. So, the license that we have is a single license for 270,000 events per second and 3 million flows per second, but that can be managed centrally. I was only part of the secondary purchase, which was 30,000 events per second for about $480,000. You can calculate how much we paid for 270,000 events. Reducing its price would be a compromise. We have already used a lower-priced product in the form of NNT, but we had to get rid of it because it was not doing the job that we actually wanted to do. You get what you pay for."
"You have a one-time payment, and you also can purchase it for one year as a subscription. We have it on-premise, and we have a permanent license for it. We have to pay for the support on a yearly basis. If you compare its cost with Sentinel for one year, QRadar would seem more expensive, but if you compare its cost over five or ten years, Azure Sentinel will be more expensive than QRadar. If you compare its cost with Sentinel for one year, QRadar would seem more expensive, but if you compare its cost over five or 10 years, Azure Sentinel can be more expensive than QRadar."
"It's not expensive for the resources that it gives you."
"It is expensive. It is not a product that I can provide for SMBs. It is a program that I can only provide for really large enterprises."
"The product is cheap."
"The pricing is very complicated, and it is very pricey. You do require a lot of different licenses in order to get a comprehensive solution that is not just the SIEM solution."
"It is possible to use a developer's license, which is up to 10GB per day of volume traffic, which is usually enough for most use cases."
"My customers have found the price of the solution to be high."
"I think that most of the monitoring solutions are expensive."
"We have an unlimited one, and we pay yearly, but I don't know how much it costs. Previously, I worked for a startup, and when they started building it up, it was complicated for them because they didn't have the budget for that many licenses. It was very costly for them. So, startups might find it a little bit problematic because of the licensing, but for bigger companies, there is no issue."
"It is expensive. I used to buy it early on, but then they combined it into a higher-up organization. They buy it for multiple systems now. Last time, I paid around 60K for it. There is just the licensing fee. That's all."
"The tool's pricing model is great. You can choose between workloads or volume."
"The solution is costly."
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Comparison Review

VS
Feb 26, 2015
HP ArcSight vs. IBM QRadar vs. ​McAfee Nitro vs. Splunk vs. RSA Security vs. LogRhythm
We at Infosecnirvana.com have done several posts on SIEM. After the Dummies Guide on SIEM, we are following it up with a SIEM Product Comparison – 101 deck. So, here it is for your viewing pleasure. Let me know what you think by posting your comments below. The key products compared here are…
 

Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Computer Software Company
16%
Financial Services Firm
11%
Manufacturing Company
7%
Government
7%
Computer Software Company
14%
Manufacturing Company
10%
Construction Company
8%
Media Company
7%
Computer Software Company
14%
Financial Services Firm
14%
Manufacturing Company
8%
Government
7%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business88
Midsize Enterprise36
Large Enterprise101
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business7
Midsize Enterprise2
Large Enterprise2
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business104
Midsize Enterprise44
Large Enterprise225
 

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 InsightOps?
Integration of InsightOps with other tools, especially SIEM solutions, has generally improved operational efficiency.
What needs improvement with Rapid7 InsightOps?
In my opinion, there are no specific areas of Rapid7 InsightIDR that need improvement because all solutions in the SI...
What is your primary use case for Rapid7 InsightOps?
The usual use cases for Rapid7 InsightOps that I work with are to meet standard requirements such as PCI DSS and ISO ...
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...
How does Splunk compare with Azure Monitor?
Splunk handles a high amount of data very well. We use Splunk to capture information and as an aggregator for monitor...
What do you like most about Splunk?
There are a lot of third-party applications that can be installed.
 

Also Known As

IBM QRadar, QRadar SIEM, QRadar UBA, QRadar on Cloud, IBM QRadar Advisor with Watson
InsightOps, Logentries
No data available
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Clients across multiple industries, such as energy, financial, retail, healthcare, government, communications, and education use QRadar.
Trimble Navigation Limited
Splunk has more than 7,000 customers spread across over 90 countries. These customers include Telenor, UniCredit, ideeli, McKenney's, Tesco, and SurveyMonkey.
Find out what your peers are saying about Wazuh, Splunk, Datadog and others in Log Management. Updated: July 2025.
865,985 professionals have used our research since 2012.