IBM Security QRadar vs Splunk Cloud Platform comparison

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31,886 views|17,713 comparisons
92% willing to recommend
IBM Logo
21,075 views|12,899 comparisons
91% willing to recommend
Splunk Logo
161 views|74 comparisons
94% willing to recommend
Comparison Buyer's Guide
Executive Summary

We performed a comparison between IBM Security QRadar and Splunk Cloud Platform based on real PeerSpot user reviews.

Find out in this report how the two Security Information and Event Management (SIEM) solutions compare in terms of features, pricing, service and support, easy of deployment, and ROI.
To learn more, read our detailed IBM Security QRadar vs. Splunk Cloud Platform Report (Updated: March 2023).
769,334 professionals have used our research since 2012.
Featured Review
Quotes From Members
We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use.
Here are some excerpts of what they said:
Pros
"Sentinel pricing is good""Free ingestion for Azure logs (with E5 licence)""It is easy to implement (turn on) - does need a skilled analyst to develop queries and playbooks.""Sentinel also enables you to ingest data from your entire ecosystem and not just from the Microsoft ecosystem. It can receive data from third-party vendors' products such firewalls, network devices, and antivirus solutions. It's not only a Microsoft solution, it's for everything.""The analytic rule is the most valuable feature.""It is always correlating to IOCs for normal attacks, using Azure-related resources. For example, if any illegitimate IP starts unusual activity on our Azure firewall, then it automatically generates an alarm for us.""The log query feature has been the most valuable because it's very good. You can put your data on the cloud and run queues from Sentinel. It will do it all very fast. I love that I don't have to upload it to an Excel file and then manually look for a piece of information. Sentinel is much faster and is good for big databases.""It's pretty powerful and its performance is pretty good."

More Microsoft Sentinel Pros →

"Senses, tracks, and links significant incidents and threats.""The threat protection network is the most valuable feature, because when you get an offense, you can actually trace it back to where it originated from, how it originated, and why.""QRadar shows very effective correlations. If you combine all the logins plus user behavior and the current intelligence, it gives a very good correlation for business. I think it reduces the false positives in user activity monitoring because there is a lot of social information to correlate with other data.""The UBA feature is the most valuable because you can see everything about users' activities.""It helps us discover any threats with their alerts and tracking.""The scalability is good.""IBM has everything you need in a cybersecurity solution. If you want to build a cybersecurity operation center version then I think QRadar is a perfect solution.""Integration is very easy and the reporting is good."

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"The most valuable feature is we don't have to deal with any back-end server maintenance because the solution is cloud-based.""The Splunk Cloud Platform has reduced our mean time to resolve. It has easily saved 20 to 30 minutes every time someone gets locked out. We get 10 or 15 instances per day where people get locked out. It definitely saves a few hours per day.""Index manager is most valuable because we do not have to bother about internal storage. It is all managed by the Splunk team.""I like the Cloud monitoring console feature.""Dashboards and alerting are the most valuable features. The dashboards let us see how the system looks in terms of anomalies, and the alerts trigger us to go and look at what possible problems are happening.""Splunk has sped up our response and reduced the time we spend manually monitoring any logs for ticketing tools or servers. It saves us around two hours daily.""This is a complete log reporting tool.""The initial setup was straightforward."

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Cons
"The playbook development environment is not as rich as it should be. There are multiple occasions when we face problems while creating the playbook.""It has been a challenge with Azure Sentinel to onboard the Syslog server from FortiGate. Azure Sentinel can work better on that shift between the Syslog server and a firewall.""Microsoft Defender has a built-in threat expert option that enables you to contact an expert. That feature isn't available in Sentinel because it's a huge product that integrates all the technologies. I would like Microsoft to add the threat expert option so we can contact them. There are a few other features, like threat assessment that the PG team is working on. I expect them to release this feature in the next quarter.""If I see an alert and I want to drill down and get more details about the alert, it's not just one click. In other SIEM tools, you just have to click the IP address of the entity and they give you the complete picture. In Sentinel, you have to write queries or use saved queries to get details.""Sentinel can be used in two ways. With other tools like QRadar, I don't need to run queries. Using Sentinel requires users to learn KQL to run technical queries and check things. If they don't know KQL, they can't fully utilize the solution.""I believe one of the challenges I encountered was the absence of live training sessions, even with the option to pay for them.""The built-in SOAR is not really good out-of-the-box. The SOAR relies on logic apps and you almost need to have some kind of developer background to be able to make these logic apps. Most security people cannot develop anything...""If you're looking to use canned queries, the interface could be a little more straightforward. It's not immediately intuitive regarding how you use it. You have to take a canned query and paste it into an operational box and then you hit a button... They could improve the ease of deploying these queries."

More Microsoft Sentinel Cons →

"The usability of interfaces could be improved.""For the common needs of clients to fulfill requirements, a real integration with Blueworks Live (BPA modeling tool also from IBM) and a more suitable BPM on cloud solution for midsize customers.""Before we didn't have any security issues but recently a few of the user emails were hacked. We had to actually recreate their emails for them.""Needs better visualization options beyond the time series charts and a few other options that they have.""The API integration for AD is a problem when it comes to vulnerability management. If you want to incorporate multiple factor authentication it becomes a problem with the AD. It doesn't integrate well. That needs to be improved.""QRadar UBA only keeps the data for a short while (it's refreshed every five minutes) and would be improved if this were extended to a week or month.""I would like to see the update process simplified.""In a future release, the solution could provide malware analysis."

More IBM Security QRadar Cons →

"The Splunk Cloud Platform dashboard could benefit from some improvements.""The dashboards should be easier to customize.""Splunk should increase the frequency of new feature releases, particularly those related to real-time operational flow monitoring and analytics reporting.""Splunk Cloud Platform should improve its integrations and consider multiple integrations or direct integration with other platforms like Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud, or AWS.""Its stability and performance can be better. Very rarely does a day go by when we do not see an error in the console, such as a health check error. Because it is cloud-hosted, we do not have access to the backend to figure it out ourselves. We are reliant on their support to figure it out, and a couple of days later, the error comes back or it is a different error. It is a never-ending cycle of support tickets. Their support is also not great.""When one of my customers needs an app, and I am able to find that app on the Splunk base, I have to create a ticket and wait for five days for them to download the app into the cloud environment. That is probably one of the main things. It is painful because I have to wait to get that app in the cloud.""There is sometimes no documentation or updated documentation available.""They need to provide more training options."

More Splunk Cloud Platform Cons →

Pricing and Cost Advice
  • "It comes with a Microsoft subscription which the customer has, so they don't have to invest somewhere else."
  • "It is a consumption-based license model. bands at 100, 200, 400 GB per day etc. Azure Sentinel Pricing | Microsoft Azure"
  • "Good monthly operational cost model for the detection and response outcomes delivered, M365 logs don't count toward the limits which is a good benefit."
  • "I have had mixed feedback. At one point, I heard a client say that it sometimes seems more expensive. Most of the clients are on Office 365 or M365, and they are forced to take Azure SIEM because of the integration."
  • "It is kind of like a sliding scale. There are different tiers of pricing that go from $100 per day up to $3,500 per day. So, it just kind of depends on how much data is being stored. There can be additional costs to the standard license other than the additional data. It just kind of depends on what other services you're spinning up in Azure, or if you're using something like Azure log analytics."
  • "I am just paying for the log space with Azure Sentinel. It costs us about $2,000 a month. Most of the logs are free. We are only paying money for Azure Firewall logs because email logs or Azure AD logs are free to use for us."
  • "Sentinel is a bit expensive. If you can figure a way of configuring it to meet your needs, then you can find a way around the cost."
  • "Azure Sentinel is very costly, or at least it appears to be very costly. The costs vary based on your ingestion and your retention charges."
  • More Microsoft Sentinel Pricing and Cost Advice →

  • "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."
  • "Most of the time, it is easier and cheaper to buy a new product or the QRadar box."
  • "IBM's Qradar is not for small companie. Unfortunately, it would be 'overkill' to place it plainly. The pricing would be too much."
  • "IBM's Qradar is not for small companie. Unfortunately, it would be 'overkill' to place it plainly. The pricing would be too much."
  • "Go through a vulnerability assessment review for price breaks. A virtualized solution will also cut down on cost."
  • "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 maintenance costs are high."
  • "Pricing (based on EPS) will be more accurate."
  • More IBM Security QRadar Pricing and Cost Advice →

  • "The licensing is based on the amount of data that we send to the cloud on a daily basis."
  • "The price is something that people complain about."
  • "The licensing costs depend on the state of your environment and the fees are paid on a monthly basis."
  • "The pricing model makes this an expensive solution."
  • "There are additional features that you would need to purchase depending on your use case."
  • "The cost of using Splunk Cloud Platform is high, but the value it provides is worth the investment."
  • "I am familiar with the pricing and licensing model a little bit. I am not sure about the particulars of the actual price that we have, but I do like the idea of going towards a more CPU-based approach rather than the ingest approach because it allows us the ability to ingest more data if we need it."
  • "It is a touchy subject because we are locked into it. That goes back to the rehydrating data. We cannot have the retention that we want to store for legal and compliance purposes because that is seven years' worth of data for some of the indexes, so we ship them off into S3 buckets and install them there, at which point they are invisible to Splunk, so we have to rehydrate them, but we cannot rehydrate those pockets into Splunk Cloud. We have to rehydrate them into a self-hosted version of Splunk, which can take days to set up and get going. I would not call Splunk's licensing and pricing predatory, but they have made it very difficult to maintain the independence of your own data."
  • More Splunk Cloud Platform Pricing and Cost Advice →

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    Comparison Review
    Vinod Shankar
    Questions from the Community
    Top Answer:Yes, Azure Sentinel is a SIEM on the Cloud. Multiple data sources can be uploaded and analyzed with Azure Sentinel and… more »
    Top Answer:It would really depend on (1) which logs you need to ingest and (2) what are your use cases Splunk is easy for… more »
    Top Answer:We like that Azure Sentinel does not require as much maintenance as legacy SIEMs that are on-premises. Azure Sentinel is… more »
    Top Answer:It mostly depends on your use-cases and environment. Exabeam and Securonix have a stronger UEBA feature set, friendlier… more »
    Top Answer:For tools I’d recommend:  -SIEM- LogRhythm -SOAR- Palo Alto XSOAR Doing commercial w/o both (or at least an XDR) is… more »
    Top Answer:The event collector, flow collector, PCAP and SOAR are valuable.
    Top Answer:Splunk has sped up our response and reduced the time we spend manually monitoring any logs for ticketing tools or… more »
    Top Answer:Splunk is a bit pricey, but it's reasonable for the features offered.
    Top Answer:Sometimes, integrating with other systems is difficult, and it isn't feasible to connect with other applications, but… more »
    Comparisons
    Also Known As
    Azure Sentinel
    IBM QRadar, QRadar SIEM, QRadar UBA, QRadar on Cloud, QRadar, IBM QRadar User Behavior Analytics, IBM QRadar Advisor with Watson
    Learn More
    Overview

    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.

    IBM Security QRadar 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:

    • Data processing and capture on any security event
    • Disaster recovery options and high availability 
    • Scalability for large enterprises
    • SoftLayer cloud installation capability
    • Advanced threat protection

    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."

    Splunk Cloud is the industry’s only enterprise-ready cloud service for machine data, offering a 100% uptime SLA and standard plans from 5GB/day to 5TB/day. Watch this video to find out how you can accelerate time-to-value and stay focused on your core business using Splunk Cloud.

    Sample Customers
    Microsoft Sentinel is trusted by companies of all sizes including ABM, ASOS, Uniper, First West Credit Union, Avanade, and more.
    Clients across multiple industries, such as energy, financial, retail, healthcare, government, communications, and education use QRadar.
    Mindtouch
    Top Industries
    REVIEWERS
    Financial Services Firm22%
    Computer Software Company11%
    Manufacturing Company8%
    Comms Service Provider8%
    VISITORS READING REVIEWS
    Computer Software Company16%
    Financial Services Firm10%
    Government9%
    Manufacturing Company7%
    REVIEWERS
    Financial Services Firm23%
    Computer Software Company15%
    Comms Service Provider10%
    Manufacturing Company6%
    VISITORS READING REVIEWS
    Educational Organization18%
    Computer Software Company15%
    Financial Services Firm10%
    Government7%
    REVIEWERS
    Financial Services Firm24%
    Computer Software Company12%
    Manufacturing Company8%
    Government8%
    VISITORS READING REVIEWS
    Computer Software Company22%
    Financial Services Firm14%
    Manufacturing Company7%
    Comms Service Provider6%
    Company Size
    REVIEWERS
    Small Business33%
    Midsize Enterprise21%
    Large Enterprise47%
    VISITORS READING REVIEWS
    Small Business25%
    Midsize Enterprise16%
    Large Enterprise59%
    REVIEWERS
    Small Business39%
    Midsize Enterprise15%
    Large Enterprise45%
    VISITORS READING REVIEWS
    Small Business21%
    Midsize Enterprise29%
    Large Enterprise50%
    REVIEWERS
    Small Business26%
    Midsize Enterprise8%
    Large Enterprise66%
    VISITORS READING REVIEWS
    Small Business18%
    Midsize Enterprise12%
    Large Enterprise69%
    Buyer's Guide
    IBM Security QRadar vs. Splunk Cloud Platform
    March 2023
    Find out what your peers are saying about IBM Security QRadar vs. Splunk Cloud Platform and other solutions. Updated: March 2023.
    769,334 professionals have used our research since 2012.

    IBM Security QRadar is ranked 4th in Security Information and Event Management (SIEM) with 198 reviews while Splunk Cloud Platform is ranked 3rd in Data Visualization with 34 reviews. IBM Security QRadar is rated 8.0, while Splunk Cloud Platform is rated 8.0. The top reviewer of IBM Security QRadar writes "A highly stable and scalable solution that provides good technical support". On the other hand, the top reviewer of Splunk Cloud Platform writes "Does not require backend maintenance, is easily integrated and utilized". IBM Security QRadar is most compared with Splunk Enterprise Security, Wazuh, LogRhythm SIEM, Elastic Security and Sentinel, whereas Splunk Cloud Platform is most compared with Wazuh, Splunk Enterprise Security, AppInsights, Check Point Security Management and Fortinet FortiAnalyzer. See our IBM Security QRadar vs. Splunk Cloud Platform report.

    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.