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Elastic Beats vs IBM Security QRadar comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Jul 13, 2025

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

Elastic Beats
Average Rating
8.0
Number of Reviews
2
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
IBM Security QRadar
Average Rating
8.0
Reviews Sentiment
6.7
Number of Reviews
211
Ranking in other categories
Log Management (7th), Security Information and Event Management (SIEM) (4th), User Entity Behavior Analytics (UEBA) (1st), Endpoint Detection and Response (EDR) (18th), Security Orchestration Automation and Response (SOAR) (4th), Managed Detection and Response (MDR) (8th), Extended Detection and Response (XDR) (11th)
 

Featured Reviews

reviewer1269834 - PeerSpot reviewer
A great addition to our security monitoring system
We haven't to this point had to scale very large, we want to continue to evolve, but it's a slow process for us. From what I've used so far, and my reading on it, I don't think we're going to have any problems scaling to really whatever size we need.
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.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"There's a whole spectrum of features on the solution that users can take advantage of. It's a very robust product."
"The security aspects in general have been very useful to use."
"It's quite scalable. We have upgraded some solutions from 1000 APS up to 3500 APS to 5000 APS. It's a good solution, they have no scalability issues."
"The scalability is very good. It's not a problem."
"The pre-canned rules and reports in this product are a huge plus."
"What's most valuable in IBM QRadar User Behavior Analytics is its higher availability than other tools."
"The detection rate is good and the false positive rate is low."
"On the back-end, Watson helps me figure out an exact problem, sometimes giving me the result."
"It's hard for me to pinpoint any one feature that's most valuable because it is all about consuming logs and analyzing them. We started using QRadar UBA because we needed something that could analyze Linux authentication information. Other products take care of the Windows platform."
"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."
 

Cons

"The dashboard is not user-friendly. The solution, in general, isn't great from a user's perspective."
"At some level, the documentation, the information as far as the components, it's sometimes a little difficult to find the information necessary to implement aspects."
"Sometimes it takes time to load queries, but other than that, it performs excellently."
"I don't look at only the features and benefits; I also look at the price. It is a bit expensive when compared with other solutions. It is expensive for specific deployment topologies, and the decision-makers go for alternatives like ArcSight. It should also have more AI features or capabilities for better threat intelligence. The more it uses machine learning, the better would be the dashboard, analytics, and other things."
"IBM QRadar Advisor with Watson could be more user-friendly. You need some skills and understanding of what you're looking at, especially if you're going to draw down specific information."
"The dashboard and reports are not user-friendly or efficient so are of little help with threat hunting activity."
"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."
"If you have too many events that occur, then the storage capacity becomes a problem. You need to have more storage."
"The implementation of the solution's technology needs to be simplified."
"In a future release, the solution could provide malware analysis."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"It wasn't cheap, but it was cost-effective compared to many of the other solutions."
"It's too expensive."
"The pricing is higher but cheaper than others and there are no additional costs."
"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."
"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."
"There are different types of subscriptions available. We were on an annual subscription, but our customers typically choose the two years subscription option."
"There is a license to use this solution, which is paid annually. However, there are subscription options available."
"I feel that the price is reasonable but compared to other products that are on the market, such as an offering by Microsoft, it is more expensive."
"QRadar is quite expensive. It wouldn't be worth it for a small business..."
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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
No data available
Computer Software Company
15%
Financial Services Firm
11%
Manufacturing Company
7%
Government
7%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
No data available
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business89
Midsize Enterprise36
Large Enterprise102
 

Questions from the Community

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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, friendlier GUI and are not licensed based on capacity (amount of logs and information in...
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 asking to miss details that are critical, and ending up a statistic. Also, rememb...
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.
 

Also Known As

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

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Sprint
Clients across multiple industries, such as energy, financial, retail, healthcare, government, communications, and education use QRadar.
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