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Elastic Beats vs IBM Security QRadar comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Oct 19, 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
6.6
Number of Reviews
217
Ranking in other categories
Log Management (6th), Security Information and Event Management (SIEM) (2nd), User Entity Behavior Analytics (UEBA) (2nd), Endpoint Detection and Response (EDR) (12th), Security Orchestration Automation and Response (SOAR) (5th), Managed Detection and Response (MDR) (7th), Extended Detection and Response (XDR) (10th)
 

Featured Reviews

it_user1269834 - PeerSpot reviewer
I.T. Manager at a healthcare company with 51-200 employees
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.
HarshBhardiya - PeerSpot reviewer
SOC Engineer at a outsourcing company with 10,001+ employees
Have managed daily asset and alert monitoring effectively but have encountered limitations with manual processes and interface usability
It's still very manual and doesn't work on its own. It's still in an early stage and not on par where we can consider it a really successful detection system. The accuracy is not there. The UI could be better when compared to Sentinels where we can use flags and tagging. It could be much more user-friendly. IBM Security QRadar has all features and is fully competitive with other SIEM tools, but when it comes to user-friendliness, a new user takes time to get used to it. More intuitive, user-friendly interfaces and more helpful documentation would be beneficial. The query searching and data fetching could be faster. In large to very large organizations with around 5,000 or 6,000 assets or beyond, even with proper configurations and RAM and hardware backing up, the query is fairly slow.

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."
"The security aspects in general have been very useful to use."
"There's a whole spectrum of features on the solution that users can take advantage of, and it's a very robust product."
"The tool is already automated in many ways, but there are some additional functions which should be automated, like sending an email, mobile notification, and integration of XFS."
"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."
"The security has improved my organization."
"I like the graphical interface, it's so good and easy."
"You should totally go for it."
"Curator is the leader of teams in the market; it's a product with plenty of features and capabilities, and it's a very powerful solution."
"This product collects all of the system logs and analyzes them to see if there are any security threats, or there have been any attacks."
"On the back-end, Watson helps me figure out an exact problem, sometimes giving me the result."
 

Cons

"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."
"The dashboard is not user-friendly. The solution, in general, isn't great from a user's perspective."
"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."
"The features that could be improved include the licensing model and the dashboards and all those presentations. Overall, the user experience part can be improved."
"We experienced some memory usage issues with a user behavior app."
"The weak signal detection with QRadar needs improvement. You can detect what you know, but what is unknown to the rule engine can't be detected."
"The advanced planning management (APM) features should be included."
"I think that the search speed of this solution could be improved."
"I would like to see more integration in place after the security lock."
"IBM QRadar User Behavior Analytics is good, but I think the functionality should be much more integrated. You should have easy access to the artifacts if you are doing a particular investigation. It's good, but other team solutions like LogRhythm are actually merging the functionality. So, I think that is something IBM can work on."
"I would like to see more integration in place after the security lock."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"It wasn't cheap, but it was cost-effective compared to many of the other solutions."
"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."
"In terms of additional costs, it depends on the subscription that you choose. There are plenty of options to choose from."
"Pricing (based on EPS) will be more accurate."
"QRadar is quite expensive. It wouldn't be worth it for a small business..."
"It is very expensive."
"Go through a vulnerability assessment review for price breaks. A virtualized solution will also cut down on cost."
"It could be cheaper, but the value itself is far more important for us than the price. Typically, our clients have yearly subscriptions."
"I would like for them to lower the price."
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Comparison Review

VS
Manager, Enterprise Risk Consulting at a tech company with 1,001-5,000 employees
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
Financial Services Firm
11%
Computer Software Company
10%
Manufacturing Company
7%
Construction Company
7%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
No data available
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business91
Midsize Enterprise39
Large Enterprise105
 

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?
Pricing and the license of EPS were managed by the governance team. I was not responsible for managing those. I was supposed to put up the requirement of the license needed to integrate that amount...
 

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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