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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
219
Ranking in other categories
Log Management (7th), Security Information and Event Management (SIEM) (3rd), User Entity Behavior Analytics (UEBA) (1st), Endpoint Detection and Response (EDR) (17th), Security Orchestration Automation and Response (SOAR) (4th), Managed Detection and Response (MDR) (7th), Extended Detection and Response (XDR) (11th)
 

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."
"One very useful feature is the plug-in offering that allows you to integrate it with other solutions, such as integrating it with plug-ins like Scout, Carbon Black, and the rest."
"IBM Qradar's ability to simplify the number of events, not only on a technical level but by making that information easy to pan through the orchestration deduplication. It is very impressive given that we have hundreds of devices that send event logs through."
"Vulnerability data, network data and the like, are part of correlation and detection."
"In addition to using this solution for our security operations center, we are using it for our other customers."
"The feature that I have found most valuable is its artificial intelligence component, Watson. Its contribution is pretty good from a machine-learning artificial intelligence perspective. This compliments the orchestration automation component, as well."
"The tool's most valuable feature is real-time detection."
"Improves visibility and has a great new dashboard."
"QRadar UBA's most valuable feature is the risk rating of users depending on their behavior."
 

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."
"The user interface and configurability of IBM QRadar User Behavior Analytics can be improved. It has a lot of pre-configured settings and not many things can be changed. It also needs more integrations. Currently, User Behavior Analytics is integrated only with IBM QRadar. It could have deeper integrations. It can also have more complicated scoring models. Currently, it has a very simple linear scoring model for users."
"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."
"I would like to see a more user-friendly product."
"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."
"Search capability and indexing still lag behind competitors. We also need to see improved rule based access controls and rule/event tuning."
"There was some complexity in the initial setup due to bandwidth issues."
"Certain updates—especially when using Azure—don't apply directly. Our engineering team must invest additional effort to implement these updates. However, the tool's cloud-based version poses no issues. However, upgrading the product can sometimes be challenging for on-premises instances."
"Ideally we would like a mobile version so that any alert that comes in will notify us in a mobile app, or by using SMS integration."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"It wasn't cheap, but it was cost-effective compared to many of the other solutions."
"Only enterprise businesses can afford the tool."
"It's very expensive but it fits our budget."
"The cost of this product is expensive."
"There is a license required for this solution."
"On a scale from one to ten, where one is cheap and ten is expensive, I rate IBM Security QRadar's pricing a five out of ten."
"Pricing is good."
"The license is not subscription-based."
"think the pricing is quite flexible."
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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
Computer Software Company
13%
Financial Services Firm
11%
Manufacturing Company
7%
Government
6%
 

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?
My experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing is great compared to the other vendor.
 

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.
Find out what your peers are saying about Wazuh, Splunk, Datadog and others in Log Management. Updated: January 2026.
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