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SolarWinds Security Event Manager vs i-SIEM [EOL] comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Nov 2, 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

i-SIEM [EOL]
Average Rating
9.0
Number of Reviews
1
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
SolarWinds Security Event M...
Average Rating
7.8
Reviews Sentiment
5.7
Number of Reviews
27
Ranking in other categories
Security Information and Event Management (SIEM) (35th)
 

Featured Reviews

Dannie Combs - PeerSpot reviewer
Senior Vice President and Chief Information Security Officer at Donnelley Financial Solutions
The alert fatigue and false positive rates have just plummeted, which is really exciting.
empow has a few areas of improvement as with any other technology, such as continuing to drive innovation in the dashboard. While we've been extremely impressed with the dashboard's ease of use, flexibility, ability to drill down deeply, and focus very intently on an area of interest, there will always be opportunities to be more innovative and open it up to a wider audience than just the operations group, for example. With reporting, there is always a desire to have custom reporting for every client of empow. Relative to keeping up with the sheer pace of cloud-native technologies, it should provide more options for clients to deploy their technologies in unique ways. This is an area that I recommend that they maintain focus.
Yashokanth Partkunan - PeerSpot reviewer
Managed Services Engineer at Loop1 Systems
Has supported client needs efficiently but requires deeper analysis features and faster support
The log analyzing capability of SolarWinds Security Event Manager should go into more depth than the current environment. More modification and enhancements are required on the dashboard side in order to make it closer to optimal performance. From observation and feedback from users, they need more functionality related to monitoring, and in-depth analyzing needs to be improved.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"From a monitoring and incident response perspective, empow is the most valuable asset we have in our toolkit."
"As a result of the automation, we are able to manage SIEM with a small security team. I'm in a unique position where we have been growing the security organization quite rapidly over the last three and a half years. But, as a direct result of the empow transition and legacy collection of tools towards the empow platform, we've been able to keep that head count flat. We've been able to redirect a lot of the security team's time away from the wash, rinse, repeat activities of responding to alarms where we have a high degree of confidence that they will be false positives, adjusting the rules accordingly. This can be a bit frustrating for the analyst when they have to spend hours a day dealing with these types of probable false positives. So, it has helped not only us keep our headcount flat relative to the resources necessary to provide the assurances that our executives expect of us for monitoring, but allows our analyst team to spend the majority of their time doing what they love. They are spending their time meaningfully with a higher degree of confidence and enjoying getting into the incident response type activity."
"SolarWinds is easy to configure, and it provides timely alerts."
"The graphical user interface is very user-friendly. SolarWinds is a hybrid solution so you can use it across many platforms."
"The solution helps you monitor database instances, application instances, other customer application things, Linux servers, IBM servers, and Oracle servers."
"The product's most effective part in improving security stems from the fact that the solution is deployed for event management, log viewing, and information management."
"It has in-depth monitoring capabilities and an easy way for setting up dashboards."
"We did previously use a different solution, but SolarWinds is much better; it's easy to interact with SolarWinds, easy to operate, easy to configure, and generally easier compared to what we were working with before."
"It will identify things in your network that you just didn't know were going on."
"The most valuable feature of SolarWinds Security Event Manager is the analysis and the knowledge about the incidence that we trace."
 

Cons

"Relative to keeping up with the sheer pace of cloud-native technologies, it should provide more options for clients to deploy their technologies in unique ways. This is an area that I recommend that they maintain focus."
"Relative to keeping up with the sheer pace of cloud-native technologies, it should provide more options for clients to deploy their technologies in unique ways."
"I imagine we will have to develop our own reports soon, this seems to be more cumbersome."
"I don't think SolarWinds is scalable enough. It is somewhat limited when I need to deploy it across multiple environments in a distributed architecture."
"The solution's technical support is okay, but we don't have an SLA, and sometimes the response times are very slow."
"I would like to be able to dig deeper into the visibility of events or incidents to determine whether they are malicious, such as by doing behavior analysis."
"The flash-based interface can be improved because sometimes, the speed of monitoring is reduced."
"The main area that would mean a big improvement for me would be for the product to include multiple dashboards."
"It takes a long time to perform a root cause analysis."
"I don't think SolarWinds is scalable enough. It is somewhat limited when I need to deploy it across multiple environments in a distributed architecture."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"With a higher degree of fidelity in the alarms, we were able to avoid adding additional resources to our teams. We take into account the cost of security resources in the market and the significantly higher fidelity from the alarms that are being generated. This drove down our costs with our MSSP. It drove down my cost for human capital internally. It drove down our need to have multiple resources supporting the underlying infrastructure and health and maintenance of empow as a platform from several resources down to one. Therefore, human capital costs were significantly reduced. Our operating expenses were significantly reduced. Our capital costs were significantly reduced while tripling our capacity and our run rate reduced. It was almost a "too good to be true" situation. Fortunately, for us, it worked out very nicely."
"I don't have to put up with any longer with these hypercomplex licensing agreements. Every time I want to add some additional reporting as a compliance centric or regulatory specific, e.g., GDPR, PCI, or Sarbanes-Oxley, many providers would have an additional license for this, which felt a bit ridiculous to me. With the simplified licensing architecture, there were no hidden "gotchas" down the road with empow. Something I have experienced with other providers that I've worked with in the past."
"Licenses can only be purchased in blocks of fifty at a time."
"We do a yearly license renewal. For a year, the solution costs roughly $500,000 USD. There are no costs beyond this yearly fee."
"Licensing is on devices, so if you have many, then this may be high."
"The tool is available at a good price for customers compared to other solutions in the market. I rate the product's price as an eight out of ten."
"The price of SolarWinds Security Event Manager is reasonable."
"It is in the appropriate mid-range. It is not as expensive as some of the other solutions. It is also not cheap."
"The pricing model would benefit from having package deals with other SolarWinds products."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Performing Arts
10%
Government
7%
Media Company
7%
Comms Service Provider
7%
Financial Services Firm
12%
Manufacturing Company
11%
University
9%
Construction Company
7%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
No data available
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business19
Midsize Enterprise3
Large Enterprise7
 

Questions from the Community

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Earn 20 points
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for SolarWinds Security Event Manager ?
The tool is available at a good price for customers compared to other solutions in the market. I rate the product's price as an eight out of ten.
What needs improvement with SolarWinds Security Event Manager ?
The log analyzing capability of SolarWinds Security Event Manager should go into more depth than the current environment. More modification and enhancements are required on the dashboard side in or...
What is your primary use case for SolarWinds Security Event Manager ?
I work with all SolarWinds products mostly, including Network Configuration Manager and NPM. I am a reseller. I usually recommend SolarWinds products for Loop1. It's for the bigger ones; we are the...
 

Also Known As

No data available
SolarWinds LEM, Solarwinds SIEM, TriGeo, Log and Event Manager
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

University of Oklahoma, Donnelley
NetSuite, EasyStreet, Legacy Texas Bank, and Energy Federal Credit Union, to name a few.
Find out what your peers are saying about Splunk, Wazuh, IBM and others in Security Information and Event Management (SIEM). Updated: March 2026.
885,264 professionals have used our research since 2012.