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IBM Security QRadar vs Palo Alto Networks Cortex XSOAR comparison

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Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Jan 25, 2026

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

Torq
Sponsored
Ranking in Security Orchestration Automation and Response (SOAR)
8th
Average Rating
8.8
Reviews Sentiment
5.6
Number of Reviews
4
Ranking in other categories
AI-SOC (13th), AI-Powered Security Automation (2nd)
IBM Security QRadar
Ranking in Security Orchestration Automation and Response (SOAR)
4th
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), Managed Detection and Response (MDR) (7th), Extended Detection and Response (XDR) (11th)
Palo Alto Networks Cortex X...
Ranking in Security Orchestration Automation and Response (SOAR)
3rd
Average Rating
8.4
Reviews Sentiment
6.7
Number of Reviews
50
Ranking in other categories
SOC as a Service (2nd)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of January 2026, in the Security Orchestration Automation and Response (SOAR) category, the mindshare of Torq is 4.9%, up from 4.5% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of IBM Security QRadar is 6.3%, down from 8.7% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Palo Alto Networks Cortex XSOAR is 8.9%, down from 11.5% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Security Orchestration Automation and Response (SOAR) Market Share Distribution
ProductMarket Share (%)
Palo Alto Networks Cortex XSOAR8.9%
IBM Security QRadar6.3%
Torq4.9%
Other79.9%
Security Orchestration Automation and Response (SOAR)
 

Featured Reviews

Nimrod Vardi - PeerSpot reviewer
Global IT Director at OpenWeb
Automation workflows have transformed our IT, enabling secure just-in-time access control
We work with them quite often, so we have a direct line regarding areas in Torq that have room for improvement. If we have a feature request, we can request it. I do not have anything in mind at the moment. We were a design partner for a short while, so we feel that they listen and that users of the system have an impact on the way the system is designed for the better. They have a new community, which is something that I personally suggested years ago. There are many people like me in different places and they might have already built the workflow that I need. Having the option to share workflows or to jump on a thread and say I have this need, did anyone ever build a workflow for it, is amazing. Someone would jump in and say yes, sure, here, take this workflow. I think this is an amazing thing and I really hope that the community will come alive because I think this is really powerful. This is something that I already suggested and it did happen eventually, and I am quite happy with it. I do not have any specific feature in mind that I have a need for at the moment.
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.
CC
Enterprise Security Architect V at FirstEnergy
Customization supports seamless workflow while data influx challenges response time
What I appreciate most about Palo Alto Networks Cortex XSOAR is that it is very open, even more so than Anomali. I can create various custom automations and custom fields. There is significant customization ability in this platform. If I already have an established process, I do not have to change my process to fit into the tool. I can modify the tool to fit into my process, which makes things considerably easier. All of our alerts from different tools come into this central place as we have multiple SIEMs. We have items coming from Anomali and other platforms that are not SIEM tools. This serves as our central location where our SOC analysts can work and determine if incident response is needed. The platform provides data enrichment capabilities, offering information upfront so analysts do not have to search for it. They can access details such as username, phone number, email address, and workplace information. For malware files, they can retrieve details from VirusTotal, including file names and environment presence. We have built substantial automation around these features, which also helps us track case metrics, investigation time, and threat mitigation duration.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"Once I started to use the system and I saw the potential, it changed all of our work in IT."
"Using that one piece of AI, we auto-closed 511 cases in quarter four alone."
"As an analyst, it has demonstrated potential to reduce workforce requirements and time needed for related activities."
"What I appreciate most about Torq is that it is an essential part of our system."
"The solution is flexible and easy to use."
"IBM QRadar Advisor with Watson is a stable solution."
"IBM QRadar is easy to scale, it doesn't affect the environment. In our office, we have around 40 - 50 users, but our clients have more users on their networks. Our organization has staff in the software department that manages IBM QRadar for us."
"I like that it's easy to use and the performance is good."
"The correlation and the parsing are important features, since it is very important for a SIEM to have a good scalability and performance."
"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."
"It comes with many rules disabled. You can tune them and modify them according to your enterprise needs and avoid false positives."
"Providing real-time visibility for threat detection and prioritization - QRadar SIEM provides contextual and actionable surveillance across the entire IT infrastructure."
"I chose Cortex XSOAR because the client also has Palo Alto firewalls. I can incorporate the data from the Palo Alto firewalls into Cortex and send it into the same data lake to manipulate that data. It lets me manage and monitor the data in one place."
"From the security team's standpoint, the solution has improved our organization's overall cybersecurity."
"Cortex XSOAR's playbook for incident management and automation is highly valuable."
"It’s easy to install."
"It is a scalable solution."
"The solution is very reliable."
"The product is quite easy to use."
"The drag-and-drop interface enables analysts with no programming knowledge to create playbooks easily."
 

Cons

"The initial deployment of Torq was not easy."
"It was able to capture data but was unable to differentiate between the agent hostname we are using and the hostname that resides on the back end of the Internet."
"Regarding stability, I have noticed some lagging, crashing, and downtime, which is one of my largest gripes."
"The tech support is not that good."
"IBM is going through some problems with its resources currently making its support response time slow."
"They need to improve their threat intelligence feed and they need to improve their user behavior analytics modules."
"There should be more opportunity for community kind of distribution where, for example, if there was a zero-day threat targeting companies."
"QRadar needs to be more specialized, along the lines of what other SIEM solutions are."
"I think QRadar is very complex. It's a distributed system and IBM QRadar has an all-in-one solution which is not like that distributed solution but it's a good product. IBM needs to consider the user interface because if we compare it with AlienVault, the AlienVault user interface is fantastic but the IBM QRadar user interface is very complex. They should focus on how to make it easier for the client."
"The threat intelligence functionality can be better. In addition, it can have more monitoring capabilities."
"We sometimes get an error about the hard drive. Approximately once in two months, we can't find the logs, and they go missing, which is a terrible issue. We are getting support for this issue from our support company."
"The complexity of Cortex XSOAR has a trade-off with its versatility. The deployment requires integration and the development of integration modules."
"I think they should increase their collaboration base."
"The solution’s price and technical support could be improved."
"The user interface could be a bit better."
"There is room for improvement in support. The response time could be faster."
"The dashboard performance could be improved."
"It was expensive, making it essential for the customer to evaluate whether ROI is coming from the business model, as they are also acting as a SOC provider."
"The dashboard could be better."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

Information not available
"The maintenance costs are high."
"I would like for them to lower the price."
"The license is not subscription-based."
"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."
"They can give us some scalability and flexibility on pricing. If its pricing can be reduced, it would help a lot of customers in bringing in a new SIEM environment and grow business in the market. If I start a license today and take around 10,000 EPS, and after a month, there is an increase in the number of clients on my platform, I can increase the number of licenses. I can add 5,000 EPS on a yearly basis."
"It would be great if this product were cheaper."
"IBM's Qradar is not for small companie. Unfortunately, it would be 'overkill' to place it plainly. The pricing would be too much."
"When compared with other SIM solutions, QRadar is considerably less expensive."
"The price of Palo Alto Networks Cortex XSOAR is comparable to other solutions in the market."
"The solution is expensive."
"The price of Palo Alto Networks Cortex XSOAR could be reduced. We are always looking for a discount. There is an annual license needed to use this solution."
"The pricing is fair. The pricing reflects the value and feature set it offers."
"When I first looked at Demisto, it had a price tag of $250,000 but when we finally purchased it, it was $345,000."
"On a scale of one to ten, where one is a low price, and ten is a high price, I rate the pricing a nine."
"It's cheaper compared to its competitors."
"The solution's cost is high."
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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
Financial Services Firm
15%
Computer Software Company
8%
Manufacturing Company
8%
Healthcare Company
7%
No data available
Financial Services Firm
13%
Computer Software Company
11%
Manufacturing Company
8%
Government
7%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
No data available
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business91
Midsize Enterprise39
Large Enterprise105
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business19
Midsize Enterprise9
Large Enterprise25
 

Questions from the Community

What needs improvement with Torq?
From our research and testing with the tool, we determined there need to be modifications and changes to train the LL...
What is your primary use case for Torq?
I used Torq for conducting one of the proof of evaluations for a vendor we are connected with. I am currently working...
What advice do you have for others considering Torq?
One of our members uses AWS, and we receive their feed. This involves triaging AWS-related logs. While I do not have ...
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, friendli...
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 a...
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.
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Palo Alto Networks Cortex XSOAR?
Comparing pricing to Micro Focus, they were offering bundles, making it free with their SIEM. For customers, it is ze...
What needs improvement with Palo Alto Networks Cortex XSOAR?
To improve the solution, it needs to have complete features that are low-code, no-code, and should be plug-and-play. ...
 

Also Known As

No data available
IBM QRadar, QRadar SIEM, QRadar UBA, QRadar on Cloud, IBM QRadar Advisor with Watson
Demisto Enterprise, Cortex XSOAR, Demisto
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Information Not Available
Clients across multiple industries, such as energy, financial, retail, healthcare, government, communications, and education use QRadar.
Cellcom Israel, Blue Cross and Blue Shield of Kansas City, esri, Cylance, Flatiron Health, Veeva, ADT Cybersecurity
Find out what your peers are saying about IBM Security QRadar vs. Palo Alto Networks Cortex XSOAR and other solutions. Updated: December 2025.
881,082 professionals have used our research since 2012.