IBM X-Force Exchange vs Recorded Future comparison

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IBM X-Force Exchange

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Executive SummaryUpdated on Jan 5, 2025

Recorded Future and IBM X-Force Exchange are competing cybersecurity intelligence platforms. Recorded Future seems to have the upper hand in user satisfaction due to its ease of use and analytic capabilities, while IBM X-Force Exchange is preferred for its comprehensive data sources and integration capabilities.

Features: Recorded Future provides real-time threat intelligence, predictive analytics, and supports enhanced decision-making in cyber threat management. IBM X-Force Exchange offers a vast database with historical data, strong integration options, and extensive data analysis capabilities.

Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: Recorded Future is known for straightforward deployment and responsive customer support, allowing fast adoption and troubleshooting. IBM X-Force Exchange has a more complex deployment process but benefits from extensive documentation and support resources.

Pricing and ROI: Recorded Future usually presents lower upfront costs with clear ROI due to efficient threat management. IBM X-Force Exchange, while potentially more expensive, provides strong long-term value for organizations needing extensive data analysis.

To learn more, read our detailed IBM X-Force Exchange vs. Recorded Future Report (Updated: March 2025).

IBM X-Force Exchange vs. Recorded Future

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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

IBM X-Force Exchange

Ranking in Threat Intelligence Platforms

11th

Average Rating

8.2

Reviews Sentiment

8.6

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

No ranking in other categories

Recorded Future

Ranking in Threat Intelligence Platforms

1st

Average Rating

8.4

Reviews Sentiment

6.7

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

Digital Risk Protection (1st)

Mindshare comparison

As of April 2025, in the Threat Intelligence Platforms category, the mindshare of IBM X-Force Exchange is 1.7%, down from 2.5% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Recorded Future is 18.0%, down from 18.3% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.

Threat Intelligence Platforms

Featured Reviews

JohnTamakloe

Solutions Architect at a tech services company with 51-200 employees

A threat intelligence platform aiming to enhance its intelligence

It falls under the category of AI-embedded threat intelligence, which makes detection more efficient by reducing the rate of false positives and improving the overall detection rate. When the threat intelligence alone doesn’t provide enough information, we use other methods to verify the threat. For example, IBM has its threat intelligence team and tools. If the threat intelligence doesn’t yield much information, the tool has a framework that can identify suspicious activity. We then use our judgment and experience to implement compensating controls, whether for a potentially malicious patch, IP address, or any other threat. Customers benefit from it, even if they’re not directly integrating it. Through our service, they receive the benefits of the integration. Overall, I rate the solution a nine out of ten.

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Dr. Merrick Watchorn

Chief Executive Officer at The Watchorn Innovation Group, Inc. (TWIGI)

Traceless online searches, stable, and scalable

There is a semantic oncology dynamic relationship between how the MIGR Tech framework needs more data infusion enrichment capabilities. To be clear, what the vendor is doing is of a high standard, and my only critique is that they need to make new enhancements. I am aware that the vendor is making a concerted effort to add additional information to their repository, and it is something they actively do. The vendor has publicly stated that they will work on this, and I always pay attention to make sure they adhere to that. This does not change over time. The export feature of the recording needs to stop being so restricted. When they record in order to save themselves by operations, I would expect that as a super user, if I asked to download the dataset I'm looking for, I would not be limited in my data downloads. One of the cool things is, let's say we do our entire research and we want to save all of the materials that were returned, and that special custom search that we made, we can export that into a CSV file. The problem is it gets restricted. So sometimes when I say it's restricted, we don't get all the data that we saw online. So then we have to go and manually search for the specific thing we're looking for. I would like to have the URI and whatever value set that I search off, and for the NLP package to not be stripped out. It's like saying I want to do a Pcap analysis. Don't strip out the Pcap when I asked to see Pcap. That's what they're doing. They do this for many different reasons. One of them is, imagine if everyone downloaded datasets that are very large and it brings the whole system down.

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Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"It's quite integratable so you can actually integrate and get IP malware and URL information. It also gives you some form of intelligence into what you're trying to investigate or what you're trying to understand."

"This product has helped to increase staff productivity."

"The most valuable feature is you have the expertise of human experience directly involved. There is a team of experts."

"The most valuable feature is Recorded Future's protection of exposed customer data on the hardware side."

"The most valuable features of Recorded Future are the useful alerts it provides. If we are monitoring a domain, the solution will provide us with an alert in a prompt manner. It is simple for clients to receive alerts. The advanced search is useful for more accurate filter results."

"Has the ability to conduct and build any query without limitations."

"The intel that they were providing us over the emails was very good. If it found any hashtag in our organization's name on the dark web, a rogue IP, or a marketplace, it would send us an email and notify us that this is being mentioned, and if we want, they can take some action."

"The solution is diverse and provides me with a lot of different mechanisms for evaluation."

"As a threat intelligence tool, it's very helpful."

"The tool can integrate with a lot of security control and proactive protection devices."

"Recorded Future allows me to maintain very accurate alerts."

More Recorded Future pros

Cons

"I would like to see better integration with other systems, solutions, and vendors."

"You have to look for the new information from X-Force. X-Force will provide it but you have to look for it. We need clearer visibility."

"We would like to have more AI capabilities to detect threats and improve its productivity from a cybersecurity standpoint."

"The customer support is frustrating and not efficient. They always request logs and screenshots that seem irrelevant."

"The solution would benefit from introducing automation."

"When you add one website to Recorded Future, it should automatically call all other websites and social media platforms."

"The tool should improve its third-party supply chain risks because there is a lack of visibility."

"The solution could improve in reducing the false positives. However, most of the other tools on the market have false positives. If they enhance their data algorithm, it could improve the accuracy of results and minimize false positives. Identifying patterns of false possibilities can aid in developing better reporting features that could potentially eliminate them in the future. This recording feature tool could benefit from adopting similar techniques utilized by other tools to enhance its functionality. By doing so, it could minimize the need for manual efforts in distinguishing true positives from false positives, ultimately reducing the workload."

"The product gives many false positives. If someone talks about the brand or organization name in the public domain over chats or blocks, it gets highlighted. It may not necessarily be a threat but still gets highlighted which increases the false positive count."

"We can get the data of different malware active throughout the globe, but it would be good if we can do sandboxing of a file. For example, on Any Run, we can perform sandboxing of malware along with their intel about a particular file or hash. It would be great if they have a feature like that."

"At present, my clients need to be trained by me or another organization on how to use Recorded Future and how to get the best out of it as an analyst, engineer, and administrator. It would be better if clients could directly learn these things without having to go through me or other organizations."

More Recorded Future cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

"One of the fastest ways to cut costs is reducing staff, and this product can reduce staff by 70 percent."

"Cost is clearly a consideration, but the important thing is what we do with the data and how we protect it."

"I would rate the solution’s pricing a seven out of ten."

"There appear to be up to five different levels, with the most expensive version costing around $95,000 to $105,000 a year for subscription services."

"The biggest disadvantage of Recorded Future is the cost here in Eastern Europe. The solution is correctly priced for big companies who have the money to invest in such solutions. Also, the solution is useless on its own, which means that you have to invest in other solutions with which Recorded Future can be integrated. At present, Recorded Future can cost 60,000 euros per year. I am able to offer my clients a 5% to 10% discount, but in this region, the cost is still prohibitive even with the discount. If Recorded Future were more flexible in terms of price, there would be better sales opportunities in Europe and Eastern Europe, in particular, because we have more small- and medium-sized companies here."

"The price of the solution is worth it. The overall performance of the solution outweighs the cost."

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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Financial Services Firm

19%

Computer Software Company

17%

Healthcare Company

Manufacturing Company

Computer Software Company

16%

Financial Services Firm

14%

Government

Manufacturing Company

Company Size

By reviewers

Large Enterprise

Midsize Enterprise

Small Business

No data available

Questions from the Community

What needs improvement with IBM X-Force?

It is very expensive.

What is your primary use case for IBM X-Force?

It's a threat intelligence platform, and we aim to enhance its intelligence by integrating additional security solutions.

What advice do you have for others considering IBM X-Force?

What do you like most about Recorded Future?

The most valuable feature of Recorded Future is how it detects everything regarding our domain.

What needs improvement with Recorded Future?

Recorded Future depends on or relies on just the deep and dark web analysis through their quantum computing and algorithms. Sometimes, the feed is not accurate or valuable. Other threat intelligenc...

What is your primary use case for Recorded Future?

I am currently working with Recorded Future's cloud solution. We provide Recorded Future to our customers as a reseller. We provide the customers with support on the API integration and the bidirec...

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Product Reports

Threat Intelligence Platforms

Download IBM X-Force Exchange product report

Download Recorded Future product report

Also Known As

X-Force Exchange, X-Force

No data available

Overview

IBM X-Force Exchange is a cloud-based threat intelligence sharing platform enabling users to rapidly research the latest security threats, aggregate actionable intelligence and collaborate with peers. IBM X-Force Exchange is supported by human- and machine-generated intelligence leveraging the scale of IBM X-Force.

IBM

Recorded Future is a powerful and effective cyber threat intelligence (CTI) platform that aims to empower administrators to protect their organizations from threats, both known and unknown. The machine learning engine that Recorded Future utilizes can process the same amount of data that 9,000 analysts working five days a week, eight hours a day for an entire year can process. It simplifies threat detection and remediation so that organizations can focus on other tasks.

Recorded Future Benefits

Some of the ways that organizations can benefit by choosing to deploy Recorded Future include:

Quick threat identification and resolution. The suite of threat detection and resolution features that Recorded Future provides enables users to find and react to threats faster than users who employ their competitors. Organizations can identify 22 times more threats 10 times faster than they would have been able to with any other solution. They can also resolve these threats 63% faster than they were able to before.

Access far-reaching deep insights. Recorded Future gives users the ability to expand their vision beyond that which is immediately visible to them. They can set Recorded Future to detect issues that originate outside of the immediate vicinity of their network. Organizations can utilize machine learning to analyze for links between themselves and the dark web. This provides users insights as to what their vulnerabilities are and gives them insights that they can use to remediate any issues that have arisen or will arise.

Customization. Organizations can integrate Recorded Future with a wide variety of other security tools. If the organization feels that Recorded Future is lacking the capability that they need, then it can expand its toolbox by combining it with other solutions. Additionally, users can easily create dashboards and modify them to best meet their objectives as their needs change.

Recorded Future Features

Some of the many features Recorded Future offers include:

Vulnerability scanning tools. Recorded Future is built with the ability to scan for, identify, and score potential vulnerabilities in real time. It searches a wide variety of sources for information on the risks that an organization faces. This information is analyzed and scored for severity in real time. These tools enable users to prioritize the most severe threats over those issues that will only be nuisances.

Threat authentication. Users can set security protocols that Recorded Future leverages to reduce false positives. It has tools that compare the detected threats against the organization’s protocols. This allows the system to notify administrators whether they are looking at an actual threat or simply a mistake that the system initially misidentified.

Attack surface intelligence. Organizations gain the ability to see the points of vulnerability that would normally be invisible to them and would only be visible to outside attackers. This tool fully exposes the environment that surrounds their network. Everything from historical data going as far back as 10 years to real-time information is gathered so that administrators can create the best possible security strategy for their organization.

Reviews from Real Users

Recorded future is a solution that stands out when compared to its top competitors. Two major advantages it offers are the threat research tools that it provides and the threat monitoring capabilities that it enables users to leverage.

A security operations lead at a comms service provider writes, “Recorded Future covers a lot of different use cases. For example, we are using it for threat intelligence research. We do use the tool to make active research on what is found around the threat. We look at patterns, for example, and see what can be elaborated on from that.”

They also write, “We can also use it for active monitoring in the customer interface. We can monitor the business side of a campaign. We can monitor for specific threats or market activity on the dashboard. We can develop queries to run in a continuous mode in order to get the best reviews.”

Sample Customers

Information Not Available

Fujitsu, Regions, SITA, St. Jude Medical, Accenture, T-Mobile, TIAA, Intel Security, Armor, Alert Logic, NTT, Splunk

IBM X-Force Exchange vs. Recorded Future