CrowdStrike Falcon vs IBM Security QRadar comparison

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Microsoft Logo
4,616 views|3,487 comparisons
97% willing to recommend
CrowdStrike Logo
37,408 views|27,203 comparisons
97% willing to recommend
IBM Logo
3,418 views|2,101 comparisons
91% willing to recommend
Comparison Buyer's Guide
Executive Summary
Updated on Jul 10, 2023

We performed a comparison between IBM Security QRadar and CrowdStrike Falcon based on our users’ reviews in five categories. After reading all of the collected data, you can find our conclusion below.

  • Features: IBM Security QRadar users say the solution provides extensive information and helpful leads for locating pertinent data. QRadar stands out with its comprehensive network visibility and strong SIEM capabilities. CrowdStrike Falcon is praised for its machine-learning capabilities, optimal resource utilization, and precise threat detection. IBM Security QRadar could improve its rule deployment and lower its false positive rate. Users would also like expanded storage capacity, streamlined user management, and a more mature architecture. CrowdStrike Falcon could benefit from adding a sandbox feature and more detailed firewall management options.

  • Service and Support: Some customers of IBM Security QRadar have had trouble connecting with knowledgeable support staff and experienced delayed responses. CrowdStrike Falcon's customer service is considered prompt and helpful.

  • Ease of Deployment: IBM Security QRadar's initial setup can be complex for users without expertise, and the difficulty may vary depending on the size of the data set. CrowdStrike Falcon's setup is considered to be simple and efficient, with deployment times ranging from a few days to a month. While there may be some challenges during installation, they are generally manageable.

  • Pricing: IBM Security QRadar can be costly because users need to buy new hardware to upgrade. Some users find CrowdStrike Falcon costly and think the price should be lowered to make it more competitive.

  • ROI: IBM Security QRadar delivers a high return on investment, improving security through its advanced user behavior analytics. CrowdStrike Falcon offers cost savings by decreasing the required number of engineers and eliminating the need for onsite servers.

Comparison Results: Our users prefer IBM Security QRadar over CrowdStrike Falcon. The advanced security features and overall strength of QRadar make it the favored option. Users like QRadar's extensive and actionable insights, user-friendly interface, and adaptability. QRadar offers a comprehensive overview of network activity and risk management.

To learn more, read our detailed CrowdStrike Falcon vs. IBM Security QRadar Report (Updated: May 2024).
771,170 professionals have used our research since 2012.
Featured Review
Quotes From Members
We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use.
Here are some excerpts of what they said:
Pros
"The most valuable features are spam filtering, attachment filtering, and antivirus protection.""The best feature is threat hunting. There are a lot of other features I like, such as the alert mechanism. The chain alert mechanism has a huge impact. It combines all the alerts into one incident and automatically correlates them with AI.""Setting up Microsoft 365 Defender is easy. It's a user-friendly solution that provides threat protection. It has good stability and scalability.""Its most significant advantage lies in its affordability.""The ability to integrate and observe a more cohesive narrative across the products is crucial.""The most valuable feature of all is the full integration with the rest of the software in the operating system and Office 365, as well as Microsoft SCCM. It is quite easy for us to work with the whole instance of Microsoft products. This integration improves the benefits of the whole suite of products.""The visibility into threats is also very impressive because Microsoft helps you predict things and provides analytics to help you really improve your security. And all of this technology works across the domain, so it is pretty helpful in terms of threat analytics.""The solution is well integrated with applications. It is easy to maintain and administer."

More Microsoft Defender XDR Pros →

"We are happy with CloudStrike's ease of use and touch notification.""The stability is very good.""The anomaly detection is the most valuable feature.""There are two things which customers really like about CrowdStrike. If they buy managed services from CrowdStrike, it offers them detection of security issues in one minute. If you buy their professional services, they offer insurance where you can claim up to $5 million if there's a breach. This is a huge upsell for customers.""Probably the most valuable thing to me is the real-time response piece. The fact that I can connect to an endpoint as long as it is on the Internet, no matter where it is globally. I can remove files from the endpoint, drop files on the endpoint, stop processes, reboot it, run custom scripts, and deploy software. Pretty much no other tool can do all that.""The detection is very reliable. Also, OverWatch is a great feature.""It helps us to identify the threats according to the behavior of any process that is running on any particular system. It helps immensely to identify any malicious behavior on any endpoints.""The CrowdStrike Falcon agent is very lightweight. Users never complain about their PCs getting stuck and things like that."

More CrowdStrike Falcon Pros →

"I have found visibility very helpful for analytics.""The stability is good.""I have found its network traffic log, network bit log, and QBI most valuable.""Provided that the report is prebuilt and I can find what I am looking for, the reporting is the most valuable feature in this solution.""It's built around Red Hat Linux, which is highly robust.""On the back-end, Watson helps me figure out an exact problem, sometimes giving me the result.""Log correlation is very useful for processing alerts. It serves to follow up alerts in real-time, building an entire workflow.""Customer service is very good and very helpful."

More IBM Security QRadar Pros →

Cons
"The dashboard should be easier to use. There is also improvement needed in the reporting when it comes to exporting or scheduling reports.""There is definitely scope for improvement in the automation area. Because the solution is a SaaS platform, we don't have the overall ability to automate stuff.... There is no direct way to go ahead because it's a SaaS platform.""Microsoft frequently changes the names of its products, sometimes even renaming entire portals or features.""The message trace feature for investigating mail flow issues should add more detailed information to the summary report... if they could extend the summary report a little bit, make it more descriptive, ordinary administrators could understand what happened and that the emails failed at this or that point. That way they would know the location to go to try to correct it and to prevent it from occurring again.""When discussing the secure score, which includes overviews and recommended actions, some of these recommended actions are not applicable to us, particularly those related to Microsoft Internet Explorer, which we do not use in any of our environments.""Support is hit or miss. Microsoft wants you to buy premium support contracts. Though they call themselves professional support, it's almost like throwing questions into a black hole. You get an answer, but it's never helpful.""For some scenarios, it provides good visibility into threats, and for some scenarios, it doesn't. For example, sometimes the URLs within the emails have destinations, and you do get a screenshot and all further details, but it's not always the case. It would be good if they did a better job of enabling that for all the emails that they identified as malicious. When you get an email threat, you can go into the email and see more details, but the URL destination feature doesn't always show you a screenshot of the URL in that email. It also doesn't always give you the characteristics relating to that URL. It would be quite good if the information is complete where it says that we identified this URL, and this is what it looks like. There should be some threat intel about it. It should give you more details.""The documentation on their website is somewhat outdated and doesn't show properly. I wanted to try a query in Microsoft Defender 365. When I opened the related documentation from the security blog on the Microsoft website, the figures were not showing. It was difficult to understand the article without having the figures. The figures were there in the article, but they were not getting loaded, which made the article obsolete."

More Microsoft Defender XDR Cons →

"I would like to see equal support across all versions. Aside from that, I would say most of the features are there.""If CrowdStrike can further expand its support for XDR compatibility, that would give it an edge over all the other competing new products.""Forensic controls have room for improvement.""They should provide us with good visibility for everything.""CrowdStrike needs to quit making up stuff about its features and functionality to bash its competition.""To simplify the budgeting process for our clients, CrowdStrike should consider offering bundled packages that include essential features.""They need to strengthen the forensic capabilities of this product, for e-discovery.""It would be nice if they did have some sort of Active Directory tie-in, whether that be Azure or on-prem. Sometimes, it is difficult for us to determine if we are missing any endpoints or servers in CrowdStrike. We honestly don't have a great inventory, but it would be nice if CrowdStrike had a way to say this is everything in your environment, Active Directory-wise, and this is what doesn't have sensors. They try to do that now with a function that they have built-in, but I have been unsuccessful in having it help us identify what needs a sensor. So, better visibility of what doesn't have a sensor in our environment would be helpful."

More CrowdStrike Falcon Cons →

"The user interface is a bit clunky, a bit hard to find what you need.""The tech support is not that good.""The IBM support can be better.""QVM is another instance where they need to revise the vulnerability scoring and the proper remediation details.""I'd like them to improve the offense. When QRadar detects something, it creates what it calls offenses. So, it has a rudimentary ticketing system inside of it. This is the same interface that was there when I started using it 12 years ago. It just has not been improved. They do allow integration with IBM Resilient, but IBM Resilient is grotesquely expensive. The most effective integration that IBM offers today is with IBM Resilient, which is an instant response platform. It is a very good platform, but it is very expensive. They really should do something with the offense handling because it is very difficult to scale, and it has limitations. The maximum number of offenses that it can carry is 16K. After 16K, you have to flush your offenses out. So, it is all or nothing. You lose all your offenses up until that point in time, and you don't have any history within the offense list of older events. If you're dealing with multiple customers, this becomes problematic. That's why you need to use another product to do the actual ticketing. If you wanted the ticket existence, you would normally interface with ServiceNow, SolarWinds, or some other product like that.""I would like to see the update process simplified.""The pricing of the solution is a bit high. If they could lower it, that would be ideal.""The solution should enhance its capabilities of UEBA and AI/ML tech modeling."

More IBM Security QRadar Cons →

Pricing and Cost Advice
  • "The solutions price is fair for what they offer."
  • "The price could be better. Normally, the costs depend on the country you're located in for the license. When we were in the initial stage, we went with the E5 license they call premium standard. It cost us around $5.20 per month for four users."
  • "The price of the solution is high compared to others and we have lost some customers because of it."
  • "Microsoft is not competitive with the pricing of the solution. The competitors are able to offer lower discounts. The price of the solution is higher."
  • "We have a lot of problems in Latin America regarding the price of Microsoft 365 Defender, because the relationship between dollars and the money of the different countries, it's is a lot. Many customers that have small businesses say that they would like the solution but it is too expensive. However, large companies do not find the cost an issue."
  • "The most valuable licensing option is expensive, so pricing could be improved. Licensing options for this solution also need to be consolidated, because they frequently change."
  • "Microsoft should provide lower-level licensing options. They should do it in such a way that even an individual could purchase a license, and it should be entirely flexible."
  • "They have moved from a licensing model to pay-per-use... The question is: What happens if, for any reason, there's not enough budget to accept this model? That could be a great problem."
  • More Microsoft Defender XDR Pricing and Cost Advice →

  • "The pricing will depend upon your volume of usage."
  • "I would like them to further reduce the price, because it is quite pricey at the moment."
  • "Purchasing the product through the AWS Marketplace is just a click away. Since we were using the on-premise version of the product, we continued on the cloud by purchasing it through the AWS Marketplace."
  • "I do not have experience with the cost or licensing of the product."
  • "The other administrator and I can log in to check the exact details of what happened, what was running, and what caused the detection. We know exactly what was happening on the end users PC and we can tell if it's something that we actually need or something that's malicious."
  • "We are at about $60,000 per year."
  • "This solution has a very competitive price."
  • "Our company pays approximately US$ 65,000 annually for 900 machines."
  • More CrowdStrike Falcon Pricing and Cost Advice →

  • "found other solutions, with more features at the same cost or less. You don’t have to leave the Gartner Magic Quadrant to beat their price."
  • "Most of the time, it is easier and cheaper to buy a new product or the QRadar box."
  • "IBM's Qradar is not for small companie. Unfortunately, it would be 'overkill' to place it plainly. The pricing would be too much."
  • "IBM's Qradar is not for small companie. Unfortunately, it would be 'overkill' to place it plainly. The pricing would be too much."
  • "Go through a vulnerability assessment review for price breaks. A virtualized solution will also cut down on cost."
  • "It is expensive. It is not a product that I can provide for SMBs. It is a program that I can only provide for really large enterprises."
  • "The maintenance costs are high."
  • "Pricing (based on EPS) will be more accurate."
  • More IBM Security QRadar Pricing and Cost Advice →

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    Comparison Review
    Vinod Shankar
    Questions from the Community
    Top Answer:The integration, visibility, vulnerability management, and device identification are valuable.
    Top Answer:There is the cost of the license, and there is the cost of implementation services. Only by enabling a license for your… more »
    Top Answer:The web filtering solution needs to be improved because currently, it is very simple. It is very important. Integrations… more »
    Top Answer:Cortex XDR by Palo Alto vs. CrowdStrike Falcon Both Cortex XDR and Crowd Strike Falcon offer cloud-based solutions that… more »
    Top Answer:Both of these products perform similarly and have many outstanding attributes CrowdStrike Falcon offers an amazing… more »
    Top Answer:The CrowdStrike solution delivers a lot of information about incidents. It has a very light sensor that will never push… more »
    Top Answer:It mostly depends on your use-cases and environment. Exabeam and Securonix have a stronger UEBA feature set, friendlier… more »
    Top Answer:For tools I’d recommend:  -SIEM- LogRhythm -SOAR- Palo Alto XSOAR Doing commercial w/o both (or at least an XDR) is… more »
    Top Answer:The event collector, flow collector, PCAP and SOAR are valuable.
    Comparisons
    Also Known As
    Microsoft 365 Defender, Microsoft Threat Protection, MS 365 Defender
    CrowdStrike Falcon, CrowdStrike Falcon XDR
    IBM QRadar, QRadar SIEM, QRadar UBA, QRadar on Cloud, QRadar, IBM QRadar User Behavior Analytics, IBM QRadar Advisor with Watson
    Learn More
    Overview

    Microsoft Defender XDR is a comprehensive security solution designed to protect against threats in the Microsoft 365 environment. 

    It offers robust security measures, comprehensive threat detection capabilities, and an efficient incident response system. With seamless integration with other Microsoft products and a user-friendly interface, it simplifies security management tasks. 

    Users have found it effective in detecting and preventing various types of attacks, such as phishing attempts, malware infections, and data breaches.

    Watch the Microsoft demo video here: Microsoft Defender XDR demo video.

    CrowdStrike Falcon offers advanced threat detection, real-time visibility, easy interface, and responsive customer support. It enhances workflow and efficiency, promotes collaboration, streamlines processes, and boosts productivity. With features like incident response options, customizable alerts, and proactive threat hunting, it helps protect organizations from malware and ransomware attacks.

    IBM Security QRadar is a security and analytics platform designed to defend against threats and scale security operations. This is done through integrated visibility, investigation, detection, and response. QRadar empowers security groups with actionable insights into high-priority threats by providing visibility into enterprise security data. Through centralized visibility, security teams and analysts can determine their security stance, which areas pose a potential threat, and which areas are critical. This will help streamline workflows by eliminating the need to pivot between tools.

    IBM Security QRadar is built to address a wide range of security issues and can be easily scaled with minimal customization effort required. As data is ingested, QRadar administers automated, real-time security intelligence to swiftly and precisely discover and prioritize threats. The platform will issue alerts with actionable, rich context into developing threats. Security teams and analysts can then rapidly respond to minimize the attackers' strike. The solution will provide a complete view of activity in both cloud-based and on-premise environments as a large amount of data is ingested throughout the enterprise. Additionally, QRadar’s anomaly detection intelligence enables security teams to identify any user behavior changes that could be indicators of potential threats. 

    IBM QRadar Log Manager

    To better help organizations protect themselves against potential security threats, attacks, and breaches, IBM QRadar Log Manager gathers, analyzes, preserves, and reports on security log events using QRadar Sense Analytics. All operating systems and applications, servers, devices, and applications are converted into searchable and actionable intelligent data. QRadar Log Manager then helps organizations meet compliance reporting and monitoring requirements, which can be further upgraded to QRadar SIEM for a more superior level of threat protection.

    Some of QRadar Log Manager’s key features include:

    • Data processing and capture on any security event
    • Disaster recovery options and high availability 
    • Scalability for large enterprises
    • SoftLayer cloud installation capability
    • Advanced threat protection

    Reviews from Real Users

    IBM Security QRadar is a solution of choice among users because it provides a complete solution for security teams by integrating network analysis, log management, user behavior analytics, threat intelligence, and AI-powered investigations into a single solution. Users particularly like having a single window into their network and its ability to be used for larger enterprises.

    Simon T., a cyber security services operations manager at an aerospace/defense firm, notes, "The most valuable thing about QRadar is that you have a single window into your network, SIEM, network flows, and risk management of your assets. If you use Splunk, for instance, then you still need a full packet capture solution, whereas the full packet capture solution is integrated within QRadar. Its application ecosystem makes it very powerful in terms of doing analysis."

    A management executive at a security firm says, "What we like about QRadar and the models that IBM has, is it can go from a small-to-medium enterprise to a larger organization, and it gives you the same value."

    Sample Customers
    Accenture, Deloitte, ExxonMobil, General Electric, IBM, Johnson & Johnson and many others.
    Information Not Available
    Clients across multiple industries, such as energy, financial, retail, healthcare, government, communications, and education use QRadar.
    Top Industries
    REVIEWERS
    Manufacturing Company18%
    Financial Services Firm13%
    Computer Software Company13%
    Government10%
    VISITORS READING REVIEWS
    Computer Software Company17%
    Financial Services Firm10%
    Government8%
    Manufacturing Company8%
    REVIEWERS
    Computer Software Company19%
    Financial Services Firm15%
    Manufacturing Company9%
    Comms Service Provider7%
    VISITORS READING REVIEWS
    Computer Software Company15%
    Financial Services Firm10%
    Manufacturing Company8%
    Government7%
    REVIEWERS
    Financial Services Firm23%
    Computer Software Company15%
    Comms Service Provider10%
    Security Firm6%
    VISITORS READING REVIEWS
    Educational Organization18%
    Computer Software Company15%
    Financial Services Firm10%
    Government6%
    Company Size
    REVIEWERS
    Small Business42%
    Midsize Enterprise22%
    Large Enterprise36%
    VISITORS READING REVIEWS
    Small Business26%
    Midsize Enterprise17%
    Large Enterprise57%
    REVIEWERS
    Small Business32%
    Midsize Enterprise22%
    Large Enterprise46%
    VISITORS READING REVIEWS
    Small Business25%
    Midsize Enterprise18%
    Large Enterprise56%
    REVIEWERS
    Small Business39%
    Midsize Enterprise15%
    Large Enterprise45%
    VISITORS READING REVIEWS
    Small Business21%
    Midsize Enterprise30%
    Large Enterprise50%
    Buyer's Guide
    CrowdStrike Falcon vs. IBM Security QRadar
    May 2024
    Find out what your peers are saying about CrowdStrike Falcon vs. IBM Security QRadar and other solutions. Updated: May 2024.
    771,170 professionals have used our research since 2012.

    CrowdStrike Falcon is ranked 3rd in Endpoint Detection and Response (EDR) with 107 reviews while IBM Security QRadar is ranked 20th in Endpoint Detection and Response (EDR) with 198 reviews. CrowdStrike Falcon is rated 8.8, while IBM Security QRadar is rated 8.0. The top reviewer of CrowdStrike Falcon writes "Easy to set up with good behavior-based analysis but needs a single-click recovery option". On the other hand, the top reviewer of IBM Security QRadar writes "A highly stable and scalable solution that provides good technical support". CrowdStrike Falcon is most compared with Darktrace, Microsoft Defender for Endpoint, Trend Micro Deep Security, Trend Vision One and SentinelOne Singularity Complete, whereas IBM Security QRadar is most compared with Splunk Enterprise Security, Microsoft Sentinel, Wazuh, LogRhythm SIEM and Elastic Security. See our CrowdStrike Falcon vs. IBM Security QRadar report.

    See our list of best Endpoint Detection and Response (EDR) vendors and best Extended Detection and Response (XDR) vendors.

    We monitor all Endpoint Detection and Response (EDR) reviews to prevent fraudulent reviews and keep review quality high. We do not post reviews by company employees or direct competitors. We validate each review for authenticity via cross-reference with LinkedIn, and personal follow-up with the reviewer when necessary.