IBM Security QRadar vs Splunk Cloud Platform comparison

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31,886 views|17,713 comparisons
92% willing to recommend
IBM Logo
21,075 views|12,899 comparisons
91% willing to recommend
Splunk Logo
161 views|74 comparisons
94% willing to recommend
Comparison Buyer's Guide
Executive Summary

We performed a comparison between IBM Security QRadar and Splunk Cloud Platform based on real PeerSpot user reviews.

Find out in this report how the two Security Information and Event Management (SIEM) solutions compare in terms of features, pricing, service and support, easy of deployment, and ROI.
To learn more, read our detailed IBM Security QRadar vs. Splunk Cloud Platform Report (Updated: March 2023).
769,334 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
"There are some very powerful features to Sentinel, such as the integration of various connectors. We have a lot of departments that use both IaaS and SaaS services, including M365 as well as Azure services. The ability to leverage connectors into these environments allows for large-scale data injection.""One of the most valuable features of Microsoft Sentinel is that it's cloud-based.""Mainly, this is a cloud-native product. So, there are zero concerns about managing the whole infrastructure on-premises.""The part that was very unexpected was Sentinel's ability to integrate with Azure Lighthouse, which, as a managed services solution provider, gives us the ability to also manage our customers' Sentinel environments or Sentinel workspaces. It is a big plus for us. With its integration with Lighthouse, we get the ability to monitor multiple workspaces from one portal. A lot of the Microsoft Sentinel workbooks already integrate with that capability, and we save countless amounts of money by simply being able to almost immediately realize multitenant capabilities. That alone is a big plus for us.""It's pretty powerful and its performance is pretty good.""You can fine-tune the SOAR and you'll be charged only when your playbooks are triggered. That is the beauty of the solution because the SOAR is the costliest component in the market today... but with Sentinel it is upside-down: the SOAR is the lowest-hanging fruit. It's the least costly and it delivers more value to the customer.""The in-built SOAR of Sentinel is valuable. Kusto Query Language is also valuable for the ease of writing queries and ease of getting insights from the logs. Schedule-based queries within Sentinel are also valuable. I found these three features most useful for my projects.""The native integration of the Microsoft security solution has been essential because it helps reduce some false positives, especially with some of the impossible travel rules that may be configured in Microsoft 365. For some organizations, that might be benign because they're using VPNs, etc."

More Microsoft Sentinel Pros →

"Stability-wise, I rate the solution a ten out of ten.""It is suitable for large companies with critical infrastructure. For our clients, robustness, availability at a high level, and the level of references and experiences connected to the solution are important.""It is a pretty solid product for the type that it is representing. It is a CM solution as compared to Splunk or ArcSight from HP. It is also user friendly. It comes with some internal AI as well, in which it automatically maps multiple lots from unrelated devices and makes a smart decision to link them back and create an offense based on that. It is a smart tool.""The timeline and machine learning features are great.""Most of our clients are interested in automation. The automation part is good because they are able to detect threats and vulnerabilities in real time. It's very fast.""There are a lot of features in QRadar. App Exchange is the most valuable feature. User behavior analytics (UBA) is also a very good feature. Watson is also there, but we are not currently using Watson. It is versatile and quite easy. It also has an all-in-one-box feature and good integration with AWS.""It saves a lot of time. We integrate the customer's firewall with all their networking devices.""In addition to using this solution for our security operations center, we are using it for our other customers."

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"I like the Cloud monitoring console feature.""Dashboards and alerting are the most valuable features. The dashboards let us see how the system looks in terms of anomalies, and the alerts trigger us to go and look at what possible problems are happening.""As compared to other tools, it is very easy. It is very easy to learn. It also integrates well.""Its interconnectivity with the cloud platforms, such as Azure and AWS, was valuable.""For my current requirements, the tool theme seems to be meeting my requirements, from a cost and requirements perspective.""Splunk helped reduce our mean time to resolve by around 60%.""It has end-to-end visibility into our cloud-native environment, which is pretty important for us. About 80% of our infrastructure is on AWS.""The most valuable feature of Splunk Cloud Platform is the alerting feature."

More Splunk Cloud Platform Pros →

Cons
"Everyone has their favorites. There is always room for improvement, and everybody will say, "I wish you could do this for me or that for me." It is a personal thing based on how you use the tool. I do not necessarily have those thoughts, and they are probably not really valuable because they are unique to the context of the user, but broadly, where it can continue to improve is by adding more connectors to more systems.""Sentinel's reporting is complex and can be more user-friendly.""The on-prem log sources still require a lot of development.""Improvement-wise, I would like to see more integration with third-party solutions or old-school antivirus products that have some kind of logging capability. I wouldn't mind having that exposed within Sentinel. We do have situations where certain companies have bought licensing or have made an investment in a product, and that product will be there for the next two or three years. To be able to view information from those legacy products would be great. We can then better leverage the Sentinel solution and its capabilities.""The performance could be improved. If I create 15 to 20 lines for a single-use case in KQL, sometimes it takes more time to execute. If I create use cases within a certain timeline, the result will show in .01 seconds. A complex query takes more time to get results.""For certain vendors, some of the data that Microsoft Sentinel captures is redacted due to privacy reasons.""When it comes to ingesting Azure native log sources, some of the log sources are specific to the subscription, and it is not always very clear.""Its implementation could be simpler. It is not really simple or straightforward. It is in the middle. Sometimes, connectors are a little bit complex."

More Microsoft Sentinel Cons →

"There are reports that I would like to generate that are either not included, or I cannot find.""The biggest problem was built on top of the QRadar in the executive operations center network. The integration was not using the network security specialist properly, and all the incidents were inferior with QRadar. Its compatibility is not really good.""Each module requires a separate license and a separate cost.""The user interface is a bit difficult to get used to.""IMB should reduce the pricing, or reduce some of the features for a more economical solution for the customer.""I don't look at only the features and benefits; I also look at the price. It is a bit expensive when compared with other solutions. It is expensive for specific deployment topologies, and the decision-makers go for alternatives like ArcSight. It should also have more AI features or capabilities for better threat intelligence. The more it uses machine learning, the better would be the dashboard, analytics, and other things.""The custom rules could be simplified more or it should be possible to use a different language, other than the ones that the solution is already using. They should add other languages into the mix.""It is not app based."

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"Support could be improved.""Its stability and performance can be better. Very rarely does a day go by when we do not see an error in the console, such as a health check error. Because it is cloud-hosted, we do not have access to the backend to figure it out ourselves. We are reliant on their support to figure it out, and a couple of days later, the error comes back or it is a different error. It is a never-ending cycle of support tickets. Their support is also not great.""Splunk should offer various options for real-time monitoring.""They can offer more self-service capability to their customers. Currently, most of the things happen behind the Splunk Cloud Platform. As a customer, I do not have an opportunity to see my platform. If they can offer more self-service to see the health of my endpoints and stack, it would be appreciated.""Every time they launch new versions, we experience a few bugs. The most recent version had a couple of bugs in the databases. We contacted the vendor and got assistance solving these bugs, so the environment is more stable.""I have not come across anything that I would consider missing as such. If anything, sometimes we have dashboards that would not go into the dark mode. It is a minor issue, but it is the only thing that I wish was there. The dark mode would definitely help.""There is sometimes no documentation or updated documentation available.""Splunk Cloud Platform needs to be made more user-friendly because it's not user-friendly."

More Splunk Cloud Platform Cons →

Pricing and Cost Advice
  • "It comes with a Microsoft subscription which the customer has, so they don't have to invest somewhere else."
  • "It is a consumption-based license model. bands at 100, 200, 400 GB per day etc. Azure Sentinel Pricing | Microsoft Azure"
  • "Good monthly operational cost model for the detection and response outcomes delivered, M365 logs don't count toward the limits which is a good benefit."
  • "I have had mixed feedback. At one point, I heard a client say that it sometimes seems more expensive. Most of the clients are on Office 365 or M365, and they are forced to take Azure SIEM because of the integration."
  • "It is kind of like a sliding scale. There are different tiers of pricing that go from $100 per day up to $3,500 per day. So, it just kind of depends on how much data is being stored. There can be additional costs to the standard license other than the additional data. It just kind of depends on what other services you're spinning up in Azure, or if you're using something like Azure log analytics."
  • "I am just paying for the log space with Azure Sentinel. It costs us about $2,000 a month. Most of the logs are free. We are only paying money for Azure Firewall logs because email logs or Azure AD logs are free to use for us."
  • "Sentinel is a bit expensive. If you can figure a way of configuring it to meet your needs, then you can find a way around the cost."
  • "Azure Sentinel is very costly, or at least it appears to be very costly. The costs vary based on your ingestion and your retention charges."
  • More Microsoft Sentinel 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 →

  • "The licensing is based on the amount of data that we send to the cloud on a daily basis."
  • "The price is something that people complain about."
  • "The licensing costs depend on the state of your environment and the fees are paid on a monthly basis."
  • "The pricing model makes this an expensive solution."
  • "There are additional features that you would need to purchase depending on your use case."
  • "The cost of using Splunk Cloud Platform is high, but the value it provides is worth the investment."
  • "I am familiar with the pricing and licensing model a little bit. I am not sure about the particulars of the actual price that we have, but I do like the idea of going towards a more CPU-based approach rather than the ingest approach because it allows us the ability to ingest more data if we need it."
  • "It is a touchy subject because we are locked into it. That goes back to the rehydrating data. We cannot have the retention that we want to store for legal and compliance purposes because that is seven years' worth of data for some of the indexes, so we ship them off into S3 buckets and install them there, at which point they are invisible to Splunk, so we have to rehydrate them, but we cannot rehydrate those pockets into Splunk Cloud. We have to rehydrate them into a self-hosted version of Splunk, which can take days to set up and get going. I would not call Splunk's licensing and pricing predatory, but they have made it very difficult to maintain the independence of your own data."
  • More Splunk Cloud Platform Pricing and Cost Advice →

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    Comparison Review
    Vinod Shankar
    Questions from the Community
    Top Answer:Yes, Azure Sentinel is a SIEM on the Cloud. Multiple data sources can be uploaded and analyzed with Azure Sentinel and… more »
    Top Answer:It would really depend on (1) which logs you need to ingest and (2) what are your use cases Splunk is easy for… more »
    Top Answer:We like that Azure Sentinel does not require as much maintenance as legacy SIEMs that are on-premises. Azure Sentinel is… 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.
    Top Answer:Splunk has sped up our response and reduced the time we spend manually monitoring any logs for ticketing tools or… more »
    Top Answer:Splunk is a bit pricey, but it's reasonable for the features offered.
    Top Answer:Sometimes, integrating with other systems is difficult, and it isn't feasible to connect with other applications, but… more »
    Comparisons
    Also Known As
    Azure Sentinel
    IBM QRadar, QRadar SIEM, QRadar UBA, QRadar on Cloud, QRadar, IBM QRadar User Behavior Analytics, IBM QRadar Advisor with Watson
    Learn More
    Overview

    Microsoft Sentinel is a scalable, cloud-native, security information event management (SIEM) and security orchestration automated response (SOAR) solution that lets you see and stop threats before they cause harm. Microsoft Sentinel delivers intelligent security analytics and threat intelligence across the enterprise, providing a single solution for alert detection, threat visibility, proactive hunting, and threat response. Eliminate security infrastructure setup and maintenance, and elastically scale to meet your security needs—while reducing IT costs. With Microsoft Sentinel, you can:

    - Collect data at cloud scale—across all users, devices, applications, and infrastructure, both on-premises and in multiple clouds

    - Detect previously uncovered threats and minimize false positives using analytics and unparalleled threat intelligence from Microsoft

    - Investigate threats with AI and hunt suspicious activities at scale, tapping into decades of cybersecurity work at Microsoft

    - Respond to incidents rapidly with built-in orchestration and automation of common tasks

    To learn more about our solution, ask questions, and share feedback, join our Microsoft Security, Compliance and Identity Community.

    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."

    Splunk Cloud is the industry’s only enterprise-ready cloud service for machine data, offering a 100% uptime SLA and standard plans from 5GB/day to 5TB/day. Watch this video to find out how you can accelerate time-to-value and stay focused on your core business using Splunk Cloud.

    Sample Customers
    Microsoft Sentinel is trusted by companies of all sizes including ABM, ASOS, Uniper, First West Credit Union, Avanade, and more.
    Clients across multiple industries, such as energy, financial, retail, healthcare, government, communications, and education use QRadar.
    Mindtouch
    Top Industries
    REVIEWERS
    Financial Services Firm22%
    Computer Software Company11%
    Manufacturing Company8%
    Comms Service Provider8%
    VISITORS READING REVIEWS
    Computer Software Company16%
    Financial Services Firm10%
    Government9%
    Manufacturing Company7%
    REVIEWERS
    Financial Services Firm23%
    Computer Software Company15%
    Comms Service Provider10%
    Manufacturing Company6%
    VISITORS READING REVIEWS
    Educational Organization18%
    Computer Software Company15%
    Financial Services Firm10%
    Government7%
    REVIEWERS
    Financial Services Firm24%
    Computer Software Company12%
    Manufacturing Company8%
    Government8%
    VISITORS READING REVIEWS
    Computer Software Company22%
    Financial Services Firm14%
    Manufacturing Company7%
    Comms Service Provider6%
    Company Size
    REVIEWERS
    Small Business33%
    Midsize Enterprise21%
    Large Enterprise47%
    VISITORS READING REVIEWS
    Small Business25%
    Midsize Enterprise16%
    Large Enterprise59%
    REVIEWERS
    Small Business39%
    Midsize Enterprise15%
    Large Enterprise45%
    VISITORS READING REVIEWS
    Small Business21%
    Midsize Enterprise29%
    Large Enterprise50%
    REVIEWERS
    Small Business26%
    Midsize Enterprise8%
    Large Enterprise66%
    VISITORS READING REVIEWS
    Small Business19%
    Midsize Enterprise12%
    Large Enterprise70%
    Buyer's Guide
    IBM Security QRadar vs. Splunk Cloud Platform
    March 2023
    Find out what your peers are saying about IBM Security QRadar vs. Splunk Cloud Platform and other solutions. Updated: March 2023.
    769,334 professionals have used our research since 2012.

    IBM Security QRadar is ranked 4th in Security Information and Event Management (SIEM) with 198 reviews while Splunk Cloud Platform is ranked 3rd in Data Visualization with 34 reviews. IBM Security QRadar is rated 8.0, while Splunk Cloud Platform is rated 8.0. The top reviewer of IBM Security QRadar writes "A highly stable and scalable solution that provides good technical support". On the other hand, the top reviewer of Splunk Cloud Platform writes "Does not require backend maintenance, is easily integrated and utilized". IBM Security QRadar is most compared with Splunk Enterprise Security, Wazuh, LogRhythm SIEM, Elastic Security and Sentinel, whereas Splunk Cloud Platform is most compared with Wazuh, Splunk Enterprise Security, AppInsights, Check Point Security Management and Fortinet FortiAnalyzer. See our IBM Security QRadar vs. Splunk Cloud Platform report.

    We monitor all Security Information and Event Management (SIEM) 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.