Splunk vs. IBM QRadar

Splunk’s vibrant user community empowers innovation backed by a vast ecosystem of 2,200+ partners and 2,800+ apps on Splunkbase to extend your Splunk investment.

IBM has limited compatibility with only 600 third-party integrations for QRadar SIEM and SOAR. 

Optimize your data sources for best use in the Splunk platform. Search data where it lives and only ingest into Splunk when needed for key tasks such as normalization, enrichment and data availability and retention. With Splunk Enterprise Security, you have the flexibility to store and access your data —even at the edge —and the choice to ingest key data critical to your security use cases. This ensures the most cost-effective data optimization strategy.

QRadar SIEM has limited capabilities to help you optimize your data. Because it still relies on a schema on ingestion, it is challenged by data outside the IBM ecosystem. This approach requires mapping to parse security log data properly, resulting in hidden costs for custom code development, overages to search and query logs and difficulty automating log parsing. 

Splunk Enterprise Security risk-based alerting (RBA) enhances prioritizations by attributing risk to users and systems, mapping alerts to cybersecurity frameworks and triggering alerts when risks exceed thresholds. This reduces alert fatigue, keeping efforts focused on detecting high-fidelity threats to proactively address risk.

QRadar SIEM lacks sophisticated risk-based alerting, and falls short on capabilities that modern SOC teams need to quickly detect, investigate and respond to threats. 

Splunk delivers leading-edge innovation and dedicated customer support. No other SIEM vendor can rival the commitment and loyalty exhibited by security practitioners in the Splunk global user community. 

IBM QRadar SIEM customers that have switched to Splunk Enterprise Security have reported that declining support quality was a primary reason. According to IDC, “Customer service is not always an area of focus at IBM.”

Splunk has advanced SIEM and security analytics by staying at the forefront of innovation in SecOps, helping thousands of customers outpace adversaries. Splunk unifies threat detection, investigation and response (TDIR)  workflows through integrated, industry-leading products such as Splunk Enterprise Security, Splunk SOAR, Splunk User Behavior Analytics and Splunk Attack Analyzer, addressing a broad spectrum of SecOps use cases. And we continue to rapidly innovate.

IBM QRadar’s pace of SIEM innovation has slowed, according to industry analysts.This makes it increasingly difficult for the modern SOC to solve evolving security needs. IBM has a diversified focus across hybrid cloud, data and AI, automation, security, semiconductors and quantum computing, with security being only one part of its extensive portfolio. This diffusion of focus explains why QRadar's SIEM improvements have been incremental and could increasingly become a sore spot for QRadar SIEM customers.