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IBM QRadar
Enterprise SIEM licensed by events per second, whose cloud business IBM sold to Palo Alto Networks in 2024.
As of 30 August 2026, IBM QRadar's pricing is not published; the vendor quotes on request. A long-established SIEM with native network flow analysis alongside log correlation. Softwr lists it under Cybersecurity. IBM QRadar is made by IBM Corporation, launched in 1911, available on Web, API.
Overview
What IBM QRadar does
QRadar is a security information and event management platform. It ingests logs from across an estate, normalises them through Device Support Modules, and correlates the results with rules into what it calls offences, which chain related events into a single investigable item. Its distinguishing technical feature is that it also ingests network flow data natively through QFlow and QNI, so an analyst can pivot from a log event to the traffic that surrounded it without a separate network detection product. It has been sold as an on-premises appliance and virtual appliance, as QRadar on Cloud, and latterly as the QRadar Suite bundling EDR from the ReaQta acquisition and SOAR from Resilient. The fact that overrides everything else is commercial. In May 2024 IBM announced the sale of the QRadar SaaS assets to Palo Alto Networks, and the transaction closed that September. Palo Alto has been migrating those customers onto Cortex XSIAM, its own platform, with migration incentives. IBM has said it will continue supporting on-premises QRadar customers, but the strategic direction of the cloud product now belongs to a competitor and IBM's own security narrative has moved to consulting and to watsonx. A buyer evaluating QRadar in 2026 is therefore not choosing between SIEMs on features; they are choosing between an on-premises product with a support horizon and a migration onto a different vendor's platform. The existing customer base is large regulated enterprises, often with an IBM relationship, log residency requirements that rule out shared SaaS, and a SOC with staff assigned to the platform. The trade-off has always been operational cost rather than licence cost. QRadar is licensed by events per second and flows per minute, which means every log source you add raises the meter, and it needs an engineer who knows it. Organisations that deploy it without that person accumulate unreviewed offences and unparsed log sources until the platform becomes a compliance artefact rather than a detection capability.
What people use it for
- A regulated enterprise that must keep log data on premises or in a specific jurisdiction and cannot use a shared SaaS SIEM
- A SOC that wants log correlation and network flow analysis in one platform rather than buying an NDR product separately
- An existing QRadar estate deciding whether to stay on premises or accept the migration path to a different vendor's platform
- Compliance-driven log retention and reporting where the audit requirement is specific about collection, retention and reporting
Related searches
The honest half
Where it falls short
Concrete and checkable, so you can decide whether any of them matter to you. This is the half of a review a vendor will not write about IBM QRadar.
- IBM sold the QRadar SaaS business to Palo Alto Networks in 2024 and those customers are being moved to Cortex XSIAM, so anyone buying today is choosing an on-premises product whose vendor has publicly moved the cloud future to a competitor, and the support horizon becomes a contract negotiation rather than an assumption.
- Licensing is by events per second and flows per minute, so every additional log source raises the cost directly and teams routinely exclude verbose sources such as DNS, proxy, endpoint and cloud audit logs to stay under the licence, which strips out exactly the data an investigation later needs.
- It needs a dedicated operator: rule tuning, parser work and offence triage are continuous jobs, and an organisation that deploys QRadar without at least one named engineer accumulates thousands of unreviewed offences and a false sense of coverage.
- A log source without a matching Device Support Module arrives unparsed, and writing a custom parser with regular expressions against an unfamiliar payload format is specialist work that can take days per source, which quietly determines which systems ever get monitored.
- On-premises capacity is planned across consoles, processors, collectors and data nodes, so outgrowing the sizing means procuring and racking more appliances rather than changing a subscription tier, and growth becomes a purchasing cycle measured in months.
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Pricing
What IBM QRadar costs
Taken from the vendor's own pricing page. Prices move, so check before you buy.
QRadar SIEM
Free
- Event and flow processing
- Offense management
- Threat intelligence
- Contact sales
QRadar Cloud
Free
- Cloud-native deployment
- Elastic scaling
- Managed infrastructure
- Contact sales
QRadar Suite
Free
- SIEM + SOAR + XDR
- Unified analyst experience
- Federated search
- Contact sales
Capabilities
Features
Offence model
Correlates related events and flows into a single investigable item rather than a stream of individual alerts
Network flow analysis
Ingests NetFlow, IPFIX and packet-derived flow data natively alongside logs, including application-layer detail via QNI
Device Support Modules
Prebuilt parsers for a large catalogue of log sources, with a framework for writing custom ones
Ariel query language
Purpose-built search over event and flow stores for investigation and rule building
Rules and building blocks
Layered correlation logic with reusable building blocks so tuning does not mean rewriting every rule
Deployment topology
Console, event processors, event collectors, flow collectors and data nodes can be distributed for scale and data residency
App Exchange
Vendor and community extensions for content packs, integrations and dashboards
Use Case Manager
Maps deployed rules against MITRE ATT&CK to show detection coverage and gaps
QRadar SOAR integration
Case management and playbooks from the Resilient acquisition, sold as part of the suite
Compliance content
Prebuilt reports and rule packs aligned to PCI DSS, HIPAA and similar regimes
Answered, with sources
Questions people ask
Each answer names the page it came from, so you can check it rather than take our word for it.
Who owns QRadar now?
It is split. IBM sold the QRadar SaaS assets to Palo Alto Networks in a deal announced in May 2024 and closed that September, and those customers are being migrated to Cortex XSIAM. IBM retains and supports the on-premises product.
Is QRadar being discontinued?
IBM has committed to continuing support for on-premises customers, including security updates, while offering migration assistance. The cloud product's future belongs to Palo Alto. If you are signing a multi-year term, get the support horizon written into the contract.
How is it licensed?
By events per second for logs and flows per minute for network data, with the software or appliance sized to that rate. Add-on modules in the suite are licensed separately.
What is an offence?
QRadar's term for a correlated case. Rules group related events and flows against a common indicator such as a host or user, so an analyst reviews one offence rather than the hundreds of events behind it.
Do I need a full-time engineer?
In practice yes for anything beyond a small deployment. Parser development, rule tuning and offence triage do not stop, and the most common failure mode is a well-installed QRadar that nobody has tuned since go-live.
Behind it
Who makes IBM QRadar
- Company
- IBM Corporation
- Based in
- Armonk, New York, USA
Keep looking
Where to go from IBM QRadar
- IBM QRadar alternativesEvery product people weigh against it
- IBM QRadar pricingPlans, floors and what the tiers exclude
- IBM QRadar badgesWhich rules it meets, and the figure behind each
- All Cybersecurity softwareThe full category
- Best Cybersecurity softwareThe shortlist, and how it was cut
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Softwr does not host reviews and shows no star rating for IBM QRadar, because a rating we did not collect is not ours to publish. What is here is the pricing and platform detail from the vendor’s own pages, limitations we could state concretely, and alternatives a reviewer confirmed people weigh against it. Tell us if any of it is wrong.
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