IBM QRadar is a long-established enterprise SIEM, and carries the licensing complexity, heavy infrastructure footprint, and deployment timelines that come with legacy enterprise software. nPro delivers modern SIEM and XDR on a lightweight ClickHouse backend that deploys in minutes.
QRadar is a capable, mature platform with deep features built up over many years. But that maturity comes with cost: complex EPS and flows-per-minute licensing that is hard to predict, a heavy infrastructure footprint, and deployment projects measured in months rather than minutes. For many organisations, that weight is disproportionate to what they actually need.
nPro delivers the core enterprise SIEM capabilities, MITRE ATT&CK-aligned detection, cross-source correlation, network monitoring, and compliance reporting, on a modern ClickHouse foundation that installs in five minutes and runs on modest hardware. You get the detection outcomes without the licensing spreadsheets. See how it performs in our storage architecture comparison.
QRadar has been deployed in regulated environments for a long time, and that track record counts for something a newer platform cannot simply claim.
The pool of engineers trained on QRadar is large. Hiring for it, or bringing in contractors who can be productive quickly, is materially easier than for anything newer.
QRadar's flow analysis alongside log correlation is mature in a way few competitors match, and if your detection strategy leans on network telemetry that is a genuine advantage.
nPro's behavioural analytics are still in development and are not comparable to a dedicated UEBA platform today. Its integration ecosystem is also smaller than the long-established platforms. If either is a requirement rather than a preference, weigh that honestly.
nPro has no SaaS option. That is deliberate, and it is also a commitment on your side. You need a Linux server that somebody patches, monitors and backs up. If your organisation has no appetite for running infrastructure, a hosted platform is the better fit whatever its licensing model looks like.
What you get in exchange is residency that does not depend on a vendor's regional policy, air-gapped operation where the network demands it, and a ClickHouse storage engine that takes materially less tuning to run than an Elasticsearch cluster. For regulated organisations that were going to self-host regardless, that trade is usually the easy part.
Self-hosted SIEM + XDR + network monitoring. Per-agent pricing, fast deploy.