Exabeam vs. Rapid7: Four Ways to Compare and Evaluate

Security information and event management (SIEM) solutions are crucial for organizations to detect and respond to potential cyberthreats. With many options available in the market, it’s essential to choose the right solution that aligns with your organization’s needs. In this blog post, we compare Exabeam and Rapid7, two popular SIEM solutions, on four critical aspects to help you make an informed decision.

1. Rapid7 scored poorly in third-party analyst reviews. In a leading analyst firm’s review, Rapid7 scored poorly and moved to a weaker position in the market. The analyst firm particularly cautioned buyers about Rapid7’s limited rule customization capabilities. Exabeam, on the other hand, outperformed Rapid7 in most of the SIEM critical capabilities, particularly in Analytics, Automation and Orchestration, and Incident Response and Management. Exabeam has superior analytics and automation, which result in accurate detections, fewer false positives, and improved SOC efficiencies.

2. Rapid7 SIEM has limited third-party integration. Rapid7 supports only 90 third-party event sources and 15 third-party alert sources, with uneven feature coverage across different platforms. Furthermore, Rapid7 does not allow integration with competitors to its products, leading to potential vendor lock-in. Exabeam boasts more than 550 integrations with industry-leading security vendors, providing organizations with greater flexibility and seamless integration capabilities.

3. Rapid7 provides minimal behavioral analytics and scant rule customization. Rapid7’s analytics primarily focus on traffic and Windows processes for known indicators of compromise (IoCs) curated by Rapid7. The solution does not offer comprehensive user behavior modeling or peer group analysis. While recent updates have introduced some customization abilities, these are limited and do not allow for threshold changes. In contrast, Exabeam Advanced Analytics™ establishes a baseline for normal user and entity activity, offering more than 1,900 models for anomalies across various sources. This enables superior security risk management based on risk scores, timelines, and use cases.

4. IoC-based detection misses advanced threats. Rapid7 excels at discovering and distributing new IoCs but relies heavily on IoC-based matching, which can miss rapidly evolving threats, zero-day attacks, and low-profile or distributed attack indicators such as credential movement anomalies common to insider threats. IoC-based detection is also less effective against application-based attacks, often burying early-stage indicators like lateral movement in the “notable behaviors” section. Exabeam, however, does not rely solely on static indicators. Its user and entity behavior analytics (UEBA) solution leverages machine learning (ML)-trained risk scoring on behavioral signals and anomalies, enabling the detection of threats even before an IoC is publicly known.

Conclusion

When comparing Exabeam and Rapid7, it’s clear that Exabeam offers several advantages in terms of analytics, automation, third-party integration, and advanced threat detection. While Rapid7 may still be a suitable choice for organizations with niche requirements, the extensive features and capabilities of Exabeam make it a superior SIEM solution for most organizations seeking to enhance their cybersecurity posture.