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AlienVault OSSIM vs Splunk Enterprise Security comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Jan 25, 2026

Review summaries and opinions

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:
 

Categories and Ranking

AlienVault OSSIM
Ranking in Security Information and Event Management (SIEM)
13th
Average Rating
7.4
Reviews Sentiment
7.1
Number of Reviews
31
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
Splunk Enterprise Security
Ranking in Security Information and Event Management (SIEM)
1st
Average Rating
8.4
Reviews Sentiment
7.3
Number of Reviews
375
Ranking in other categories
Log Management (2nd), IT Operations Analytics (1st)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of February 2026, in the Security Information and Event Management (SIEM) category, the mindshare of AlienVault OSSIM is 1.7%, down from 4.2% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Splunk Enterprise Security is 7.1%, down from 9.8% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Security Information and Event Management (SIEM) Market Share Distribution
ProductMarket Share (%)
Splunk Enterprise Security7.1%
AlienVault OSSIM1.7%
Other91.2%
Security Information and Event Management (SIEM)
 

Featured Reviews

BP
Independent Contractor at a comms service provider with 5,001-10,000 employees
Enables cost-effective security management for small businesses
Scaling for USM is always challenging for any product unless it is purpose-built or overbuilt at the front end. They will use Palo Alto and its competitors, and LevelBlue will manage that implementation. The main area where the AlienVault product was lacking around the 2018 timeframe was in its ability to scale. By pushing it to a cloud-based system, they've largely alleviated scale issues. It's native in Amazon but will also run in Azure. They have worked with cloud service providers to offer enough throughput at a cost reasonable for a corporation. Scaling was their biggest problem, and they've largely conquered those issues.
reviewer1469784 - PeerSpot reviewer
Senior Manager at a financial services firm with 10,001+ employees
Helps us detect cyber threats quickly and integrate multiple feeds effectively
Overall, the product is good, but when it comes to some infrastructure issues, we have to dig into more logs. There is no straightforward indication of an issue. Health check kind of dashboards are not available. More AI would help us, and more optimization, since security products run more queries. The AI module could suggest solutions, optimizing queries or workload balancing. If the product itself advises on running queries during peak times, it would be similar to what ChatGPT currently offers. We see quite a few issues on stability. Even last week, we faced something, and identifying bottlenecks is not easy. We need more SMEs, and there is no mechanism to tell us about indexer or search head issues. Self-monitoring dashboards could be beneficial. The technical support still requires more improvement. Often, primary support takes a lot of time and forwards most solutions to the engineering side. The primary support team has very limited knowledge to provide.

Quotes from Members

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:
 

Pros

"The initial setup is straightforward."
"OSSIM is the only solution that includes the large number of modules that we need: a vulnerability scanner, a network IDS system, a host IDS system."
"The product is majorly used for threat detection of the agents on servers and endpoints."
"The paid version of the solution has reporting and better scalability options."
"The product is easy to use."
"Inbuilt IDS, inbuilt integration with threat intelligence platform and with vulnerability assessment modules."
"The solution is very stable. Compared to Qradar and Splunk, it's very stable."
"Its user-friendliness is the most valuable. It is very easy to use and explore. The dashboard is very well packaged and integrated. You don't have to spend a lot of time in configuring it and checking out the RPM etc. It is also free and very powerful."
"If properly built, I'm very impressed with the stability of Splunk ES."
"The most valuable feature is that it brings all of the components necessary to identify, analyze, and respond together."
"The initial setup is pretty straightforward."
"From my experience, the visual aid that it provides is most valuable. There are charts and other means to provide information."
"Splunk is stable, and this is why many customers want it."
"The solution's most valuable feature is the criticality of alerts."
"The log aggregation is great."
"Splunk can deliver more information by going deeper. By creating a dashboard, we can identify the root cause of the threat. Let's say I have a firewall from Check Point. Splunk will find the dashboard for Check Point, implement it in our environment, and connect it to the Check Point firewall logs, which are shown on the dashboard. If we request a custom dashboard, the engineer will take longer to complete the task."
 

Cons

"I suggest more in-built rules based on modern threats and environments to make it a more competitive solution."
"It's so hard to configure and explore something new on it."
"I would like the solution to be able to integrate with my firewall, my IDS and my Honeypot solutions so that it can provide real-time reporting as things occur and then have alert sent to me on my phone when suspicious activity is happening."
"The user interface needs to be friendlier across the board."
"The initial setup was a bit complex. You've got to do a lot of reading. It's not an intuitive implementation."
"The correlation engine needs to be improved."
"The incidence reporting could be better."
"We need more dashboards and we need more customization for dashboards."
"My organization does not completely utilize risk-based alerting in Splunk Enterprise Security as it's not fully mature."
"It needs to improve the way to install third-party apps and enable installation without logging into splunk.com."
"It works as intended for us, and we are getting everything that we need out of it. If anything, its initial setup can be improved a bit."
"Splunk does not provide any default threat intelligence like Microsoft Sentinel, but you can integrate any third-party threat intelligence with Splunk. By default, no threat intelligence suite is there, whereas, with IBM QRadar or Microsoft Sentinel, the default feature of threat intelligence is there. It is free. If Splunk can provide a default threat intelligence suite, it would be better."
"There are new services which are coming up. If Splunk can catch up with the speed of Amazon, and with the integration, instead of us waiting for another year or so, that would be good."
"Splunk has a steeper learning curve, making it feel less user-friendly."
"We find that the maintenance process could be a lot better."
"Splunk Enterprise Security can be improved by addressing the content management interface, which is very outdated, slow, and clunky; sometimes we think things are saved and they haven't."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The licensing fees for the non-community edition are paid on an annual basis, and there are no costs in addition to this."
"The price of AlienVault OSSIM is too high sometimes for us to present to our customers. The price should be lower. We are on a three-year license to use the solution. We had to pay extra for the support."
"AlienVault OSSIM is expensive compared to its competitors."
"When comparing AlienVault OSSIM to Microsoft Sentinel, AlienVault OSSIM incurs additional costs due to its licensing price structure. If you are using AlienVault for security purposes at a certain level it can have a higher price point than the current pricing of Microsoft Sentinel."
"OSSIM is free."
"OSSIM is open source, and USM is the paid license. So, if you want, you can switch to USM. There you will have to buy a license, and they have a support team that helps you out on issues you face."
"AlienVault OSSIM is free."
"AlienVault pricing is the best. Whatever cost you are paying, you are getting a return on every penny... It's not like your IBM, your QRadar, or Splunk, where the cost is too high."
"While licensing can be a concern, there are ways to reduce the licensing costs including filtering some events."
"The pricing is very complicated, and it is very pricey. You do require a lot of different licenses in order to get a comprehensive solution that is not just the SIEM solution."
"I would highly recommend anyone evaluating this option to download the free trial which allows for the ingestion of 500MB of data per day in order to get a feel for what Splunk does at its core. It will get pricey once your ingestion rates start to sky rocket, but I would consider it expensive given the amount of information that it allows you to analyze and react on straight out-of-the-box."
"Splunk is a bit pricier, but the benefits and ROI are huge."
"Pricing can be a limiting factor. You have to continuously tune what you are bringing in and make sure what you bring in is of value."
"While some clients find the cost of Splunk Enterprise Security to be on the higher end, its pricing is comparable to other SIEM solutions."
"The pricing can be better. We are already considering Elastic because Splunk is too expensive. You have to pay based on per-day ingestion. There should be a more flexible model for the use cases where one day you have a huge amount, and on other days, it is quite less."
"Splunk Enterprise Security is a bit expensive overall, but it provides good value."
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Comparison Review

VS
Manager, Enterprise Risk Consulting at a tech company with 1,001-5,000 employees
Feb 26, 2015
HP ArcSight vs. IBM QRadar vs. ​McAfee Nitro vs. Splunk vs. RSA Security vs. LogRhythm
We at Infosecnirvana.com have done several posts on SIEM. After the Dummies Guide on SIEM, we are following it up with a SIEM Product Comparison – 101 deck. So, here it is for your viewing pleasure. Let me know what you think by posting your comments below. The key products compared here are…
 

Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Computer Software Company
13%
Comms Service Provider
11%
Financial Services Firm
9%
Manufacturing Company
8%
Financial Services Firm
13%
Computer Software Company
11%
Manufacturing Company
9%
Government
7%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business18
Midsize Enterprise9
Large Enterprise8
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business109
Midsize Enterprise50
Large Enterprise264
 

Questions from the Community

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for AlienVault OSSIM?
It depends. I would need to review their cost models, but generally, they are on a scaled basis based on throughput usage. Because it's a software as a service solution for their core product for U...
What needs improvement with AlienVault OSSIM?
Scaling for USM is always challenging for any product unless it is purpose-built or overbuilt at the front end. They will use Palo Alto and its competitors, and LevelBlue will manage that implement...
What SOC product do you recommend?
For tools I’d recommend: -SIEM- LogRhythm -SOAR- Palo Alto XSOAR Doing commercial w/o both (or at least an XDR) is asking to miss details that are critical, and ending up a statistic. Also, rememb...
What is a better choice, Splunk or Azure Sentinel?
It would really depend on (1) which logs you need to ingest and (2) what are your use cases Splunk is easy for ingestion of anything, but the charge per GB/Day Indexed and it gets expensive as log ...
How does Splunk compare with Azure Monitor?
Splunk handles a high amount of data very well. We use Splunk to capture information and as an aggregator for monitoring information from different sources. Splunk is very good at alerting us if we...
 

Also Known As

OSSIM
No data available
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Council Rock School District
Splunk has more than 7,000 customers spread across over 90 countries. These customers include Telenor, UniCredit, ideeli, McKenney's, Tesco, and SurveyMonkey.
Find out what your peers are saying about AlienVault OSSIM vs. Splunk Enterprise Security and other solutions. Updated: December 2025.
881,360 professionals have used our research since 2012.