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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
376
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

"With AlienVault you get everything in one box."
"The paid version of the solution has reporting and better scalability options."
"The open vault component and the checking of vulnerabilities are the most valuable features. The page management helps with this. If you know how your device is vulnerable at least you can do something about it."
"You can customize the dashboards as well as the reporting."
"The solution is free to use."
"The initial setup is straightforward."
"Better than other SIEM solutions because almost everything can be integrated."
"The solution has a very good open source community, and whenever we have problems, we are always able to resolve it online."
"The features I find most valuable in Splunk Enterprise Security are Incident Review, Security Essentials, Asset and Identity Management, and Machine Learning Toolkit."
"Splunk is a user-friendly solution."
"It helps streamline troubleshooting and log analysis."
"I am satisfied with the support."
"Splunk is user-friendly. We can easily customize the monitoring script."
"Previously, it would take us days to properly analyze, triage, and respond to insider threats; now with risk-based alerting, we are able to reduce that to 10 minutes."
"The most valuable feature is that it brings all of the components necessary to identify, analyze, and respond together."
"The query functionality is very easy to use and fast to retrieve logs in comparison to other SIEM solutions."
 

Cons

"There are somewhat more false positives with the user behavior analytics, which could benefit from an additional machine learning model to detect user patterns more rapidly."
"AlienVault OSSIM is costly."
"It's under heavy traffic. If you have heavy traffic, the system is slow."
"The initial setup was a bit complex. You've got to do a lot of reading. It's not an intuitive implementation."
"It takes some time. It does not give me a prompt response for any such [malicious] traffic. It takes time to get that alert from the AlienVault system."
"AlienVault OSSIM on-premise version is more difficult to implement than the cloud version. Additionally, they should add integration between several different environments at once and improve their online knowledge base."
"The correlation engine needs to be improved."
"The price of this solution is very high and it could be cheaper."
"I didn't face any major issues with Splunk Enterprise Security. There were only one or two issues related to the user account, but nothing major."
"The solution could improve by making it more business analysis oriented. The way it is now is designed more for developers."
"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."
"It is a challenge to manage the environment in such a way, that one’s log, even with the bandwidth license, isn’t exceeded."
"The UI can be difficult to understand for non-technical people."
"It's costly."
"Splunk Enterprise Security should provide a better and richer integration."
"I encounter issues such as downtime, bugs, glitches, and unbox errors."
 

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."
"I used the paid version of the tool and found it to be expensive. It has been a while since I changed to Securonix. I will have to check whether AlienVault charges per device, user, or log."
"AlienVault OSSIM is expensive compared to its competitors."
"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."
"We are using the community version, which can be used for free."
"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."
"We are using a free version of the solution. If you purchase a license there are more features available but the price is a little high. The solution should be cheaper to allow more customers to be able to afford it."
"OSSIM is free."
"I think that most of the log analytics solutions are expensive and I'm not sure if it's worth it."
"From what I have seen so far, Splunk has multiple cost models. The one that we are using is pretty good when it comes to ingesting data into the environment. It has worked out pretty well."
"Pricing is probably its weakest spot. As compared to some competitors, Splunk is really expensive."
"Splunk Enterprise Security is not at all cost-friendly to be deployed in very small enterprises like start-ups."
"The price of this solution is expensive. However, it has great features. If you want a great solution you need to pay a price matching the features."
"It is pretty straightforward and based on the sizing. If I compare it with other competitors, it makes sense."
"I believe that Splunk Enterprise Security is worth the price, but it is expensive."
"The pricing could be made more competitive."
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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
11%
Comms Service Provider
11%
Manufacturing Company
9%
Financial Services Firm
8%
Financial Services Firm
12%
Computer Software Company
10%
Manufacturing Company
9%
Government
6%
 

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 Business110
Midsize Enterprise50
Large Enterprise265
 

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: February 2026.
882,333 professionals have used our research since 2012.