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AlienVault OSSIM vs Splunk Enterprise Security comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Oct 19, 2025

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)
12th
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
374
Ranking in other categories
Log Management (2nd), IT Operations Analytics (1st)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of January 2026, in the Security Information and Event Management (SIEM) category, the mindshare of AlienVault OSSIM is 1.9%, down from 4.3% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Splunk Enterprise Security is 7.4%, down from 10.0% 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 Security7.4%
AlienVault OSSIM1.9%
Other90.7%
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

"I recommend it due to the experience of the people running it."
"The threat alerts it gives me from time to time on harmful code within the network, or if they are generating any network traffic, are very useful."
"The most valuable features of AlienVault OSSIM are vulnerability assessment, network intrusion detection system, response to critical events, and awareness of the whole network."
"The initial setup is straightforward."
"The solution has a very good open source community, and whenever we have problems, we are always able to resolve it online."
"The product is majorly used for threat detection of the agents on servers and endpoints."
"You can customize the dashboards as well as the reporting."
"The most valuable feature is the logging capability."
"The initial setup is really straightforward. It's one of the easiest installations."
"The additional vendors we've brought on board, particularly the elastic, have been quite beneficial."
"Splunk Enterprise Security helps my SOC team prioritize and investigate high-fidelity alerts more effectively by enabling us to quickly gather information, collaborate, and provide various teams with access to the same information, allowing them to follow the workflow to complete the task."
"Splunk helps us be more proactive. We can take predictive action to identify and block threats so that nothing harmful gets into the system."
"The best features I've experienced over the past six years with Splunk Enterprise Security are the ability to create use cases and the flexibility to customize searches and use cases based on our specific requirements."
"The SIEM is the most valuable feature of the product."
"Splunk allows us to customize processing and dashboards, which helps us take care of our customers' needs."
"The data representation options in the dashboards are excellent."
 

Cons

"I don't like to work on OSSIM because it is unpredictable."
"AlienVault OSSIM is costly."
"AlienVault OSSIM’s configuration and integration could be a little easier."
"It's so hard to configure and explore something new on it."
"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."
"GUI could be improved."
"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."
"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."
"Sometimes talking through email isn't the most effective method, as they go through troubleshooting steps we've already taken, which requires additional back-and-forth communication."
"Enterprise security: Splunk must work on clarifying the solution to customers and explain how to gain more from it."
"Splunk Enterprise Security can be improved mainly from the user interface regarding the visualizations. They are working on it, yet there are only five to ten very basic visualizations."
"There is improvement needed when importing from some types of data sources."
"We would like more integrations with other cloud products, not just AWS, e.g., Azure."
"Splunk's implementation process for managing multiple indexes can be complex, especially when dealing with a large number of components."
"The most significant challenges I face when using Splunk Enterprise Security for advanced threat detection include not having enough time to be in it, the resources and people to also be in there, and trying to configure it and teach people how to use it. A lack of resources prevents us from giving it the attention it needs."
"For instance, if a DLP operations analyst accesses the platform, it should guide them to navigate predefined content for their role. That's something I've already mentioned to them, and I'm eager to see what happens next."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"AlienVault OSSIM is free."
"We are using the community version, which can be used for free."
"OSSIM is free."
"The tool's licensing costs are yearly."
"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."
"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."
"The licensing fees for the non-community edition are paid on an annual basis, and there are no costs in addition to this."
"I think that most of the log analytics solutions are expensive and I'm not sure if it's worth it."
"Splunk is definitely not a cheap solution. It is an expensive product."
"Personnel costs are saved by not having to involve the domain developers from multiple teams when tracing a problem that spans multiple platforms."
"We had a yearly subscription."
"The pricing seems good relative to the other vendors that we have had here. However, they need to find ways to be more flexible with the licensing and be able to deal with situations where we start generating more logs. Maybe having some controls in the Splunk interface to turn it off, so we don't have to change anything in our application."
"Splunk is really expensive compared to all the other tools on the market, including Microsoft Sentinel."
"Pricing and licensing is quite expensive. But for the value the product provides, it seems at par in the market."
"I have no opinion on pricing."
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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
12%
Financial Services Firm
9%
Manufacturing Company
8%
Financial Services Firm
13%
Computer Software Company
12%
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 Enterprise263
 

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.
879,711 professionals have used our research since 2012.