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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

"The product is easy to use."
"It has helped us remediate threats in the past by providing significant events that assisted in identifying suspicious activities, such as logins from multiple countries."
"The most valuable features of this solution are the data correlation and vulnerability assessment."
"Network traffic analysis is highly efficient."
"The initial setup is straightforward."
"The dashboard is the solution's most valuable aspect. It brings everything into one central point where I can actually look at it and go, "Okay, I understand what's going on.""
"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."
"What is nice about the solution is that it makes it easy to build the queries, search for the events and then do analysis."
"The solution is very fast and succinct."
"I would definitely recommend Splunk Enterprise Security because if you are really concerned about security and want to follow compliance rules, this product is really helpful."
"We can ingest and correlate data from virtually any type of system."
"The technical support has been very good. They are very responsive and have been helpful."
"Speeds up root cause analysis and can help identify issues that your organization never realized were occurring."
"It has a big user base, so the community is useful."
"What Splunk does, and really is why it is a choice platform, is that it speaks all of those languages, no matter what IT discipline you are in."
 

Cons

"The user interface needs to be friendlier across the board."
"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."
"AlienVault OSSIM failed to provide our company a full insight, while also giving out a lot of false positives."
"The incidence reporting could be better."
"AlienVault OSSIM should improve the deployment and make it unified like the USM."
"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."
"They can add more compliance templates."
"We can only increase the environment. For instance, with an ES server, we cannot make a cluster of ES. If you have two servers and want to make a cluster of these two servers for ES, that is not possible."
"One issue is that we are getting a lot of false positives. We are trying to reduce them by customizing the default rules, changing thresholds, and using white-listing and black-listing. It's getting better and better as a result. But they need to build components that would reduce the false positives."
"Splunk Enterprise Security can be improved mainly from the user interface regarding the visualizations."
"I encounter issues such as downtime, bugs, glitches, and unbox errors."
"Splunk Enterprise Security offers a vast amount of information to learn and comprehend, resulting in a challenging initial learning curve."
"Splunk's high cost, despite its recognition in our region, prevents many organizations from adopting Splunk Enterprise Security, suggesting there's room for improvement in their pricing strategy."
"There is improvement needed when importing from some types of data sources."
"The support and the pricing can be better"
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"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."
"The tool's licensing costs are yearly."
"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."
"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 free."
"AlienVault OSSIM is an open-source solution."
"It is expensive. That is why many customers have moved to IBM QRadar. The price is definitely a challenge for customers."
"Splunk Enterprise Security is an expensive solution."
"I think we recently switched to the SVC pricing compared to the ingest pricing."
"It is not cheap."
"Splunk can be expensive, as its licensing is based on the daily data ingestion volume."
"It is a pretty high cost solution, but if your organization has the funds, it can bring many benefits."
"It is pretty straightforward and based on the sizing. If I compare it with other competitors, it makes sense."
"The pricing model is based on the number of gigabytes that you ingest into the Splunk system. So it can be an expensive solution."
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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.