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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 threat policies of the solution are always very advanced and the best in the market. They are very persistent in terms of keeping up with security protocols."
"Inbuilt IDS, inbuilt integration with threat intelligence platform and with vulnerability assessment modules."
"AlienVault OSSIM is an enterprise solution that sells easily. It is rated highly by organizations."
"Asset discovery is good."
"The solution has a very good open source community, and whenever we have problems, we are always able to resolve it online."
"There are a lot of people you will find using OSSIM since they are also offering OTX as a service"
"The product is majorly used for threat detection of the agents on servers and endpoints."
"I recommend it due to the experience of the people running it."
"Generally speaking, their support is pretty good and their response time is pretty good."
"Splunk Enterprise Security's dashboards are a key asset."
"It definitely does help with both auditing and as well as regular monitoring. SOC does more monitoring, but ES also gives you other features that are auditing-related. The dashboards are also beneficial."
"Being able to aggregate detection and alerts from various sources is valuable. Like everyone else, we have a wide range of tools in our shop. We are able to stop at one spot and look at all the data. All the data is able to come through, and we can then jump from source to source or index to index. We can dig deep whenever we need to and get a good high-level understanding."
"The ability to quickly search logs, performance data, and other inputs has helped tremendously with troubleshooting."
"Splunk has give us the capability to easily track problems and their status."
"The product has a good security posture."
"The solution has made us more secure."
 

Cons

"It's so hard to configure and explore something new on it."
"I suggest more in-built rules based on modern threats and environments to make it a more competitive solution."
"The documentation could be improved."
"There needs to be more support or some kind of training program so users can self-learn the system more effectively."
"The user interface needs to be friendlier across the board."
"I don't like to work on OSSIM because it is unpredictable."
"We need more dashboards and we need more customization for dashboards."
"The initial setup was a bit complex. You've got to do a lot of reading. It's not an intuitive implementation."
"I think the only thing lacking is that there are some answers that I couldn't find about the tool without reaching out to support, and it had to be escalated to the engineering team."
"I've noticed that onboarding data from various multi-cloud sources and diverse products, such as security network devices, can be challenging."
"Splunk Enterprise Security could be cheaper."
"The GUI can be improved to include some of the capabilities that other BI solutions have."
"Splunk's reporting functionality would benefit from enhanced customization capabilities, allowing users to tailor reports to their specific needs for better data visualization and analysis."
"I think the pricing aspect of Splunk Enterprise Security is quite high compared to other products, which I hear from most of my customers."
"I think the machine learning should be emphasized. Now, it's really important to analyze Big Data, data mining. A SIEM solution, like Splunk, needs an improved data mining solution, artificial intelligence."
"They can incorporate the SOAR solution within the actual product so that we do not require two different products, two different installations, and two different pricing methods. In regards to UBA, I am familiar with the UBA that existed two years ago. I am not updated about it today, but two years ago, UBA required such an amount of data that from a cost perspective, it was not worth it. When you compare it to what you get out of the box with Microsoft Sentinel without additional costs, there is no match."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"AlienVault OSSIM is free."
"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."
"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."
"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 an open-source solution."
"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."
"Splunk is not free."
"Licensing is a yearly, one-time cost."
"Splunk is a bit pricier, but the benefits and ROI are huge."
"The price of Splunk is reasonable."
"The price of Splunk Enterprise Security is reasonable, falling somewhere in the middle range."
"I assume that the pricing is reasonable, because if it was too costly, there are other alternatives."
"It is expensive, but it is a good tool. It is worth the cost."
"My experience with the solution's setup cost, pricing, and licensing was really good."
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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.
882,260 professionals have used our research since 2012.