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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
380
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 solution has a very good open source community, and whenever we have problems, we are always able to resolve it online."
"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 product is easy to use."
"AlienVault OSSIM is an enterprise solution that sells easily. It is rated highly by organizations."
"AlienVault OSSIM's GUI is very user-friendly."
"You pay monthly for the solution. I think it's one of the best products. If you compare with other companies, like LogRhythm, etc., the top 8 or 10 CMs, I think Alien Vault has the best price-performance ratio."
"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."
"Asset discovery is good."
"There are a lot of third-party applications that can be installed."
"I like Splunk's automated threat detection and orchestration capabilities. Splunk offers a single solution for analyzing, aggregating, correlating, monitoring, reporting, visualizing, etc. You can get all of these capabilities in one place. On top of that, it provides a cloud, testing, on-premise, and hybrid solution, giving customers more flexibility for their use cases."
"Overall, I would rate it a nine out of ten."
"The compatibility with the add-ons helps us add more data in the same compatible format and use data models to elaborate and make it faster."
"Low barrier to start searching with the ability to normalize data on the fly."
"It is easy to use in any environment."
"I find the process for customizing, developing, testing, deploying, and refining detections in Splunk Enterprise Security effective."
"I would assess the stability and reliability of Splunk Enterprise Security as good, as I have not had any issues with it."
 

Cons

"There needs to be more support or some kind of training program so users can self-learn the system more effectively."
"The initial setup was a bit complex. You've got to do a lot of reading. It's not an intuitive implementation."
"AlienVault OSSIM’s configuration and integration could be a little easier."
"The user interface needs to be friendlier across the board."
"AlienVault OSSIM gives unwanted notifications."
"I don't like to work on OSSIM because it is unpredictable."
"It's under heavy traffic. If you have heavy traffic, the system is slow."
"The user interface could be improved."
"I would evaluate customer service and technical support as frustrating at times."
"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."
"The GUI, now called Mission Control, which serves as issue management or ticket management, falls below what would be considered industry standards."
"I encounter issues such as downtime, bugs, glitches, and unbox errors."
"Splunk Enterprise Security is complicated in terms of developing specific cybersecurity use cases."
"DMC should be a little more intuitive with better dashboarding. Seeing the cause of data flow can be tough to track down."
"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."
"Improving the infrastructure behind Splunk Enterprise Security is vital—enhanced cores, CPUs, and memory should be prioritized to support better processing power. When we execute heavy, resource-intensive queries over long periods, the performance dips."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"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."
"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."
"OSSIM is free."
"The tool's licensing costs are yearly."
"The licensing fees for the non-community edition are paid on an annual basis, and there are no costs in addition to this."
"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."
"The pricing model is based on the number of gigabytes that you ingest into the Splunk system. So it can be an expensive solution."
"We had a yearly subscription."
"Splunk Enterprise Security is expensive."
"The price of Splunk Enterprise Security fluctuates based on the customer, but I believe it's quite costly, especially for our clientele."
"It's more expensive than the other tools, but it's worth it. Every penny is worth it."
"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."
"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."
"Splunk can be an expensive solution. It all depends on how we configure the alerts and the events from the endpoints. You can save some money if you do that correctly. If not, it becomes 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
Comms Service Provider
12%
Computer Software Company
11%
Financial Services Firm
9%
Manufacturing Company
9%
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 Business112
Midsize Enterprise50
Large Enterprise266
 

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.
882,961 professionals have used our research since 2012.