Try our new research platform with insights from 80,000+ expert users

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)
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
375
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

"The most valuable feature is the logging capability."
"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."
"The most valuable features of AlienVault OSSIM are case management, ease of configuration, and investigation."
"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."
"I recommend it due to the experience of the people running it."
"The paid version of the solution has reporting and better scalability options."
"The solution is free to use."
"OSSIM is the only solution that includes the large number of modules that we need: a vulnerability scanner, a network IDS system, a host IDS system."
"The features of Splunk Enterprise Security that I find most valuable are the correlation and correlation data."
"On the cloud, we are pushing through less than half a petabyte of data. So far, it has been fairly stable because it runs on all the underlying AWS infrastructures."
"What I really like is that even if you have already collected the data, you can extract fields and can build searches."
"Splunk Enterprise Security definitely improved our operations."
"It is a very stable solution. I never really had a hiccup with the tool."
"The product is generally stable and forgiving."
"The ease of use and building queries, specifically SQL queries, is notably beneficial as it is easy to build, and the data model itself is very simple."
"Splunk's schema on demand is incredibly useful. I do not have to worry about what my users will need when we onboard their data."
 

Cons

"AlienVault OSSIM should improve the deployment and make it unified like the USM."
"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."
"It's so hard to configure and explore something new on it."
"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."
"Lacking in depth of reporting."
"I suggest more in-built rules based on modern threats and environments to make it a more competitive solution."
"AlienVault OSSIM could improve by having better integration with some of the newer tools."
"Missing capability for audio/video and image processing."
"The training was mostly sales-focused, like how to monitor your sales. It was hard to then come back from doing the training and try to switch it to a cybersecurity focus because all the training we did was sales oriented. The basic training didn't really touch on any kind of cybersecurity use cases or anything like that. That would have been great to see in the training."
"The Enterprise Security app could be improved. We have had trouble with it working from the first day."
"Splunk can be an expensive solution. Technical support could be improved as well."
"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."
"Endpoint access is the only issue I can think to mention, even though the endpoint access we have with Cisco is fine."
"My organization does not completely utilize risk-based alerting in Splunk Enterprise Security as it's not fully mature."
"More training on PetaData using artificial intelligence techniques to identify the events which are not normal and exceptions that would help the organization identify threats and malware on the go with results."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"OSSIM is free."
"AlienVault OSSIM is expensive compared to its competitors."
"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 OSSIM is an open-source solution."
"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 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."
"The solution is open source, so it's free to use."
"Splunk Enterprise Security is a bit expensive overall, but it provides good value."
"Splunk's cost is very high. They need to review the pricing. They have to go back and totally readdress the market."
"It is quite expensive."
"I think we recently switched to the SVC pricing compared to the ingest pricing."
"Splunk Enterprise Security incurs a significant cost because of the amount of data we send, but we are fine with the value we're getting for that price."
"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 tool's licensing is good and we haven't received any complaints from the team handling it."
"The Splunk Enterprise Security license is expensive."
report
Use our free recommendation engine to learn which Security Information and Event Management (SIEM) solutions are best for your needs.
881,227 professionals have used our research since 2012.
 

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
11%
Financial Services Firm
9%
Manufacturing Company
8%
Financial Services Firm
13%
Computer Software Company
11%
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 Enterprise264
 

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.
881,227 professionals have used our research since 2012.