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Datadog vs Splunk Enterprise Security comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Jan 5, 2025

Review summaries and opinions

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:
 

ROI

Sentiment score
7.1
Datadog enhances efficiency, reduces downtime, and improves ROI by tracking instances, visualizing trends, and resolving performance issues.
Sentiment score
7.2
Splunk Enterprise Security enhances efficiency, reduces costs and personnel, boosts revenue, automates processes, and improves data management for users.
Splunk's cost is justified for large environments with extensive assets.
 

Customer Service

Sentiment score
7.3
Datadog's customer service is proactive and knowledgeable, but technical support quality varies with occasional delays and inconsistencies.
Sentiment score
6.7
Splunk Enterprise Security offers knowledgeable support but encounters response delays, leading users to seek help from community forums.
If you want to write your own correlation rules, it is very difficult to do, and you need Splunk's support to write new correlation rules for the SIEM tool.
The technical support for Splunk met my expectations.
 

Scalability Issues

Sentiment score
7.6
Datadog efficiently scales with infrastructure demands, offering seamless integration and reliability, though cost management is essential.
Sentiment score
7.7
Splunk Enterprise Security is praised for scalability across environments, though on-prem expansion may face cost and planning challenges.
They struggle a bit with pure virtual environments, but in terms of how much they can handle, it is pretty good.
 

Stability Issues

Sentiment score
8.0
Datadog is praised for its reliable stability, minimal disruptions, quick issue resolution, and efficient large-scale data handling.
Sentiment score
7.9
Splunk Enterprise Security is stable and reliable, handling large data efficiently, but requires careful capacity planning for complex queries.
It provides a stable environment but needs to integrate with ITSM platforms to achieve better visibility.
It is very stable.
 

Room For Improvement

Datadog users desire performance improvements, consistent APIs, clearer pricing, better support, enhanced features, and more user-friendly documentation and interface.
Splunk Enterprise Security requires UI, integration, and documentation improvements; users seek better performance, visualizations, licensing, and automation features.
The documentation is adequate, but team members coming into a project could benefit from more guided, interactive tutorials, ideally leveraging real-world data.
There should be a clearer view of the expenses.
What Splunk could do better is to create an API to the standard SIEM tools, such as Microsoft Sentinel.
Splunk Enterprise Security would benefit from a more robust rule engine to reduce false positives.
Splunk could enhance its offerings by incorporating modules for network detection and response and fraud management.
 

Setup Cost

Datadog offers flexible, usage-based enterprise pricing, focusing on host count and log ingestion, requiring careful management to control costs.
Splunk Enterprise Security provides robust features but is costly, especially for small organizations, with complex licensing and potential savings.
The setup cost for Datadog is more than $100.
I saw clients spend two million dollars a year just feeding data into the Splunk solution.
The platform requires significant financial investment and resources, making it expensive despite its comprehensive features.
Splunk is priced higher than other solutions.
 

Valuable Features

Datadog excels with integration, customizable dashboards, and monitoring, offering streamlined setup, centralized data, and enhanced user insights.
Splunk Enterprise Security offers quick data search, integration, real-time alerts, and customizable dashboards for effective multi-cloud threat management.
Our architecture is written in several languages, and one area where Datadog particularly shines is in providing first-class support for a multitude of programming languages.
The technology itself is generally very useful.
Splunk Enterprise Security's most valuable features are its stability and the robust Splunk Search Processing Language.
The Splunk Enterprise Security's threat-hunting capabilities have been particularly useful in later releases.
They have approximately 50,000 predefined correlation rules.
 

Categories and Ranking

Datadog
Ranking in Log Management
3rd
Average Rating
8.6
Reviews Sentiment
7.1
Number of Reviews
188
Ranking in other categories
Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability (1st), Network Monitoring Software (3rd), IT Infrastructure Monitoring (2nd), Container Monitoring (2nd), Cloud Monitoring Software (1st), AIOps (1st), Cloud Security Posture Management (CSPM) (8th)
Splunk Enterprise Security
Ranking in Log Management
1st
Average Rating
8.4
Reviews Sentiment
7.6
Number of Reviews
304
Ranking in other categories
Security Information and Event Management (SIEM) (1st), IT Operations Analytics (1st)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of February 2025, in the Log Management category, the mindshare of Datadog is 6.2%, down from 8.7% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Splunk Enterprise Security is 7.8%, down from 12.0% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Log Management
 

Featured Reviews

Kevin Palmer - PeerSpot reviewer
Useful log aggregation and management with helpful metrics aggregation
Datadog provides us value in three major ways: First, Datadog provides best-in-class functionality in many, if not all, of the products to which we subscribe (infrastructure, APM, log management, serverless, synthetics, real user monitoring, DB monitoring). In my experience with other tools that provide similar functionality, Datadog provides the largest feature set with the most flexibility and the best performance. Second, Datadog allows us to access all of those services in one place. Having to learn and manage only one tool for all of those purposes is a major benefit. Third, Datadog provides significant connectivity between those services so that we can view, summarize, organize, translate and correlate our data with maximum effect. Not needing to manually integrate them to draw lines between those pieces of information is a huge time savings for us.
ROBERT-CHRISTIAN - PeerSpot reviewer
Has many predefined correlation rules and is brilliant for investigation and log analysis
It is very complicated to write your own correlation rules without the help of Splunk support. What Splunk could do better is to create an API to the standard SIEM tools, such as Microsoft Sentinel. The idea would be to make it less painful. In ELK Stack, Kibana is the query language with which you can search log files. I believe Splunk has also a query language in which they search their log files, but once you have identified the log file that you want to use for further security correlation, you want to very quickly transport that into your SIEM tool, such as Microsoft Sentinel. That is something that Splunk could make a little bit less painful because it is a lot of effort to find that log file and forward it. An API with Microsoft Sentinel or a similar SIEM tool would be a good idea.
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Comparison Review

VS
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
Educational Organization
39%
Computer Software Company
10%
Financial Services Firm
10%
Manufacturing Company
5%
Financial Services Firm
15%
Computer Software Company
14%
Manufacturing Company
8%
Government
8%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
 

Questions from the Community

Any advice about APM solutions?
There are many factors and we know little about your requirements (size of org, technology stack, management systems, the scope of implementation). Our goal was to consolidate APM and infra monitor...
Datadog vs ELK: which one is good in terms of performance, cost and efficiency?
With Datadog, we have near-live visibility across our entire platform. We have seen APM metrics impacted several times lately using the dashboards we have created with Datadog; they are very good c...
Which would you choose - Datadog or Dynatrace?
Our organization ran comparison tests to determine whether the Datadog or Dynatrace network monitoring software was the better fit for us. We decided to go with Dynatrace. Dynatrace offers network ...
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...
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Adobe, Samsung, facebook, HP Cloud Services, Electronic Arts, salesforce, Stanford University, CiTRIX, Chef, zendesk, Hearst Magazines, Spotify, mercardo libre, Slashdot, Ziff Davis, PBS, MLS, The Motley Fool, Politico, Barneby's
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 Datadog vs. Splunk Enterprise Security and other solutions. Updated: January 2025.
838,533 professionals have used our research since 2012.