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

Elastic Security vs Graylog vs Splunk Enterprise Security comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive Summary

Review summaries and opinions

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

Mindshare comparison

As of April 2025, in the Log Management category, the mindshare of Elastic Security is 3.5%, down from 6.7% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Graylog is 6.6%, up from 5.7% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Splunk Enterprise Security is 7.4%, down from 11.1% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Log Management
 

Featured Reviews

SyedAli17 - PeerSpot reviewer
Centralized monitoring improves security posture through rapid data processing
The processing part of Elastic Security ( /products/elastic-security-reviews ) is very interesting for us since we handle almost 7,000 to 8,000 alerts per minute. We require rapid processing speed for alerts and event data, and Elastic Security is very efficient at handling this level of data. Additionally, Elastic Security helps improve the security posture of Pakistan through centralized visibility and real-time processing.
Andrey Mostovykh - PeerSpot reviewer
Real-time analysis, easy setup, and open source
We stopped using it for analytics because of its price, and at the moment, we are using it mostly for log centralization. If you use it with high traffic for analytical purposes, as well as for the logs, the infrastructure costs are unbelievable. Graylog is a great product backed by Elasticsearch as the storage and query engine. It is just an interface on top of Elasticsearch and some Elasticsearch management. The indexes that are kept in Elasticsearch are managed by Graylog software. Elasticsearch is a decent product, but it's very infrastructure-heavy. It requires lots of resources, and if you make a mistake with provisioning, you are likely to not get a cluster back. We had a couple of outages like that, and we hated that. So, we ended up over-provisioning resources just to avoid such situations from happening. If you have a whole team trying to fix the Graylog instance for two days, that's a bit too much. That may be my Norwegian take on it, but the engineering resources are expensive. It's better to just provision the infrastructure. Overall, the product is great, and the features are just fine, but the infrastructure cost is what is killing it. The infrastructure cost is the main issue. I like the rest. If the infrastructure costs could be lower, it would be fantastic. I'm not sure if they can improve the infrastructure cost with the way Elasticsearch is. If they keep using Elasticsearch, maybe there are some opportunities there, or they can support other backends with cheaper storage. They could have a different backend to replace Elasticsearch or do some tweaks to Elasticsearch to reduce the costs. There could be partial parsing of logs or parsing on demand so that when you write data through Graylog to Elasticsearch, it doesn't need to crunch in every detail requiring that much CPU.
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.

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 of Elastic Security is that you can install agents, and they are not separately licensed."
"The indexes allow you to get your results quickly. The filtering and log passing is the advantage of Logstash."
"It is scalable."
"Elastic Security is cost-effective compared to Defender and CrowdStrike."
"Elastic has a lot of beats, such as Winlogbeat and Filebeat. Beats are the agents that have to be installed on the terminals to send the data. When we install beats or Elastic agents on every terminal, they don't overload the terminals. In other SIEM solutions such as Splunk or QRadar, when beats or agents are installed on endpoints, they are very heavy for the terminals. They consume a lot of power of the terminals, whereas Elastic agents hardly consume any power and don't overload the terminals."
"I use the stack every morning to check the errors and it's just so clear. I don't see any disadvantage to using Logstash."
"The most valuable features are the speed, detail, and visualization. It has the latest standards."
"The solution has a good community surrounding it for lots of helpful documentation for troubleshooting purposes."
"We have scaled from a single machine installation (a VM with a Graylog + ES + MongoDB) to (2 Graylog + 2 ES + 3 MongoDB). This was done smoothly with a minimal impact on logging."
"The solution's most valuable feature is its new interface."
"Real-time UDP/GELF logging and full text-based searching."
"I am very proud of how very stable the solution is."
"UDP is a fast and lightweight protocol, perfect for sending large volumes of logs with minimal overhead."
"Storing logs in Elasticsearch means log retrieval is extremely fast, and full text search is available by default."
"Allowing us to set up alerts and integrate with platforms we already use, such as Slack and OpsGenie to alert users of these errors proactively, is also a very useful feature."
"The ability to write custom alerts is key to information security and compliance."
"The stock analysts and security people use one single dashboard (one single location) to check our logs."
"We evaluated several solutions and selected Splunk due to the functionality and cost."
"The client site login is pretty extensible and probably cost-effective."
"Its compatibility with other SIEMS is very useful."
"To get visibility from your network devices, servers, and security devices is a great feature."
"Our clients are easily able to modify and evolve their implementations."
"The most valuable features are how stable and easy to use Splunk is."
"The completeness of the solution is what we like the most."
 

Cons

"I think because we are a cybersecurity company, the thing that can be improved is the prebuilt tools, especially quality. Compared to its competitor, they still have fewer prebuilt security rules. Elastic Security, in terms of generating alerts, cannot group the same products into one another. Even though the alerts are the same, they still generate them one by one. So, it is very noisy in our dashboard. I would like the Elastic Security admin to group all the same alarms into one alarm so that our dashboard is not noisy."
"In terms of what could be improved with Elastic, in some use cases, especially on the advanced level, they are not ready made, so you'll have to write some scripts."
"Elastic Security consumes a lot of resources, requiring a substantial deployment setup."
"The price of this product could be improved, especially the additional costs. I would also like to see better-quality graphics."
"This solution is very hard to implement."
"I would like more ways to manage permissions and restrict access to certain users."
"The tool should improve its scalability."
"We'd like better premium support."
"With technical support, you are on your own without an enterprise license."
"The biggest problem is the collector application, as we wanted to avoid using Graylog Collector Sidecar due to its architecture."
"Graylog needs to improve their authentication. Also, the fact that Graylog displays logs from the top down is just ridiculous."
"I hope to see improvements in Graylog for more interactivity, user-friendliness, and creating alerts. The initial setup is complex."
"Graylog could improve the process of creating rules. We have to create them manually by doing parses and applying them. Other SIEM solutions have basic rules and you can create and get more events of interest."
"Graylog can improve the index rotation as it's quite a complex solution."
"We ran into problems with Elasticsearch throwing a circuit-breaking exception due to field data size being too large. It turned out that the heap size directly impacted this size in a high-throughput environment, causing unexplained instability in Graylog. We were able to troubleshoot on the Elasticsearch size, but we should have been able to reference some minimum requirements for Graylog to know that our settings weren't sufficient."
"When it comes to configuring the processing pipeline, writing the rules can be very tedious, especially since the documentation isn't extensive on how the functions provided for these rules work."
"In the next release, they should include machine learning-based rules that would streamline the process of finding anomalies."
"I do not like the pricing model. It is expensive."
"The solution has a high learning curve for users. It's a little complicated when you're trying to figure out all the features and what they do."
"Splunk has a steeper learning curve, making it feel less user-friendly."
"The analytics of Splunk could be improved."
"The support that is included with the standard licensing fee is very bad."
"An area of improvement would be the licensing of the solution. They need a free license, which would allow faster lead times."
"The product was designed for security and IT with business intelligence needs, such as PDF exporting, but this has not been the highest priority. While the functionality is there, it could be developed more."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"I can say that the product is cheaply priced."
"The price is reasonable. It probably costs the same as ArcSight and LogRhythm SIEM. FortiSIEM might cost less than Elastic Security. There are no hidden or additional costs."
"We use the open-source version, so there is no charge for this solution."
"The base product is open-source but if you need advanced security features then you need to pay for the subscription. Elastic Security's price is reasonable in some cases and in other cases it's not."
"Elastic Security is free to use."
"Affordable but with additional costs"
"Compared to other products such as Dynatrace, this is one of the cheaper options."
"This is an open-source product, so there are no costs."
"We are using the free version of the product. However, the paid version is expensive."
"If you want something that works and do not have the money for Splunk or QRadar, take Graylog.​​"
"We're using the Community edition."
"​You get a lot out-of-the-box with the non-enterprise version, so give it a try first."
"Consider Enterprise support if you have atypical needs or setup requirements.​"
"I am using a community edition. I have not looked at the enterprise offering from Graylog."
"Graylog is a free open-source solution. The free version has a capacity limitation of 2 GB daily, if you want to go above this you have to purchase a license."
"I use the free version of Graylog."
"The licensing model can be expensive, but the value it provides is significant."
"The pricing of Splunk Enterprise Security is high."
"It can be tough to determine if you are getting all of the value out of your investment at times."
"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."
"Splunk Enterprise Security is affordable."
"In addition to the licensing fee, there is also a support and maintenance charge."
"The pricing modules could be improved."
"I think we recently switched to the SVC pricing compared to the ingest pricing."
report
Use our free recommendation engine to learn which Log Management solutions are best for your needs.
848,989 professionals have used our research since 2012.
 

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
Computer Software Company
17%
Government
10%
Financial Services Firm
9%
Comms Service Provider
7%
Computer Software Company
18%
Comms Service Provider
10%
Government
7%
Educational Organization
7%
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

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 time...
What do you like most about Elastic Security?
Elastic provides the capability to index quickly due to the reverse indexes it offers. This data is crucial as it con...
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Elastic Security?
Since Elastic Security is community-based, it does not require significant costs. This is beneficial for SMEs as they...
What do you like most about Graylog?
The product is scalable. The solution is stable.
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Graylog?
We are using the free version of the product. However, the paid version is expensive.
What needs improvement with Graylog?
When it comes to configuring the processing pipeline, writing the rules can be very tedious, especially since the doc...
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 a...
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 ingest...
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 monitor...
 

Also Known As

Elastic SIEM, ELK Logstash
Graylog2
No data available
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Texas A&M, U.S. Air Force, NuScale Power, Martin's Point Health Care
Blue Cross Blue Shield, eBay, Cisco, LinkedIn, SAP, King.com, Twilio, Deutsche Presse-Agentur
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 Wazuh, Splunk, Datadog and others in Log Management. Updated: March 2025.
848,989 professionals have used our research since 2012.