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Elastic Security vs SolarWinds Security Event Manager comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Sep 18, 2024

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

Elastic Security
Ranking in Security Information and Event Management (SIEM)
5th
Average Rating
7.6
Reviews Sentiment
6.7
Number of Reviews
63
Ranking in other categories
Log Management (7th), Endpoint Detection and Response (EDR) (16th), Security Orchestration Automation and Response (SOAR) (6th), Extended Detection and Response (XDR) (8th)
SolarWinds Security Event M...
Ranking in Security Information and Event Management (SIEM)
22nd
Average Rating
7.8
Reviews Sentiment
6.7
Number of Reviews
26
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
 

Mindshare comparison

As of March 2025, in the Security Information and Event Management (SIEM) category, the mindshare of Elastic Security is 6.9%, down from 9.5% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of SolarWinds Security Event Manager is 0.6%, down from 0.7% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Security Information and Event Management (SIEM)
 

Featured Reviews

Nikhil-Kumar - PeerSpot reviewer
Customizable with great dashboards but the premium support is poor
The initial setup can be complex if you don't have technical knowledge. However, once it is deployed, it works well. I'm not sure how long it took to deploy. I wasn't there when it was set up and configured. We have an internal team that handles deployment and maintenance. It doesn't require too many people to deploy. Five or six people would be enough. However, for 24/7 monitoring, you need to have someone always on it.
Alex Kinyanjui - PeerSpot reviewer
A stable and scalable solution that provide 24/7 monitoring
We have to protect customer data, including any PII, accessed via the internet terminal. Additionally, we need to monitor events from network devices and servers that may raise suspicion, allowing us to analyze them and determine what is occurring. SolarWinds affected your overall security costs. Considering the nature of our traffic, it has been very effective. We have proactively identified and addressed issues before they escalate into incidents. I've noticed a reduced investment in handling event-related cases with SolarWinds Security Event Manager. This reduction includes reducing human resources and the time required for teams to provide 24/7 monitoring. Consequently, there has been a significant decrease in costs. Additionally, the platform enables us to address issues before they escalate into incidents, thus preventing revenue leakage. As a result, the organization experiences reduced costs and avoids revenue leakage. Since the SolarWinds Security Event Manager implementation, the total budget allocated to security has been reduced by close to five percent. Initially, there was a heavy investment in that aspect, but we have observed this reduction in the allocated budget for the security team. Since implementing SolarWinds Security Event Manager, the team members' pressure has been reduced. They can now concentrate on more critical tasks and development, promoting growth within their department rather than solely focusing on incident monitoring. I recommend the solution. Overall, I rate the solution an eight out of ten.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"Elastic Security is very customizable, and the dashboards are very easy to build."
"Elastic Security is cost-effective compared to Defender and CrowdStrike."
"What customers found most valuable in Elastic Security feature-wise is the search capability, in particular, the way of writing the search query and the speed of searching for results."
"The tool's functionality is good for overall security and incident response times."
"ELK Logstash is easy and fast, at least for the initial setup with the out of box uses."
"ELK documentation is very good, so never needed to contact technical support."
"Elastic Security offers advanced features such as machine learning and integration with ChatGPT."
"The scalability is good. It can be scaled easily in the production environment."
"It performs network behavior monitoring, log monitoring, and disaster recovery monitoring."
"We had to integrate with other teams, and the infrastructure deployment didn't take long. The integration involves learning with different teams, networking, and configuring various network devices and servers. Infrastructure deployment only took one or two days."
"It has in-depth monitoring capabilities and an easy way for setting up dashboards. I can expand in various areas, or I can reduce areas. It supports different types of breakdowns, filters, and rules. It is very simple for an out-of-the-box type of product. It doesn't take a lot of time to figure it out, which is unlike some of the solutions that I have looked at. It meets all the aspects."
"Some of the rules are most valuable because you can be notified about various things, such as spyware or things that are going on in the internal network."
"SolarWinds' stability is fine. I don't think we've had any software issues."
"We did previously use a different solution, but SolarWinds is much better. It's easy to interact with SolarWinds. It's easy to operate, easy to configure and is generally easier compared to what we were working with before."
"The solution helps me to go back in time and search for different events. For example, if you wanted to know who activated an account; you could go back in time and find out."
"The most valuable feature is the ease of use for the end user."
 

Cons

"Elastic Security's maintenance is hard and its scalability is a challenge. There are complications in scaling and upgrading. The solution needs to also provide periodic upgrade checks."
"Elastic Security can be a bit difficult to use if a person only has experience in SMBs with tools like Zoho. The product can also be difficult for those who have never dealt with query language."
"Anything that supports high availability or ease of deployment in a highly available environment would help to improve this solution."
"The tool should improve its scalability."
"The solution's basic setup takes time, and a lot of effort is required from the beginning to make it actually work."
"The solution does not have a UI and this is one of the reasons we are looking for another solution."
"The problem with ELK is it's difficult to administer. When you have a problem, it can be very, very difficult to rebuild indexes."
"We're using the open-source edition, for now, I think maybe they can allow their OLED plugin to be open source, as at the moment it is commercialised."
"The product should improve the ease with which you can create event alerts. They are not as hard now but you need to have an easier way."
"One of the drawbacks of being so flexible is that it is also a fairly complicated software application to install, configure, and maintain."
"I don't think SolarWinds is scalable enough. It is somewhat limited when I need to deploy it across multiple environments in a distributed architecture."
"The only issue is the pricetag. SolarWinds is a costly solution."
"There is no correlation made between log entries, so no threat information is presented."
"Under the new system, it is not upgradable the way they say. When you try to do an upgrade, it doesn't really work unless you dump everything and start from scratch. You lose a lot of your nodes. Whenever you set your nodes up and everything else, they don't want to bring those nodes back in, so you have to really go back and restructure all your nodes. I went from version 6.5 to version 6.6 and then to version 6.7. I then went to version 2019, and now it is version 2020. It would be good if we can upgrade without having to delete everything and start from scratch. They can maybe build more KPIs and other things for the dashboard. Some of the other systems already have built-in KPIs. SolarWinds is starting to catch up, but it is not there yet. They can include some of the business or industry standards for tracking the time, that is, the meantime to detect (MTTD) and the meantime to resolve (MTTR). They can also find a way to build a KPI that measures the number of instances of port scans experienced in a week or a month."
"SolarWinds should improve its correlation capabilities. The correlation does not automatically detect and reduce the events fast enough. You have to manually do a correlation report, which means the tool is not scalable in many ways."
"There are no multiple dashboards which would allow you to see information side-by-side."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"This is an open-source product, so there are no costs."
"We are using the free, open-source version of 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 Stack is an open-source tool. You don't have to pay anything for the components."
"The tool's pricing is flexible and comes at unit cost. You don't have to pay for everything."
"It's a monthly cost with Elastic SIEM, but I am not sure of the exact cost."
"Compared to other products such as Dynatrace, this is one of the cheaper options."
"The product offers an amazing pricing structure. Price-wise, the product is very competitive."
"The pricing model would benefit from having package deals with other SolarWinds products."
"Licenses can only be purchased in blocks of fifty at a time."
"Licensing is on devices, so if you have many, then this may be high."
"We do a yearly license renewal. For a year, the solution costs roughly $500,000 USD. There are no costs beyond this yearly fee."
"It is in the appropriate mid-range. It is not as expensive as some of the other solutions. It is also not cheap."
"The price of SolarWinds Security Event Manager is reasonable."
"The tool is available at a good price for customers compared to other solutions in the market. I rate the product's price as an eight out of ten."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Computer Software Company
16%
Government
10%
Financial Services Firm
9%
University
7%
Educational Organization
77%
Computer Software Company
4%
Financial Services Firm
3%
University
3%
 

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 times lately using the dashboards we have created with Datadog; they are very good c...
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 contains critical information. The reverse index allows fast data indexing because ...
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Elastic Security?
Elastic Security is considered cost-effective, especially at lower EPS levels. However, a direct comparison was not made due to different pricing structures.
What do you like most about SolarWinds Security Event Manager ?
The solution helps you monitor database instances, application instances, other customer application things, Linux servers, IBM servers, and Oracle servers.
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for SolarWinds Security Event Manager ?
The tool is available at a good price for customers compared to other solutions in the market. I rate the product's price as an eight out of ten.
What needs improvement with SolarWinds Security Event Manager ?
I think the customization area in the tool can be considered as an area of concern where improvements are required In the future, I want to see the tool have better customization abilities with som...
 

Also Known As

Elastic SIEM, ELK Logstash
SolarWinds LEM, Solarwinds SIEM, TriGeo, Log and Event Manager
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Texas A&M, U.S. Air Force, NuScale Power, Martin's Point Health Care
NetSuite, EasyStreet, Legacy Texas Bank, and Energy Federal Credit Union, to name a few.
Find out what your peers are saying about Elastic Security vs. SolarWinds Security Event Manager and other solutions. Updated: March 2025.
842,592 professionals have used our research since 2012.