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ELK Kibana 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:
 

Categories and Ranking

ELK Kibana
Average Rating
7.2
Number of Reviews
4
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
Splunk Enterprise Security
Average Rating
8.4
Reviews Sentiment
7.3
Number of Reviews
380
Ranking in other categories
Log Management (2nd), Security Information and Event Management (SIEM) (1st), IT Operations Analytics (1st)
 

Featured Reviews

KJ
Engineer at Raytheon Technologies
Visualization tools are optimized providing us with increased flexibility
One area that could be improved is security. Being an open source product, if you want to add security, if you want to add authentication, you've got to use a third party plugin that may or may not cost you, or alternatively upgrade to their subscription service, which is a downside as well. I think the types of visualizations are nice, but I think there's room to add more without having to go to third party plugins to do that. Just comparing the total number of visualizations that it provides compared to Grafana, you can see that it's lacking. The UI experience isn't as rich as it is with Grafana or certain other tools. I would like to see better authentication options, typical authentication options, like active directory and LDAP as well, just a richer UI with more graph type options.
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 optimization and flexibility of visualization tools."
"The automatic update of the graphs from a dashboard is very convenient."
"Having a tool where you can find logs that were generated months ago, and being able to search over a long period of time, is great."
"The feature that I have found most valuable with Splunk is the ability to sift through a bunch of data very quickly."
"The varied prebuilt feature is the most valuable because it ensures that we have complete coverage over all of the key questions."
"I have not seen any outages in the product in the past two years that it has been running in our company, so I think it is good when it comes to the stability part."
"Deployment server for deploying changes in one go."
"The product provides visibility and enables us to correlate data and generate alerts."
"The solution has proven to be quite stable."
"Splunk Enterprise Security provides the foundation for unified threat detection, investigation, and response, enabling fast identification of critical issues."
"The solution is stable and reliable."
 

Cons

"This solution should allow the user to combine two indices into one graph."
"Having a kind of wizard that would help you when you are typing your search would make it easier and quicker to refine your search, and ultimately find what you are looking for."
"Security could be improved thereby avoiding the necessity of a third party plugin."
"Splunk Enterprise Security can be improved by having more focus on the data health monitoring aspect, which will definitely be helpful."
"​Not even Splunk's support guy, who came to our firm, could help with defining proper role management.​"
"Search head clustering is often temperamental in its current state and should be improved, replaced by something better, or be reverted to search head pooling."
"The biggest thing with Splunk is making sure that the documentation is maintained."
"Sometimes, there is latency in the logs."
"Custom visualizations are real hard. While the default visualizations are good, creating enhanced visualizations are complex."
"Splunk Enterprise Security can improve in terms of probably being able to talk to additional sources."
"Improving the infrastructure behind Splunk Enterprise Security is vital—enhanced cores, CPUs, and memory should be prioritized to support better processing power."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

Information not available
"The price of Splunk Enterprise Security is high."
"Our ROI is high."
"Its pricing model can be improved."
"Splunk Enterprise Security is not at all cost-friendly to be deployed in very small enterprises like start-ups."
"Splunk is priced higher than other solutions."
"The pricing depends on the bandwidth of an organization and is good compared to some SIEM tools. IBM, for example, is quite costly. But Microsoft Sentinel is notably cheaper."
"I remember Splunk being relatively affordable. Kibana was more reasonable, but you get more with Splunk. If I was suggesting something, I would probably suggest Splunk because it is better to pay a little bit more and get a lot more."
"Splunk Enterprise Security is expensive."
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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
No data available
Financial Services Firm
12%
Computer Software Company
10%
Manufacturing Company
9%
Government
6%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
No data available
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business112
Midsize Enterprise50
Large Enterprise266
 

Questions from the Community

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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

Sprint, Grab, Volkswagen, Autopilot, Voyages-SNCF.com, Just Eat, Accenture, Dell, Verizon Wireless, Kaidee, Green Man Gaming, Compare Group, Tango, Quizlet
Splunk has more than 7,000 customers spread across over 90 countries. These customers include Telenor, UniCredit, ideeli, McKenney's, Tesco, and SurveyMonkey.
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