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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
375
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."
"Aggregation searches have reduced time and difficulty of identifying trends and conditions which need to reviewed."
"Splunk Enterprise Security has helped speed up our security investigations."
"It's basically one of the best SIEM products on the market."
"We can ingest and correlate data from virtually any type of system."
"We evaluated several solutions and selected Splunk due to the functionality and cost."
"The search engine and indexes are fast and optimized, and the report generation dashboard is user-friendly."
"The ability to analyze huge amounts of sales data and accurate prediction of sales forecasting is the most valuable feature."
"The tool drastically reduces SOC overhead. Its integration with our tool suite is great and helps us correlate events. The solution is also a lot faster than our standalone instances."
 

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."
"While there aren't any major areas where the solution has to be improved, there are certain integrations that are still not available. I would specifically like to see legacy applications integrated."
"Features related to content management must be improved."
"Splunk is not very user-friendly. It has a complex architecture in comparison to other solutions on the market."
"The GUI can be improved. Splunk has always suffered from having a kind of goofy UI, it needs some updating."
"Free-floating panels in the dashboards are like a glass table."
"It would be nice to have more advanced UEBA in Splunk Enterprise Security. Additionally, it would be beneficial if they offered more threat intel feeds for free."
"The most significant challenges I face when using Splunk Enterprise Security for advanced threat detection are the false positive alerts."
"Splunk is more expensive than other solutions."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

Information not available
"Splunk Enterprise Security is a worthwhile investment given the comprehensive range of features it offers."
"Although Splunk is an expensive product, it is designed to be utilized across your organization in order to maximize your ROI and lower your TCO."
"I think we recently switched to the SVC pricing compared to the ingest pricing."
"I think that most of the monitoring solutions are expensive."
"It is a bit costly."
"It is expensive, but it is a good tool. It is worth the cost."
"The solution is a little expensive."
"Splunk is expensive based on our current requirements, but it's obviously worth what we pay."
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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
13%
Computer Software Company
11%
Manufacturing Company
9%
Government
7%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
No data available
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business109
Midsize Enterprise50
Large Enterprise264
 

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.
Find out what your peers are saying about Salesforce, Apache, Splunk and others in Data Visualization. Updated: January 2026.
880,844 professionals have used our research since 2012.