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

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
378
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

"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 optimization and flexibility of visualization tools."
"The automatic update of the graphs from a dashboard is very convenient."
"The integration and plugin availability are nice, the AI module is also great."
"It has quite extensive support in terms of integration. If you want to do anything, there are tools for that."
"Splunk can extract all kinds of data. There's no limitation on what kind of structured and unstructured data one needs to extract — it can access any kind of data, including machine-generated data."
"I find it beneficial that Splunk Enterprise Security easily integrates with other tools. Due to its excellent API capabilities, it facilitates connections with various cybersecurity tools."
"The dashboard and reporting are very good... It provides very good visibility in a hybrid cloud environment, and you can build custom utilization APIs using Splunk."
"It gives me notifications of notable events."
"It is very easy to use and integrate. There are connectors for every technology."
"The best feature I've seen is the ability to easily change the query based on the dashboard or based on the chart we have to create, allowing any value or metric we want to add to that particular chart while keeping the rest of the dashboard settings intact."
 

Cons

"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."
"This solution should allow the user to combine two indices into one graph."
"Security could be improved thereby avoiding the necessity of a third party plugin."
"It needs to improve the way to install third-party apps and enable installation without logging into splunk.com."
"In terms of the interface, it could include some improvements for the look and feel."
"Splunk can improve its third-party device application plugins."
"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."
"Improving the infrastructure behind Splunk Enterprise Security is vital—enhanced cores, CPUs, and memory should be prioritized to support better processing power."
"The main issue that I have with it is that the field transformations sometimes overlap with those in Splunk Enterprise, and then you get permissions issues that lead to troubles."
"The AWS add-on is particularly problematic, with most inputs requiring manual writing due to lack of out-of-box functionality."
"The system can be intimidating, and sometimes the concepts conveyed in the documentation require adjustment."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

Information not available
"Its pricing model can be improved."
"The pricing modules could be improved."
"I work on the technical side, so I don't know precise figures. However, I know that Splunk is a premium product, so it's somewhat costly. Still, you get a lot of unique features for the money."
"It is expensive. That is why many customers have moved to IBM QRadar. The price is definitely a challenge for customers."
"You will eat up whatever you purchase quickly. The level of insights that Splunk empowers is addictive."
"It is expensive, but it is a good tool. It is worth the cost."
"Splunk is really expensive compared to all the other tools on the market, including Microsoft Sentinel."
"The pricing model is based on the number of gigabytes that you ingest into the Splunk system. So it can be an expensive solution."
report
Use our free recommendation engine to learn which Data Visualization solutions are best for your needs.
882,606 professionals have used our research since 2012.
 

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 Business110
Midsize Enterprise50
Large Enterprise266
 

Questions from the Community

Ask a question
Earn 20 points
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: February 2026.
882,606 professionals have used our research since 2012.