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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
7.6
Number of Reviews
305
Ranking in other categories
Log Management (2nd), Security Information and Event Management (SIEM) (1st), IT Operations Analytics (1st)
 

Featured Reviews

KJ
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.
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

"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 automatic update of the graphs from a dashboard is very convenient."
"The optimization and flexibility of visualization tools."
"It has helped us look at modern technology, as well as penetrate our legacy systems, to see where the bottlenecks are."
"The client site login is pretty extensible and probably cost-effective."
"The flexibility of the solution is quite good."
"Splunk is user-friendly. We can easily customize the monitoring script."
"There are a lot of third-party applications that can be installed."
"It has the ability to correlate data, analyze and review it."
"Splunk simplifies real-time problem identification and resolution by seamlessly integrating existing customer and vendor systems."
"The search lookups are useful."
 

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."
"In the next releases, I would like to see more pricing flexibility."
"The upgrading process could be smoother."
"Sometimes, the data does not match what we're looking for, or the tool contains incorrect data."
"A lot of people are averse to using new tools so if they make it even more user-friendly than it already is, I think that could go a long way."
"I would like some additional AI capabilities to provide additional information about things going wrong and things going well."
"Custom visualizations are real hard. While the default visualizations are good, creating enhanced visualizations are complex."
"Splunk has a steeper learning curve, making it feel less user-friendly."
"Make it easy to use and the cost cheaper. This will help all organisations to implement Splunk."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

Information not available
"I think we recently switched to the SVC pricing compared to the ingest pricing."
"Splunk is not a cheap solution and the license is billed annually."
"It is pretty straightforward and based on the sizing. If I compare it with other competitors, it makes sense."
"It's a yearly subscription."
"While licensing can be a concern, there are ways to reduce the licensing costs including filtering some events."
"Pricing is probably its weakest spot. As compared to some competitors, Splunk is really expensive."
"It is a pretty high cost solution, but if your organization has the funds, it can bring many benefits."
"Splunk's cost is very high. They need to review the pricing. They have to go back and totally readdress the market."
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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
No data available
Financial Services Firm
15%
Computer Software Company
14%
Manufacturing Company
8%
Government
8%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
No data available
 

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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