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ELK Kibana vs Splunk Enterprise Security comparison

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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
7.1
Number of Reviews
466
Ranking in other categories
Log Management (1st), 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.
Sathis-Kumar - PeerSpot reviewer
Senior Manager at Bank of America
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 automatic update of the graphs from a dashboard is very convenient."
"Some visualization tools are optimized for time series like Kibana, which allows you to do both, and we like the flexibility of being able to analyze different types of data."
"The optimization and flexibility of visualization tools."
"The user interface is very good, and the data visualization is simple and user-friendly."
"The stability of this solution is fantastic, as it has not failed us for months and we use it extensively."
"Analyst productivity has risen because they started using Splunk instead of the other product, the third-party SIEMs, and the detection has really improved because they are doing everything by SLA and fitting into these tight schedules, and our clients really love Splunk Enterprise Security."
"The best features Splunk Enterprise Security offers include the ease at which changes can be made as an engineer or as a lead to deploy rules, and the whole process is faster, it is easier, and it just gets done a lot quicker, generating a lot less frustration."
"Splunk is a user-friendly solution."
"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."
"It is quite extensible. It is a platform that we can build our use instead of each case instead of each case being limited or restricted to each capability. This is probably the best feature."
"It's great for finding anonymous threats."
"In the past we used the different application to collect logs. We used SurfWatch and VMware to do so. But, we found that the Splunk has more capacity to do more in less time. They provide a aster speed to index all the events , and this is a huge asset."
"Out-of-the-box, it seems very powerful."
 

Cons

"Security could be improved thereby avoiding the necessity of a third party plugin."
"Populating data sometimes is also difficult for the user."
"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."
"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 and it should provide a unique count."
"I'm a security manager and Splunk is not a good solution for my needs and not as good as other products I've used."
"One complaint is that it is very expensive for organizations."
"Spam has different plugins but by default, the logs are not organized, it shows that there are roll-ups that are out of the box. I saw many plugins that can help improve or extend Splunk's functionality but I haven't tried any of them."
"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."
"Customer support for Splunk Enterprise Security is good; sometimes it's not as fast as I would prefer, but it has been useful."
"Splunk Enterprise Security can be improved with additional features and newer features and tools."
"Deployment is not difficult but the lock sources and configurations can take time."
"My organization does not completely utilize risk-based alerting in Splunk Enterprise Security as it's not fully mature."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

Information not available
"The tool's licensing is good and we haven't received any complaints from the team handling it."
"It can be expensive, especially the licensing costs. However, there is added value in what it can do, not just log aggregation."
"Splunk is really expensive compared to all the other tools on the market, including Microsoft Sentinel."
"The price of Splunk Enterprise Security is reasonable, falling somewhere in the middle range."
"Regarding the product's pricing, I think it has always been difficult to have a conversation with Splunk."
"It is a pretty high cost solution, but if your organization has the funds, it can bring many benefits."
"Splunk can be expensive, as its licensing is based on the daily data ingestion volume."
"I assume that the pricing is reasonable, because if it was too costly, there are other alternatives."
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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
Outsourcing Company
12%
Financial Services Firm
12%
Manufacturing Company
8%
Construction Company
7%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
No data available
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business134
Midsize Enterprise76
Large Enterprise316
 

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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