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
7.6
Number of Reviews
304
Ranking in other categories
Log Management (1st), 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

"The optimization and flexibility of visualization tools."
"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 most valuable features for us include its robust log management capabilities, which allow us to efficiently handle and retain logs for extended periods as needed."
"The ability to ingest any data and display it in a way that anyone can understand."
"It is user-friendly. It is more effective than other solutions. The support and help for troubleshooting and the documentation from Splunk make it very effective."
"The solution is very fast and succinct."
"The site is constantly up, and it's been really easy to adjust the data."
"We saw the granularity that we could get from Splunk far exceeded what we already had. We had the ability to have our security team really focus on the platform and stay within the platform, but they could correlate with a variety of other stakeholders, and our stakeholders were growing."
"The additional vendors we've brought on board, particularly the elastic, have been quite beneficial."
"It has virtual visualization, and other products do not."
 

Cons

"Security could be improved thereby avoiding the necessity of a third party plugin."
"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."
"Being able to have a one-stop shop where you have the alert, but then you can generate the case right there from Splunk Enterprise Security instead of having to pivot to another tool such as Mission Control. You do not have to keep bouncing between them, so if you could do it all in one place, that would be great. The new release is supposed to start getting in that direction."
"​On the technical side, it would be nice to see aspects of the recent acquisition of Phantom make it into the core Splunk Enterprise, not just become a part of the premium Enterprise Security.​"
"It is important to make sure that everything is built off of the threat models and all the underlying items within Splunk."
"The ingestion happens quickly, so you can run up the data costs if you use the default settings. It isn't a problem for government agencies in the Saudi market, but many of the corporations in India are small or medium-sized enterprises that cannot afford that kind of ingestion system."
"I've never had too many issues with the stability. Years ago we had indexes crash but that was more on us. We didn't understand how to properly size Splunk."
"Splunk needs to be able to hold more days of data. At the moment it only holds three months of data."
"Splunk could enhance its offerings by incorporating modules for network detection and response and fraud management, along with improving its threat intelligence management capabilities."
"Delays in responses from the technical team can pose challenges for both vendors and clients, especially considering that Splunk applications and machine solutions are critical assets."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

Information not available
"The pricing can be better. We are already considering Elastic because Splunk is too expensive. You have to pay based on per-day ingestion. There should be a more flexible model for the use cases where one day you have a huge amount, and on other days, it is quite less."
"The tool's pricing model is great. You can choose between workloads or volume."
"It is quite expensive."
"It is a pretty high cost solution, but if your organization has the funds, it can bring many benefits."
"Splunk Enterprise Security is an expensive solution."
"I am fine with the licensing, but in terms of the cost, it is expensive for the data that we have. We have an open discussion with our account rep about this."
"The price of Splunk Enterprise Security fluctuates based on the customer, but I believe it's quite costly, especially for our clientele."
"It is economical than other solutions."
report
Use our free recommendation engine to learn which Data Visualization solutions are best for your needs.
838,713 professionals have used our research since 2012.
 

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
16%
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

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, Qlik, Splunk and others in Data Visualization. Updated: January 2025.
838,713 professionals have used our research since 2012.