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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
381
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.
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

"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."
"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 user interface is very good, and the data visualization is simple and user-friendly."
"The automatic update of the graphs from a dashboard is very convenient."
"The stability of this solution is fantastic, as it has not failed us for months and we use it extensively."
"The automatic update of the graphs from a dashboard is very convenient."
"The optimization and flexibility of visualization tools."
"The solution's most valuable feature is risk-based alerting, focusing on building out user risks for individuals throughout the enterprise."
"It's great for finding anonymous threats."
"The technical support has been very good. They are very responsive and have been helpful."
"The risk-based alerting (RBA) is one of the valuable features."
"From a visibility perspective, the solution has significantly improved our organization by providing a single platform to visualize our entire IT landscape."
"The logs on the solution are excellent."
"The metrics and trends that Splunk Enterprise Security generates using all the data points we send allow customers to understand better what their users are doing."
"Splunk Enterprise Security is a very useful application to collect all the logs and also to find out the problems."
 

Cons

"This solution should allow the user to combine two indices into one graph and it should provide a unique count."
"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."
"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."
"Populating data sometimes is also difficult for the user."
"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."
"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."
"Over time I will have more requirements and I can foresee the solution could improve the search algorithm to run and output the data faster."
"The solution's case management system could be further improved to make it easier for analysts to manage cases."
"Splunk is very expensive. The license is based on the volume of the logs ingested. I was responsible for managing the contract with our service integrator. I don't know the precise details of the competing solution, but I have heard that Splunk is more expensive than others. I don't know what the going rate is on the market, but I think there are at least two competitors that are less expensive. We have experienced a few issues with our service providers in terms of log filtering and ingestion, so we continue to pay a bit more per day for our logs."
"Our customers often complain that the price of Splunk is too high."
"Enterprise security: Splunk must work on clarifying the solution to customers and explain how to gain more from it."
"For instance, if a DLP operations analyst accesses the platform, it should guide them to navigate predefined content for their role. That's something I've already mentioned to them, and I'm eager to see what happens next."
"There were only one or two issues related to the user account, but nothing major."
"The prices are complicated as we operate in a small third-world country."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

Information not available
"I believe there is room for improvement in reducing costs, particularly in the financial aspect, as Splunk tends to be pricier compared to other options."
"The price of Splunk is too high for our market."
"Splunk Enterprise Security is expensive."
"It is economical than other solutions."
"It is pretty straightforward and based on the sizing. If I compare it with other competitors, it makes sense."
"This product could use better pricing in general."
"It is expensive, but it is a good tool. It is worth the cost."
"Splunk can be expensive, as its licensing is based on the daily data ingestion volume."
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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
14%
Manufacturing Company
9%
Computer Software Company
9%
Government
5%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
No data available
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business113
Midsize Enterprise50
Large Enterprise267
 

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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