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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

"The optimization and flexibility of visualization tools."
"The stability of this solution is fantastic, as it has not failed us for months and we use it extensively."
"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 automatic update of the graphs from a dashboard is very convenient."
"The user interface is very good, and the data visualization is simple and user-friendly."
"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."
"With Splunk, we got more insights out of our data as it includes machine and secure data."
"Splunk Enterprise Security's risk-based alerting has been a game-changer for us, adding intelligence to alerts by considering behavioral or internal asset-based criteria, effectively helping us prioritize alerts and filtering out noise that can be ignored."
"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."
"It scales better in the cloud than on-premise."
"I find the process for customizing, developing, testing, deploying, and refining detections in Splunk Enterprise Security effective."
"We use the solution as a log collector, and to analyze and provide alerts from the IT instructor."
"Correlating data across different systems via one interface will allow you to know your environment or identify incident data in ways you never imagined."
"Splunk has a wide range of features that customers use to find and analyze all kinds of logs."
 

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."
"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."
"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."
"This solution should allow the user to combine two indices into one graph and it should provide a unique count."
"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."
"Some of the queries are difficult to run and have room for improvement."
"The search query seems slow, but I am not sure if that is just because it is searching millions upon millions of lines of text."
"If it could be made available as a service, this would be much better than as a product."
"The first tier support is as bad as it is most places and getting worse all the time."
"There is improvement needed when importing from some types of data sources. Most of the time you have to do some customization for the data because not everything is working the way it should."
"I've ever used it, just studied it."
"Splunk can improve regex/asset analysis as we do not want to crawl until it is done."
"The main improvement needed in Splunk Enterprise Security is its system visibility after installation."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

Information not available
"I would highly recommend anyone evaluating this option to download the free trial which allows for the ingestion of 500MB of data per day in order to get a feel for what Splunk does at its core. It will get pricey once your ingestion rates start to sky rocket, but I would consider it expensive given the amount of information that it allows you to analyze and react on straight out-of-the-box."
"Luckily, we come under a large federal agency, and before the pandemic, they signed a large enterprise license agreement. It worked out great and to our advantage because we are a small organization. We got a 300 gig license, and we just did not have the buying power to be able to get products cheaply. Because we all partnered together under the agency umbrella, we were able to get Splunk Enterprise Security, UBA, and ITSI for cheap. This was good considering the fact that some of these premium apps require a minimum number of users, and we do not have the number of people needed to even justify buying it."
"The cost is on the high end, which makes it difficult for some organizations to use."
"Splunk is priced higher than other solutions."
"The licensing model can be expensive, but the value it provides is significant."
"You will eat up whatever you purchase quickly. The level of insights that Splunk empowers is addictive."
"The pricing seems good relative to the other vendors that we have had here. However, they need to find ways to be more flexible with the licensing and be able to deal with situations where we start generating more logs. Maybe having some controls in the Splunk interface to turn it off, so we don't have to change anything in our application."
"We had a yearly subscription."
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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
12%
Computer Software Company
9%
Manufacturing Company
9%
Government
6%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
No data available
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business112
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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