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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
387
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

"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."
"The automatic update of the graphs from a dashboard is very convenient."
"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."
"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."
"Splunk Enterprise Security's most valuable features are its stability and the robust Splunk Search Processing Language, allowing extensive customization and analysis capabilities."
"The UI of Splunk makes it easier for our analysts to move around and see what they need to see."
"Its integration is most valuable. Its UI is also pretty much easy."
"I am enjoying our implementation of risk-based alerting. That has helped very much with cutting out a lot of the noise that we have. It has reduced our alert volume significantly. There is about an 80% reduction."
"Gives full visibility on operational and security posture in our organization."
"It helped us consolidate all our solutions into an easy tool to use for various employees."
"What I appreciate about Splunk Enterprise Security is creating the newest SPL for network traffic and using the risk-based alerting feature that helps my organization by allowing me to learn more information about Splunk every day because it is a big platform."
"The most valuable feature of Splunk is the log monitoring."
 

Cons

"This solution should allow the user to combine two indices into one graph and it should provide a unique count."
"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."
"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."
"Populating data sometimes is also difficult for the user."
"Security could be improved thereby avoiding the necessity of a third party plugin."
"Splunk Enterprise Security can be improved mainly from the user interface regarding the visualizations. They are working on it, yet there are only five to ten very basic visualizations."
"I would like to see ability to master management. In terms of clustering, how it manages clustering needs improvement."
"You do need a lot of training and certification with this product."
"The Enterprise Security app could be improved. We have had trouble with it working from the first day."
"It could be more user friendly, in terms of the end-user experience."
"Splunk needs local technical support."
"Endpoint access is the only issue I can think to mention, even though the endpoint access we have with Cisco is fine."
"The most significant challenges I face when using Splunk Enterprise Security for advanced threat detection are the false positive alerts."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

Information not available
"It's definitely worth it."
"I think that most of the log analytics solutions are expensive and I'm not sure if it's worth it."
"It is expensive. I used to buy it early on, but then they combined it into a higher-up organization. They buy it for multiple systems now. Last time, I paid around 60K for it. There is just the licensing fee. That's all."
"Its price is fair. Like with anything else, if you go into the cloud, different providers cost more, and you are able to throttle back or throttle up. The cost is comparable with anything else."
"I have no opinion on pricing."
"My experience with the solution's setup cost, pricing, and licensing was really good."
"The price is comparable."
"It's more expensive than the other tools, but it's worth it. Every penny is worth it."
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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%
Comms Service Provider
5%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
No data available
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business118
Midsize Enterprise51
Large Enterprise269
 

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.
Find out what your peers are saying about Salesforce, Splunk, Apache and others in Data Visualization. Updated: April 2026.
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