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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
386
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 optimization and flexibility of visualization tools."
"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 stability of this solution is fantastic, as it has not failed us for months and we use it extensively."
"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."
"The most valuable features are the logs, which allow us to identify what happened and who interacted with the web repository."
"Splunk has provided a venue for us to determine student engagement during COVID, for which we didn't really have any other way except by looking at data that we captured off of our student systems and our authentication servers to see who's logging in, and who's logging out, and for how long they've been logged in."
"Splunk simplifies the information, and it gives you charts and different means of seeing that information, making it easily understandable for people."
"The initial setup is simple, not very complex. Initial deployment takes around 10 to 15 minutes to set up the entire base for Splunk including all three tiers."
"We are satisfied with Splunk Enterprise Security, and it comes with a wide number of out-of-the-box applications which do help us to fix the problems."
"I would assess the stability and reliability of Splunk Enterprise Security as good, as I have not had any issues with it."
"The stability of Splunk Enterprise Security is very impressive; it is a very stable product."
"You can use it to gather syslog messages from anything."
 

Cons

"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."
"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 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."
"Populating data sometimes is also difficult for the user."
"​Not even Splunk's support guy, who came to our firm, could help with defining proper role management.​"
"The user interface is the main area for improvement."
"It is a challenge to manage the environment in such a way, that one’s log, even with the bandwidth license, isn’t exceeded."
"From the commercial point of view, they have to bring down their costs. It's a bit pricey right now."
"I'd like a dashboard that allows me to connect elements through drag-and-drop functionality."
"The Enterprise Security app could be improved. We have had trouble with it working from the first day."
"In terms of training. I find that some things about Splunk aren't well-explained. I see features and then go to the website but don't find good explanations."
"Due to its high licensing cost, Splunk is out of reach for many organizations."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

Information not available
"Its pricing model can be improved."
"It is a bit costly."
"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."
"Price-wise, if you compare QRadar to Splunk for SIEM functionality then they are in the same range but when you integrate SOAR with these solutions, Splunk takes the lead and is more competitive."
"While licensing can be a concern, there are ways to reduce the licensing costs including filtering some events."
"It is not cheap."
"It is economical than other solutions."
"Unlike other security tools, Splunk provides a fixed amount of gigabytes per day, and we are required to pay for any additional usage beyond that limit, in addition to our monthly cost."
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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 Business116
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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