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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
378
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.
reviewer1469784 - PeerSpot reviewer
Senior Manager at a financial services firm with 10,001+ employees
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 automatic update of the graphs from a dashboard is very convenient."
"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 solution allows easy gathering and ingestion of the data."
"We used it to create a custom anomaly detection data model to monitor the activity of our back-end services on an hourly basis relative to the past three months of activity."
"The benefits include the easy integration with other Splunk tools including Splunk UEBA, Splunk ITSI, and Splunk Core. The ease of integration and the organization's experience and familiarity with searching and passing logs through Splunk are the main benefits."
"We are much faster finding and addressing issues with Splunk."
"The security part is useful as it helps secure the entire environment."
"We have created a few custom use cases for Splunk that have helped us detect threats faster. For example, we set up endpoint-related data models and specialized setups for various scenarios. It's more efficient than some other products I've used."
"Splunk Enterprise Security stands out for its ability to integrate with existing security tools, provide informative dashboards, and offer IT Service Assurance functionality that goes beyond basic threat detection to include service performance monitoring."
"Search language is easy to understand and teach to new users."
 

Cons

"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."
"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."
"It needs a better way to export dynamic views without requiring a ton of code and user/pw."
"The biggest thing with Splunk is making sure that the documentation is maintained."
"Being a SIEM solution with a centralized dashboard, we would like to have more options to customize it."
"The AWS add-on is particularly problematic, with most inputs requiring manual writing due to lack of out-of-box functionality."
"There are new services which are coming up. If Splunk can catch up with the speed of Amazon, and with the integration, instead of us waiting for another year or so, that would be good."
"It would be great if I could have a certain dialogue box in Splunk that uses innovative AI tools like ChatGPT, which are available now in the tech department."
"We had some connections issues with the solution at the beginning."
"I would like more assistance with use cases and help with teaching us how to use it once it's installed."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

Information not available
"Splunk can be expensive, as its licensing is based on the daily data ingestion volume."
"This product could use better pricing in general."
"I remember Splunk being relatively affordable. Kibana was more reasonable, but you get more with Splunk. If I was suggesting something, I would probably suggest Splunk because it is better to pay a little bit more and get a lot more."
"I believe that Splunk Enterprise Security is worth the price, but it is expensive."
"It is possible to use a developer's license, which is up to 10GB per day of volume traffic, which is usually enough for most use cases."
"Splunk Enterprise Security is an expensive solution."
"Splunk Enterprise becomes extremely expensive after the 20GB/month license."
"The variables and the flexibility that Splunk provides are helpful, especially in a hybrid and multi-cloud environment."
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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
10%
Manufacturing Company
9%
Government
6%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
No data available
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business110
Midsize Enterprise50
Large Enterprise266
 

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, Apache, Splunk and others in Data Visualization. Updated: January 2026.
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