No more typing reviews! Try our Samantha, our new voice AI agent.

ELK Kibana vs Splunk Enterprise Security comparison

Why PeerSpot?
 

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
7.1
Number of Reviews
467
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 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."
"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's most valuable feature is the criticality of alerts."
"The two features I appreciate most in Splunk Enterprise Security are the content management system and the inter-incident review dashboard."
"The product provides visibility and enables us to correlate data and generate alerts."
"Gives full visibility on operational and security posture in our organization."
"It scales better in the cloud than on-premise."
"You can use it to gather syslog messages from anything."
"I would strongly recommend this product, as it would be very beneficial for service operations and management."
"It's extremely scalable, it's a very robust solution and certainly has the capability of handling far bigger data requirements than a lot of the other tools."
 

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."
"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."
"Security could be improved thereby avoiding the necessity of a third party plugin."
"Populating data sometimes is also difficult for the user."
"The Splunk platform is not unified. We have all of these different tools and they feel a bit disjointed."
"Splunk Enterprise Security can be improved by including backup network detection and response and safe management to the paid platform."
"Splunk is such a large product. Allowing it to be more easily used by people who have not had a lot of training on it would be an improvement."
"In terms of improvement, the dashboards are not up to the mark. If you compare with Tableau and Power BI reports, they are more customized, more user-friendly, and more interactive."
"It needs more thoroughly tested releases. Every new big version (6, 7, etc.) has had so many bugs that it makes me wary of customers upgrading right away."
"More control with Splunk Cloud as it seems a bit limited. I used to manage an on-premise instance of Splunk Enterprise and really liked having more control over it."
"The pricing can be better."
"Splunk Enterprise Security can be improved by addressing the content management interface, which is very outdated, slow, and clunky; sometimes we think things are saved and they haven't."
 

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 subscription is monthly."
"The pricing modules could be improved."
"While licensing can be a concern, there are ways to reduce the licensing costs including filtering some events."
"I work on the technical side, so I don't know precise figures. However, I know that Splunk is a premium product, so it's somewhat costly. Still, you get a lot of unique features for the money."
"Splunk Enterprise Security is expensive."
"Some of the insights that we have obtained as a part of using Splunk have greatly helped us in increasing our revenue in terms of selling our products."
"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."
report
Use our free recommendation engine to learn which Data Visualization solutions are best for your needs.
917,382 professionals have used our research since 2012.
 

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
Outsourcing Company
12%
Financial Services Firm
12%
Manufacturing Company
8%
Construction Company
7%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
No data available
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business135
Midsize Enterprise74
Large Enterprise318
 

Questions from the Community

Ask a question
Earn 20 points
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, SAP and others in Data Visualization. Updated: October 2026.
917,382 professionals have used our research since 2012.