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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."
"The automatic update of the graphs from a dashboard is very convenient."
"The automatic update of the graphs from a dashboard is very convenient."
"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 user interface is very good, and the data visualization is simple and user-friendly."
"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."
"I evaluate customer service and technical support as excellent."
"The user interface is excellent, and since I'm using Splunk as a power user, it's easy to create dashboards."
"It is quite extensible; it is a platform where we can build our use cases instead of each case being limited or restricted to each capability, which is probably the best feature."
"It gives us the liberty to do more in terms of use cases."
"In terms of technical support, we don't have any issues, as the professional services which they have extended to us are very, very good."
"Splunk would be my choice for the presentation layer because it comes with inbuilt reports and a dashboard that you can customize."
"What I appreciate the most about the product is the flexibility with data ingestion and searching, which is very powerful; you can do whatever you want with it."
"We primarily use it to correlate logs throughout the enterprise for both searching and use in investigations."
 

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."
"Populating data sometimes is also difficult for the user."
"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."
"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."
"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."
"The technical support still requires more improvement. Often, primary support takes a lot of time and forwards most solutions to the engineering side."
"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."
"I want Splunk Enterprise Security to release more AI and machine learning features in the future."
"Splunk does not build apps. They only go back and validate the apps that somebody has already built. They should have remote consulting support. They have a wonderful solution. They have 24/7 security. Nobody needs to depend on any third party and will therefore just buy Splunk on the cloud."
"It is very complicated to write your own correlation rules without the help of Splunk support."
"The system can be intimidating, and sometimes the concepts conveyed in the documentation require adjustment."
"I'd like to see more integration with more antivirus systems."
"One of the improvement points that Enterprise Security could offer is on-prem training, the availability to have a Splunk representative come out to different sites and actually sit down with the organizations and help them understand."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

Information not available
"Splunk is a bit pricier, but the benefits and ROI are huge."
"The pricing depends on the bandwidth of an organization and is good compared to some SIEM tools. IBM, for example, is quite costly. But Microsoft Sentinel is notably cheaper."
"The subscription is monthly."
"The licensing model can be expensive, but the value it provides is significant."
"Splunk Enterprise Security's pricing is competitive."
"Pricing and licensing are quite high compared to other tools or SIEM tools, but the features justify it."
"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."
"It is a bit costly."
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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 Business113
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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