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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 (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 stability of this solution is fantastic, as it has not failed us for months and we use it extensively."
"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 automatic update of the graphs from a dashboard is very convenient."
"The optimization and flexibility of visualization tools."
"The user interface is very good, and the data visualization is simple and user-friendly."
"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."
"We are saving a lot of time by being in one place instead of several servers."
"Splunk Enterprise Security gives us a single pane of glass so that we can use just one tool instead of having to use different tools."
"The data analysis part is good in Splunk, which is something that I like the most, and it is also quite easy to use, with dashboards, visualizations, and analytics that are good."
"Splunk Enterprise Security has helped greatly improve the organization's business resilience."
"The most valuable features include agility and Splunk Enterprise Security's ability to quickly search for alerted items, as well as the capacity to create custom alerts using the SQL language employed by Splunk."
"While it might be an initial upfront investment on data onboarding, it's going to be something that makes your life incredibly easy once you get beyond that point."
"The search function for spam is like a google search. You just enter and it will quickly show you the results."
"The most valuable features in Splunk Enterprise Security are the cluster capabilities."
 

Cons

"This solution should allow the user to combine two indices into one graph and it should provide a unique count."
"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."
"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."
"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."
"This solution should allow the user to combine two indices into one graph."
"Integrating tools and creating use cases could be easier. It's hard for a junior security engineer with only a couple of years of experience to write use cases. They can do it, but it's much easier in a solution like IBM QRadar. Setting conditions is like a multiple-choice type of thing. It's a more user-friendly process."
"Its setup is a little bit complex for a distributed environment. Their support can also be better. If we miss the response for more than a week, they usually close the case. Sometimes, it can take us more than a week to reply."
"​Not even Splunk's support guy, who came to our firm, could help with defining proper role management.​"
"Adding custom visualization in Splunk has been improved over the years but can still be made better by integrating more and more JavaScript visualization sources."
"When you get into large amounts of data, Splunk can get pretty slow. This is the same on-premise or AWS, it doesn't matter. The way that they handle large data sets could be improved."
"The only improvement I am expecting is the cost of the licensing. Clients are going to other solutions just because of the cost."
"Considering the contract thing and the whole legal area, it takes forever to get the contracts signed and to be able to agree to the terms and conditions for my company as well as for Splunk's team."
"On the technical side, it would be nice to see aspects of the recent acquisition of Phantom make it into the core Splunk Enterprise, not just become a part of the premium Enterprise Security."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

Information not available
"Be upfront about your needs and expectations. Splunk is great to work with."
"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."
"It is quite expensive."
"Splunk is priced higher than other solutions."
"My customers have found the price of the solution to be high."
"The price of Splunk Enterprise Security is high."
"Splunk can be an expensive solution. It all depends on how we configure the alerts and the events from the endpoints. You can save some money if you do that correctly. If not, it becomes an expensive solution."
"The Splunk Enterprise Security license is expensive."
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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 Enterprise50
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.
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