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Fortinet FortiSIEM vs Splunk Enterprise Security comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Apr 6, 2025

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

Fortinet FortiSIEM
Ranking in Security Information and Event Management (SIEM)
8th
Average Rating
7.6
Reviews Sentiment
6.7
Number of Reviews
73
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
Splunk Enterprise Security
Ranking in Security Information and Event Management (SIEM)
1st
Average Rating
8.4
Reviews Sentiment
7.6
Number of Reviews
306
Ranking in other categories
Log Management (2nd), IT Operations Analytics (1st)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of April 2025, in the Security Information and Event Management (SIEM) category, the mindshare of Fortinet FortiSIEM is 3.1%, up from 3.0% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Splunk Enterprise Security is 9.5%, down from 12.8% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Security Information and Event Management (SIEM)
 

Featured Reviews

Oliver Jackson - PeerSpot reviewer
Systems monitoring enhanced by firewall and intrusion detection features
My primary use case for Fortinet FortiSIEM is systems monitoring and alerting. I use it for standard functions like log monitoring, incident detection, and notification.  My customers are mostly medium-sized enterprises ranging from engineering companies, mining companies, independent schools, and…
ROBERT-CHRISTIAN - PeerSpot reviewer
Has many predefined correlation rules and is brilliant for investigation and log analysis
It is very complicated to write your own correlation rules without the help of Splunk support. What Splunk could do better is to create an API to the standard SIEM tools, such as Microsoft Sentinel. The idea would be to make it less painful. In ELK Stack, Kibana is the query language with which you can search log files. I believe Splunk has also a query language in which they search their log files, but once you have identified the log file that you want to use for further security correlation, you want to very quickly transport that into your SIEM tool, such as Microsoft Sentinel. That is something that Splunk could make a little bit less painful because it is a lot of effort to find that log file and forward it. An API with Microsoft Sentinel or a similar SIEM tool would be a good idea.

Quotes from Members

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:
 

Pros

"We have found the most important features in Fortinet FortiSIEM to be the correlation, file utility check, latest file, and hash changes. These features are important for us."
"FortiSIEM provides a single PIN to monitor SOC and NOC. It's a nice tool for integration and monitoring. It provides multiple categories for monitoring based on security designations like low, medium, and high."
"FortiSIEM's best features are the dashboards and customization."
"The most valuable feature is the ability to view all the network events on a single pane and find the point of contact or point of the incident."
"The most valuable feature of Fortinet FortiSIEM is the user and entity behave as analytics(UEBA). This feature mixes your data and provides useful information based on the behavior of the targeted."
"Technical support is helpful."
"Some of our customers who use this solution have seen improvement in their connection with load balancing on both connections."
"The tool's most valuable feature stems from the fact that I can see a complete analysis, like all the incidents that have happened, and it detects everything in real-time."
"Capability to expand the functionality through custom code for data inputs, commands, visualization, alerts, and machine learning."
"There are lots of free learning materials on their website."
"The data representation options in the dashboards are excellent."
"It has a drag-and-drop interface, so you don't need to know SQL or Java to construct a query on Splunk. The resolution time is about the same, but it took longer to discover the issue with ArcSight. Our previous solution took about an hour or more, but Splunk can do it within a few minutes or an hour at most."
"Splunk's strength lies in its single-page view."
"The UI of Splunk makes it easier for our analysts to move around and see what they need to see."
"Splunk has improved our operations by giving us access to more information and allowing us to deploy more use cases."
"It helped us consolidate all our solutions into an easy tool to use for various employees."
 

Cons

"The dashboards need to be improved. It gives you so much detail, but sometimes too much detail, especially to an executive, it's too much."
"Our team tried configuring MS SQL database logs with Fortinet FortiSIEM, but it did not work for some time."
"The interface needs some improvements because it's a bit cumbersome when you're trying to view items. It takes some time to get used to. Additionally, sometimes the scrolling does not work."
"Fortinet FortiSIEM could improve to extend to several locations or sites."
"They could work on their documentation. If there's anything about the solution that needs improvement, it's that. For example, documentation already is on a very high level but specifically on the CLI there are tons of features which can be fine-tuned and thousands of commands are very difficult to document. If they could make this easier, it would improve the overall solution."
"We need to see incident reports about the event log, without events from the administrator or through human interaction."
"Patching is not great - we're not getting the support we'd expect."
"Improvements include making it easier for users to create their normalizers. Fortinet FortiSIEM uses XML for normalizing and parsing, which can be tedious and time-consuming. A simpler way of using regex could be helpful."
"Some of the search functions can be better. There has been a lot of talk at the conference about the update of SPL before each iteration. That will be a lot of help."
"It'd be really nice if Splunk Enterprise Security had a better and solid configuration guide."
"The access and identity features could be improved. For example, let's say we have onboarded 65 logs. Now, we can identify the various processes, but we run into trouble when we're updating the processes for AWS CloudTrail, EDR, MDR, and XDR."
"In the next releases, I would like to see more pricing flexibility."
"While Splunkbase (the app repository) has a lot of great content, some apps are terribly old and could stand to be updated or purged."
"The algorithms customization of Splunk could improve. They have limited algorithms for machine learning support. If they can allow the user to add more machine learning algorithms, such as the ability to choose the algorithm that a user might want. Additionally, they should provide the required libraries for those algorithms, and then analyzes the data for use."
"Some of the terminology can be confusing, even for seasoned vets. Renaming components at this point would be a serious undertaking. However, it might be beneficial in the long run."
"The training was mostly sales-focused, like how to monitor your sales. It was hard to then come back from doing the training and try to switch it to a cybersecurity focus because all the training we did was sales oriented. The basic training didn't really touch on any kind of cybersecurity use cases or anything like that. That would have been great to see in the training."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"Please be cheaper and more simplified."
"The tool is really expensive. For what the tool does for our team, the price is fair."
"This is probably more on the lower cost end of the spectrum compared to competing products. Fortinet's license model is based on events per second, which makes sense, but that's not typical. It makes it very hard to calculate what your costs are going to be as you scale the platform because some log sources, such as firewall logs, are very noisy, and there are lots and lots of events per second, but some of them are not. So, it becomes a bit of a science experiment trying to guess what your costs are going to be as you scale the solution. This is where other competing products perhaps have a more straightforward license model."
"Its price can be better. We are Fortinet partners, so we can get discounts, but its price can be an issue at the beginning for others. There is a licensing scheme for every case. There are three licensing schemes that we can choose from."
"Pricing is determined based on the customer's budget."
"Pricing is acceptable for more than 90% of our customers, as they normally get discounts."
"Fortinet's products are not expensive, it is less than the competition."
"FortiSIEM's licensing is based on EPS, and its pricing is competitive in the market."
"We have had a reduction in the time it takes to resolve issues and correlate what has failed."
"The price of Splunk Enterprise Security is high."
"Splunk is a bit pricier, but the benefits and ROI are huge."
"Splunk is priced higher than other solutions."
"I think that most of the log analytics solutions are expensive and I'm not sure if it's worth it."
"There is an annual license required to use this solution."
"Expensive compared to other options."
"Splunk has always been on the expensive side."
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Comparison Review

VS
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
Computer Software Company
16%
Financial Services Firm
9%
Government
7%
Comms Service Provider
7%
Financial Services Firm
15%
Computer Software Company
14%
Manufacturing Company
8%
Government
8%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
 

Questions from the Community

What do you like most about Fortinet FortiSIEM?
Fortinet FortiSIEM needs to provide better API integrations to users.
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Fortinet FortiSIEM?
As a service, the cost is reasonable and affordable with scalable pricing based on the number of monitored devices. However, setting it up for oneself as an enterprise-licensed product can be quite...
What needs improvement with Fortinet FortiSIEM?
The built-in APIs in Fortinet FortiSIEM are somewhat lacking and could be improved for better integration with external ITSM products. Improving software stability and reducing bugs will make it a ...
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...
 

Also Known As

FortiSIEM, AccelOps
No data available
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

FortiSIEM has hundreds of customers worldwide in markets including managed services, technology, financial services, healthcare, and government. Customers include Aruba Networks, Compushare, Port of San Diego, Cleveland Indians, Infoblox, Healthways, and Referentia.
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 Fortinet FortiSIEM vs. Splunk Enterprise Security and other solutions. Updated: April 2025.
849,190 professionals have used our research since 2012.