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Graylog vs Splunk Enterprise Security comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Jan 5, 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

Graylog
Ranking in Log Management
16th
Average Rating
8.0
Reviews Sentiment
6.7
Number of Reviews
19
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
Splunk Enterprise Security
Ranking in Log Management
2nd
Average Rating
8.4
Reviews Sentiment
7.6
Number of Reviews
305
Ranking in other categories
Security Information and Event Management (SIEM) (1st), IT Operations Analytics (1st)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of March 2025, in the Log Management category, the mindshare of Graylog is 6.4%, up from 5.6% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Splunk Enterprise Security is 7.6%, down from 11.6% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Log Management
 

Featured Reviews

Andrey Mostovykh - PeerSpot reviewer
Real-time analysis, easy setup, and open source
We stopped using it for analytics because of its price, and at the moment, we are using it mostly for log centralization. If you use it with high traffic for analytical purposes, as well as for the logs, the infrastructure costs are unbelievable. Graylog is a great product backed by Elasticsearch as the storage and query engine. It is just an interface on top of Elasticsearch and some Elasticsearch management. The indexes that are kept in Elasticsearch are managed by Graylog software. Elasticsearch is a decent product, but it's very infrastructure-heavy. It requires lots of resources, and if you make a mistake with provisioning, you are likely to not get a cluster back. We had a couple of outages like that, and we hated that. So, we ended up over-provisioning resources just to avoid such situations from happening. If you have a whole team trying to fix the Graylog instance for two days, that's a bit too much. That may be my Norwegian take on it, but the engineering resources are expensive. It's better to just provision the infrastructure. Overall, the product is great, and the features are just fine, but the infrastructure cost is what is killing it. The infrastructure cost is the main issue. I like the rest. If the infrastructure costs could be lower, it would be fantastic. I'm not sure if they can improve the infrastructure cost with the way Elasticsearch is. If they keep using Elasticsearch, maybe there are some opportunities there, or they can support other backends with cheaper storage. They could have a different backend to replace Elasticsearch or do some tweaks to Elasticsearch to reduce the costs. There could be partial parsing of logs or parsing on demand so that when you write data through Graylog to Elasticsearch, it doesn't need to crunch in every detail requiring that much CPU.
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

"It has data adapters and lookup tables that utilize HTTP calls to APIs."
"It is used as a log manager/SIEM. It provides visibility into the infrastructure and security related events."
"The best feature of Graylog is the Elasticsearch integration. We can integrate and we can run filters, such as an event of interest, and those logs we can send to any SIEM tool or as an analytic. Additionally, there are clear and well-documented implementation instructions on their website to follow if needed."
"The solution's most valuable feature is its new interface."
"Everything stands out as valuable, including the fact that I can quantify and qualify the logs, create pipelines and process the logs in any way I like, and create charts or data maps."
"What I like about Graylog is that it's real-time and you have access to the raw data. So, you ingest it, and you have access to every message and every data item you ingest. You can then build analytics on top of that. You can look at the raw data, and you can do some volumetric estimations, such as how big traffic you have, how many messages of data of a type you have, etc."
"Real-time UDP/GELF logging and full text-based searching."
"The ability to write custom alerts is key to information security and compliance."
"I like the ease of setting up dashboards on Splunk. They're easy to create, manage, alter, and share. You can fine-tune them any way you see fit."
"Splunk's strongest suit is its user interface. We can integrate multiple solutions and adjust settings in the Splunk interface."
"The solution is stable and reliable."
"The graph visualization is the most valuable feature."
"We can easily configure things as required in relation to our use cases."
"Splunk Enterprise Security allows us to create custom dashboards by changing fonts and modifying widgets."
"The solution's most valuable feature is the criticality of alerts."
"The technical support is among the best in the market."
 

Cons

"I hope to see improvements in Graylog for more interactivity, user-friendliness, and creating alerts. The initial setup is complex."
"Since container orchestration systems are popular and Graylog fits the niche well, perhaps they could officially support running in docker containers on Kubernetes as a StatefulSet as a use case. That way, the declarative nature of Kubernetes config files would document their best case deployment scenario-"
"I would like to see some kind of visualization included in Graylog."
"I would like to see a default dashboard widget that shows the topology of the clusters defined for the graylog install."
"When it comes to configuring the processing pipeline, writing the rules can be very tedious, especially since the documentation isn't extensive on how the functions provided for these rules work."
"There should be some user groups and an auto sign-in feature.​"
"More complex visualizations and the ability to execute custom Elasticsearch queries would be great."
"Dashboards, stream alerts and parsing could be improved."
"I feel the solution to be too slow."
"I would like to see more SIEM functionality and a better ticket tool."
"For on-premise, it's more about optimization. With such a heavy byte scale of data that we are operating on, the search for disparate data sometimes takes about a minute. This is understandable considering the amount of data that we are pumping into it. The only optimization that I recommend is better sharding, when it comes to Splunk, so that data retrieval can be faster."
"It'd be really nice if Splunk Enterprise Security had a better and solid configuration guide."
"My biggest struggle with Splunk in general is memorizing all the commands. If I want to know which users have logged in between certain hours, I cannot write that query out. It would be helpful to have AI so that I can explain in simple terms what I want and then the search gives that back to me. I am waiting for that."
"Some of the queries are difficult to run and have room for improvement."
"The configuration had a bit of a learning curve."
"Data retention can be better. If we want to look at the data for five months or six months, that is not available to us. We only have a history of 20 or 30 days. After that, the information gets lost. That is a drawback."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"I am using a community edition. I have not looked at the enterprise offering from Graylog."
"​You get a lot out-of-the-box with the non-enterprise version, so give it a try first."
"If you want something that works and do not have the money for Splunk or QRadar, take Graylog.​​"
"Having paid official support is wise for projects."
"We're using the Community edition."
"We are using the free version of the product. However, the paid version is expensive."
"Graylog is a free open-source solution. The free version has a capacity limitation of 2 GB daily, if you want to go above this you have to purchase a license."
"There is an open source version and an enterprise version. I wouldn't recommend the enterprise version, but as an open source solution, it is solid and works really well."
"It is expensive. I work for multiple clients. I am working for more than five clients, but most of the clients are switching from Splunk to Sentinel because of the cost. Even though Sentinel is very limited, clients are moving to Sentinel."
"I think that most of the monitoring solutions are expensive."
"The price of Splunk is too high for our market."
"Splunk is not a cheap solution and the license is billed annually."
"The price of Splunk Enterprise Security fluctuates based on the customer, but I believe it's quite costly, especially for our clientele."
"Most people share the same thought that the ingestion rates can get pretty pricey. There is a lot of work we do to curate the data that we send to Splunk so that it is not too noisy or too expensive."
"The licensing is good, but the pricing absolutely needs some work. It is very high."
"The licensing costs are high for Splunk Enterprise Security."
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Comparison Review

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Feb 26, 2015
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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
17%
Comms Service Provider
10%
Government
8%
University
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 Graylog?
The product is scalable. The solution is stable.
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Graylog?
We are using the free version of the product. However, the paid version is expensive.
What needs improvement with Graylog?
When it comes to configuring the processing pipeline, writing the rules can be very tedious, especially since the documentation isn't extensive on how the functions provided for these rules work. P...
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

Graylog2
No data available
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Blue Cross Blue Shield, eBay, Cisco, LinkedIn, SAP, King.com, Twilio, Deutsche Presse-Agentur
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 Graylog vs. Splunk Enterprise Security and other solutions. Updated: March 2025.
841,714 professionals have used our research since 2012.