Try our new research platform with insights from 80,000+ expert users

Graylog vs Splunk Enterprise Security vs VMware Aria Operations for Logs 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:
 

Mindshare comparison

As of April 2025, in the Log Management category, the mindshare of Graylog is 6.6%, up from 5.7% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Splunk Enterprise Security is 7.4%, down from 11.1% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of VMware Aria Operations for Logs is 1.2%, down from 1.4% 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.
LarsChristensen - PeerSpot reviewer
Efficient troubleshooting with precise log filtering and an easy setup
The tool could benefit from improved filter settings and dashboarding. While there are dashboards available, they are often created by community members and may not work after updates. It would be beneficial to have a roadmap for these dashboards to ensure consistent functionality. It would also be advantageous if the tool could process even large amounts of data faster, though this may be more related to data movement challenges rather than the software itself.

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."
"We run a containerized microservices environment. Being able to set up streams and search for errors and anomalies across hundreds of containers is why a log aggregation platform like Graylog is valuable to us."
"I am very proud of how very stable the solution is."
"Message forwarding through the in-built module."
"Real-time UDP/GELF logging and full text-based searching."
"UDP is a fast and lightweight protocol, perfect for sending large volumes of logs with minimal overhead."
"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."
"It is used as a log manager/SIEM. It provides visibility into the infrastructure and security related events."
"The dashboards are the most valuable feature. We like the ability to drill in and see what queries are under the dashboard, build new visualizations, edit the querying, and see the reports."
"The most valuable features in Splunk are the search function and the ability to run selected session reports. The session reports are important because I can use them to see what is going on in our environment weekly. Additionally, we can use the graph to see how often that particular event is happening."
"Splunk provides immediate visibility into key business metrics and new business insights that deliver immediate value."
"Its usability is the best part. It is easy for our developers to use if they want to search their logs, etc."
"It has a rapid response search environment in the event of an incident."
"Great platform with user-friendly interface and GUI."
"It has reduced the time to resolution, time to investigate, and time to troubleshoot for debugging issues."
"The most valuable feature of Splunk Enterprise Security is the threat intelligence integration because essentially having to go out and correlate all the data on our own becomes convoluted."
"I like the interface."
"The interface of the solution is good."
"The most valuable feature is server virtualization. It's been very useful."
"The ability to narrow into a specific time to filter heavy hitters and anomalies is extremely valuable."
"Overall, I would recommend VMware Aria Operations for Logs because it is a good tool with many valuable features."
"The tool helps my company deal with security and log analysis, which are very important areas for us...It is a scalable solution."
"We are using it because we have a VMware product. It has its own built in dashboards for VMware products, and that's a good thing."
"It is a very useful tool if you have a VMware environment."
 

Cons

"More customization is always useful."
"It would be great if Graylog could provide a better Python package in order to make it easier to use for the Python community."
"Graylog could improve the process of creating rules. We have to create them manually by doing parses and applying them. Other SIEM solutions have basic rules and you can create and get more events of interest."
"I would like to see a default dashboard widget that shows the topology of the clusters defined for the graylog install."
"Its scalability gets complicated when we have to update or edit multiple nodes."
"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."
"The biggest problem is the collector application, as we wanted to avoid using Graylog Collector Sidecar due to its architecture."
"Graylog can improve the index rotation as it's quite a complex solution."
"Splunk should have more regional data centers in the Middle East."
"Its interface and usability can always be improved."
"It is important to make sure that everything is built off of the threat models and all the underlying items within Splunk."
"An improved user interface along with multi-tenancy support would be beneficial."
"They could offer pre-built search queries for everyday use cases like brute force attacks, DDoS attacks, and other security threats."
"The incident response technique should be available out of the box. That isn't as available as we would expect."
"It requires a significant amount of relatively complex architecture once you push past the single server instance."
"Our two main complaints are about the difficulty of the initial setup and the licensing model."
"I don't use the solution on a day to day basis, so I'm not sure what specifically can be improved."
"The tool could be cheaper."
"Technical support should be improved."
"The response time and quality need improvement. It takes too long to prove a problem and get a solution."
"The dashboard needs to be improved because this is what I need to monitor my infrastructure."
"If data migration occurs during a search, it alters performance, causing delays."
"The monitoring landscape is getting bigger. When it comes to infrastructure monitoring, we need more visibility. VMware needs to integrate more related applications and third-party products. That would make it more appealing to an audience beyond the VMware team."
"I think that it should be able to integrate with other third-party backup and recovery solutions, more that it does now."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"I use the free version of Graylog."
"If you want something that works and do not have the money for Splunk or QRadar, take Graylog.​​"
"Consider Enterprise support if you have atypical needs or setup requirements.​"
"We are using the free version of the product. However, the paid version is expensive."
"We're using the Community edition."
"I am using a community edition. I have not looked at the enterprise offering from Graylog."
"It's open source and free. They have a paid version, but we never looked into that because we never needed the features of the paid version."
"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."
"You will eat up whatever you purchase quickly. The level of insights that Splunk empowers is addictive."
"Personnel costs are saved by not having to involve the domain developers from multiple teams when tracing a problem that spans multiple platforms."
"Licensing is a yearly, one-time cost."
"It is expensive, but it is a good tool. It is worth the cost."
"It is pretty straightforward and based on the sizing. If I compare it with other competitors, it makes sense."
"Splunk Enterprise Security incurs a significant cost because of the amount of data we send, but we are fine with the value we're getting for that price."
"The pricing of Splunk Enterprise Security is high."
"The licensing is good, but the pricing absolutely needs some work. It is very high."
"The licensing cost for vRealize Log Insight is a little higher, so in terms of cost, it all depends upon what kind of environment you have. If you have a complete virtualized environment, or at least you're using a ninety-five percent virtualized environment, then vRealize Log Insight will play a very good role because it is a VMware component, so it has very tight integration with other VMware components and systems. This means you don't have to procure any other monitoring and management tool, and you don't need a separate automation tool. vRealize Log Insight will have an upper hand if your environment is purely virtualized on VMware. If you're using a mix of physical and virtual components, for example, a 50:50 ratio, then you need to have a third-party component to manage overall monitoring."
"Pricing could always be lower. If it were free, I would be more satisfied."
"It is not cheap. But it is worth it."
"I think it is a reasonably priced product."
"The pricing has been updated recently."
"Pricing is good because it is part of the suite package. It comes in a bundle for us."
"The license cost for any other monitoring tool is too high compared to this product."
"The product's price is reasonable, but when it comes to SQL licensing, it's a bit expensive."
report
Use our free recommendation engine to learn which Log Management solutions are best for your needs.
848,989 professionals have used our research since 2012.
 

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
18%
Comms Service Provider
10%
Government
7%
Educational Organization
7%
Financial Services Firm
15%
Computer Software Company
14%
Manufacturing Company
8%
Government
8%
Computer Software Company
15%
Government
13%
Financial Services Firm
11%
Manufacturing Company
7%
 

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 doc...
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 a...
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 ingest...
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 monitor...
What do you like most about vRealize Log Insight?
The events are notably more descriptive, aiding in security and event analysis. We've also integrated Sky Collector, ...
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for vRealize Log Insight?
Pricing for VMware Aria Operations for Logs can depend on several variables, including the workload and the customer....
What needs improvement with vRealize Log Insight?
It is not the main tool in my stack. I can do similar tasks using solutions like Grafana ( /products/grafana-reviews ...
 

Also Known As

Graylog2
No data available
vRealize Log Insight
 

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.
Wildlands Adventure Zoo, Medic Mobile, IBM, Seventy Seven Energy, Baystate Health, Osis, Oxford University, Columbia University, Siemens, Cardinal Health, Ashdod Port, Vasakronan, Sydney Adventist Hospital, University of Derby
Find out what your peers are saying about Wazuh, Splunk, Datadog and others in Log Management. Updated: March 2025.
848,989 professionals have used our research since 2012.