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Honeycomb.io vs Splunk Enterprise Security comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Jan 12, 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

Honeycomb.io
Average Rating
8.6
Reviews Sentiment
7.0
Number of Reviews
2
Ranking in other categories
Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability (25th)
Splunk Enterprise Security
Average Rating
8.4
Reviews Sentiment
7.6
Number of Reviews
304
Ranking in other categories
Log Management (1st), Security Information and Event Management (SIEM) (1st), IT Operations Analytics (1st)
 

Mindshare comparison

While both are Application Lifecycle Management solutions, they serve different purposes. Honeycomb.io is designed for Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability and holds a mindshare of 1.6%, up 1.2% compared to last year.
Splunk Enterprise Security, on the other hand, focuses on Security Information and Event Management (SIEM), holds 9.8% mindshare, down 13.5% since last year.
Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability
Security Information and Event Management (SIEM)
 

Featured Reviews

Diego Gomes De Lima - PeerSpot reviewer
Easy to use and the dashboard is very intuitive
We faced some OpenTelemetry metrics lost between the communication from the service and the Honeycomb.io. I can't say if this is a Honeycomb.io issue or if there are some limitations in OpenTelemetry. Alerts are very helpful in Honeycomb.io, but we don't usually merge because we can compare queries with queries for making alerts. We can make alerts based on static numbers, which may block us from building alerts that could be generic enough or could be serviced.
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

"The solution's initial setup process was straightforward since we were getting enough support from Honeycomb.io's team."
"The solution's most valuable features are the queries for the OpenTelemetry events and all the tracing."
"Exporting is a good feature. It helps me out when I have to do reports. I do a lot of exporting and crunching of the numbers. Dashboards are okay for showing to the leadership, but for doing statistics and updating tickets, the export feature is very beneficial for me."
"Aggregation searches have reduced time and difficulty of identifying trends and conditions which need to reviewed."
"It helps us uncover bottlenecks in the network."
"We saw the granularity that we could get from Splunk far exceeded what we already had. We had the ability to have our security team really focus on the platform and stay within the platform, but they could correlate with a variety of other stakeholders, and our stakeholders were growing."
"There are lots of free learning materials on their website."
"It is quite extensible. It is a platform that we can build our use instead of each case instead of each case being limited or restricted to each capability. This is probably the best feature."
"Splunk Enterprise Security stands out for its ability to integrate with existing security tools, provide informative dashboards, and offer IT Service Assurance functionality that goes beyond basic threat detection to include service performance monitoring."
"Splunk allows us to customize processing and dashboards, which helps us take care of our customers' needs."
 

Cons

"We can make alerts based on static numbers, which may block us from building alerts that could be generic enough or could be serviced."
"The process of log scraping gets delayed on Honeycomb.io. At times, it gives false alerts to the application team."
"Splunk Enterprise Security could improve in automation, flexibility, and providing more content out of the box."
"Splunk Enterprise Security offers a vast amount of information to learn and comprehend, resulting in a challenging initial learning curve."
"Splunk should align its security principles with those of other vendors like SentinelOne. Splunk has mature APIs that can communicate with various security applications and devices. Splunk can process more to produce an understandable dashboard."
"The only thing which can be improved is that they are too subjective on whom their Splunk4Good initiative can be applied. They market it as you only need to be a nonprofit, but there is more to it."
"I do not like the pricing model. It is expensive."
"I haven't found a way for me to create my own plugins and integrate them into Splunk, but this isn't necessarily a limitation; it could simply be a lack of knowledge on my part."
"The main issue that I have with it is that the field transformations sometimes overlap with those in Splunk Enterprise, and then you get permissions issues that lead to troubles."
"Their technical support sucks."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

Information not available
"It's definitely worth it."
"Some of the insights that we have obtained as a part of using Splunk have greatly helped us in increasing our revenue in terms of selling our products."
"The pricing model is based on the number of gigabytes that you ingest into the Splunk system. So it can be an expensive solution."
"The pricing is a little bit on the higher side, but looking at what Splunk provides us, it is reasonable."
"It can be cost-prohibitive when you start to scale and have terabytes of data. Its cost model is based on how much data it processes a day. If they're able to create scaled-down niche or custom package offerings, it may help with the cost. Instead of the full-blown features, if they can narrow the scope where it can only be used for a specific purpose, it would kind of create that market for the product, and it may help with the costing. When you start using it as a central aggregator and you're pumping tons of logs at it, pretty soon, you'll start hitting your cap on what it can process a day. Once you've got that, you're kind of defeating the purpose because you're going to have to scale back."
"The price of Splunk is reasonable."
"Its price is fair. Like with anything else, if you go into the cloud, different providers cost more, and you are able to throttle back or throttle up. The cost is comparable with anything else."
"I think we recently switched to the SVC pricing compared to the ingest pricing."
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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
Financial Services Firm
17%
Computer Software Company
15%
Manufacturing Company
9%
Healthcare Company
6%
Financial Services Firm
16%
Computer Software Company
14%
Manufacturing Company
8%
Government
8%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
No data available
 

Questions from the Community

What do you like most about Honeycomb.io?
The solution's initial setup process was straightforward since we were getting enough support from Honeycomb.io's team.
What needs improvement with Honeycomb.io?
We faced some OpenTelemetry metrics lost between the communication from the service and the Honeycomb.io. I can't say if this is a Honeycomb.io issue or if there are some limitations in OpenTelemet...
What is your primary use case for Honeycomb.io?
The solution is mainly used for stack observability. It observes service behavior or any kind of failure that may be happening. The tool is also related to research. My company is working more on t...
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

Clover Health, Eaze, Intercom, Fender
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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