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McAfee ePolicy Orchestrator vs Splunk SOAR comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Mar 9, 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

McAfee ePolicy Orchestrator
Ranking in Security Orchestration Automation and Response (SOAR)
12th
Average Rating
8.0
Reviews Sentiment
6.8
Number of Reviews
40
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
Splunk SOAR
Ranking in Security Orchestration Automation and Response (SOAR)
3rd
Average Rating
8.0
Reviews Sentiment
6.8
Number of Reviews
45
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
 

Mindshare comparison

As of April 2025, in the Security Orchestration Automation and Response (SOAR) category, the mindshare of McAfee ePolicy Orchestrator is 0.5%, down from 0.8% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Splunk SOAR is 7.2%, down from 8.7% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Security Orchestration Automation and Response (SOAR)
 

Featured Reviews

DavidJones7 - PeerSpot reviewer
Offers automation alert features with easy integrations and impressive scalability
I would rate the initial setup an eight out of ten. There are a few technical challenges with the deployment, but it can easily solved by an experienced professional but not by a beginner user of the tool. The complete implementation and migration to McAfee ePolicy Orchestrator will take around three months. If someone is using a software platform already with implemented use cases in their environment, it might be difficult to implement the same use cases when the customer is migrating to McAfee ePolicy Orchestrator. The conditions and prior alert settings needs to be accurate when migrating to McAfee ePolicy Orchestrator, otherwise false positive alerts might get generated.
Shubham Sinha. - PeerSpot reviewer
Helped eliminate repetitive and redundant tasks, but custom functions and reporting need a lot of work
The visibility of the solution’s playbook viewer depends on the right you assign to the analyst. SOAR has the flexibility to distinguish between the roles of analyst and owner. If the analyst's role is to just work on a ticket, they cannot view the playbook design platform. That is limited to the owner. That can be both a good and bad thing. A major problem I have faced in SOAR's rights distribution is roles and responsibilities. Suppose I am initially granted user rights or analyst rights, but later on, I also get admin rights. SOAR is unable to amend the limitations of my role. I raised a support ticket with Splunk about this. They said it's a bug in their 5.3.5 version. To fix this, I had to reinstall the entire platform from scratch, just to amend the rights and responsibilities of one role. This bug was not fixed. Also, the latest GUI is terrible. The previous one was better. Another point is that while using Splunk SOAR in an investigation is not difficult, there are some complex parameters. We have SOAR case management, but the licensing is going to put a big hole in your pocket. Also, there is an issue with investigation node addition. When you are doing node additions you cannot grant the entire environment to have SOAR visibility into the incident. So when you integrate it with an ITSM tool, like ServiceNow or Jira for ticketing purposes, there is a challenge. When you do nodes for investigation on a regular basis, sometimes it does not update our ServiceNow platform, which is terrible. It is a redundant activity for an analyst to update that in the case management as well as in the ITSM tool. Although SOAR provides integration, the functionality of investigation and nodes is terrible when it comes to integration. An additional area for improvement is custom function creation. It's terrible. A newbie cannot create custom functions right away. They would require a solid understanding first. Also, the reporting is really awful. If I want to do a report for a customized time period, such as the last three days or the last four days, or from the 10th to the 12th of June, that is not available in SOAR at all. That kind of feature is available in Cortex XSOAR. Reporting is a real challenge.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"The automation alert for the ticketing tool is one of the vital features"
"We implemented data transfer protection, which allows transfer in one direction only. Users can copy from the PC to the USB but not from the USB to the PC. That way, if someone is carrying a virus on a USB, it will not be transferred to the PC."
"The solution's best part is that it is very easy to manage McAfee Agent."
"It is a highly scalable solution. Scalability-wise, I rate the solution a ten out of ten."
"The most valuable features of McAfee ePolicy Orchestrator are the easy-to-use console, and lots of reports, such as customized reports and inventory reports. Additionally, overall the centralized management is very good where you can see the compliance levels and inventory."
"The policy auditing, policy management, and device auditing are all valuable features. Our customers appreciated the ability to get alerts to system-wide events from a single view."
"It is a scalable solution...I rate its scalability a nine out of ten."
"I like the solution's feasibility. McAfee ePolicy Orchestrator is also better and easier to use than other ePOs."
"The best feature is the integration and the custom Python code that we can write. Splunk SOAR provides us with both of these capabilities, allowing us to integrate different security solutions with Splunk SOAR and take remediation actions directly on those security tools."
"The playbooks are valuable. They are the core component. Being able to implement and build a code process to work through and scale out what we want to do is valuable."
"Splunk SOAR has made a huge impact across security operations and the business overall."
"We are not a 24/7 SOC, so the most valuable feature of Splunk SOAR is the auto-response to threats when we are not in the office and the notifications that it sends to the on-call engineer."
"SOAR allows custom code to be written and integrates with various technologies through pre-built apps like Windows Remote Management or custom apps we can build ourselves like a secret retrieval app from our vault."
"I'm just a beginner on the solution and it's pretty easy for me to use."
"The most valuable feature of the solution is the playbook automation just because it allows us to reduce the manual actions that SOC has to handle."
"Very flexible integration with other tools"
 

Cons

"There should be more insights and completeness into the cyber kill chain, similar to CrowdStrike and SentinelOne. It just seems a little outdated in being 100% signature-based without all of the insights and protections that come with CrowdStrike and SentinelOne. Overall, they've got some catching up to do if they plan to compete in the comprehensive EDR space."
"The impact of the agent on the endpoint's performance - the resources it takes. Additionally, the difficulties we experience with inheriting and breaking inheritance on the organization's structure breakdown for policy inheritance and then for rules inheritance. We are actually struggling with this."
"While there are bugs and a few functionality issues, it is just a matter of raising them with the support team. However, support is part of the problem as well. You want everything to be seamless in a perfect world, but the support is spread across different countries. They have Level 1, 2, and 3. Level 1 is most likely in a developing country. They don't provide the best service."
"It's a little bit complex to configure it, but when you start using it, it is much easier. There are many policies that you need to create, and in three or four places"
"McAfee ePolicy Orchestrator should improve its integration with other tools."
"Features such as full drive encryption are lacking in the cloud version."
"As for improvements, I think that putting everything on a cloud and one console would be a great idea and would be useful for customers."
"We need to consolidate multiple features into one console. It would be beneficial to have all the important features on a single platform."
"The tool's response is slower because it has to search through a huge dataset, which can be improved for latency."
"In my opinion, the focus should be on improving its simplicity, specifically the interface, and configuration."
"They can improve on what they are currently doing. They can provide more playbooks or at least template playbooks that are in their repository."
"The Splunk SOAR platform was not designed specifically for case management which is why this area needs improvement."
"We have playbooks written to extract these events and put them into the workflow since it wasn't structured as expected. It was a miss for us. We couldn't figure out why it broke or what actually happened there. It was something in this feed with legitimate and security events, so we tried to understand the names and what we would call them."
"And most of the challenges that I have faced with the solution can be found in the documentation itself."
"The cost of Splunk SOAR has room for improvement."
"Unfortunately, not all of our analysts are iPhone users or iOS users. The mobile app is only supported on iOS. Our analysts who have Android do not have that benefit. That would be a nice thing to have so that we can have it across the board and not just for iOS."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"There is a license required to use this solution. If we use the additional components, such as DLP encryption, there is an additional cost. However, it is similar to a separate product altogether. If you want to use that or not, it is optional, but when you use it, it will cost you additional pricing."
"For large enterprise companies, the price should be alright, but for small businesses, the uptake might be slow because, for these clients, the price doesn't look very attractive."
"Compared to other Antivirus products, the cost of this solution is a bit high."
"It is attractively priced. It is a fraction of what we're going to pay for CrowdStrike or SentinelOne, but it only has a fraction of the capabilities as well."
"It's an expensive solution"
"McAfee ePolicy Orchestrator is not an expensive solution."
"On a scale from one to ten, where one is cheap, and ten is expensive, I rate the solution's pricing a three out of ten."
"$The price of McAfee ePolicy Orchestrator is expensive, it is approximately $6,000 to $9,000 per license annually."
"It's very overpriced because it is based on the number of users. There is no bulk licensing."
"Splunk SOAR is moderately priced, neither cheap nor overly expensive."
"Splunk SOAR is more expensive compared to other options for SOAR."
"When we first purchased our Splunk SOAR license, it was based on an event-count model. It was based on the number of events. I had strong opinions at the time that automation should not be stifled by the amount of automation you can accomplish, so the previous structure was not as beneficial for us. Later that year, we got told or saw at a conference that they announced user-based pricing. We are now in a renewal period, so we migrated to a user-based license model, which is more appropriate for us so that we no longer have to worry about stifling our automation based on the quantity."
"The licensing cost is reasonable."
"In my opinion, the price is high, but if you want good products, you have to be willing to pay for them."
"Splunk SOAR is an expensive solution for an organization of our size."
"Splunk is a fast enterprise tool, but it costs too much. At the same time, it's worth what we pay, in my opinion. We can efficiently perform all the functions and tie together the data. It's the perfect tool for our needs."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Computer Software Company
12%
Government
12%
Financial Services Firm
11%
Manufacturing Company
11%
Computer Software Company
14%
Financial Services Firm
13%
Manufacturing Company
11%
Government
8%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
 

Questions from the Community

Which is better - Mcafee's MVision ePO or ePolicy Orchestrator?
Our organization ran comparison tests to determine whether Mcafee's MVision ePO or ePolicy Orchestrator network security software was the better fit for us. We decided to go with Mcafee's ePolicy O...
What do you like most about McAfee MVISION ePO?
McAfee ePolicy Orchestrator's performance is good.
What do you like most about Splunk Phantom?
Splunk SOAR's quick response to incidents is the most valuable part.
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Splunk Phantom?
Splunk SOAR is affordable cost-wise only, but not competitive from a technical perspective compared to Palo Alto SOAR and FortiSOAR.
What needs improvement with Splunk Phantom?
The creation of playbooks is complex in Splunk SOAR ( /categories/security-orchestration-automation-and-response-soar ), and the number of integrations needs enhancement. Although it enhances alert...
 

Also Known As

McAfee ePO, ePolicy Orchestrator, Intel Security ePolicy Orchestrator, McAfee MVISION ePO
Phantom
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Brelje & Race, Cognizant, Sutherland Global Services, Eagle Rock Energy, Arab National Bank, Bank Central Asia, Kleberg Bank, Leading Mexican Bank, SF Police Credit Union, Macquarie Telecom, Seagate Technology, Blackburn & Darwen Council, California Department of Corrections & Rehabilitation, IRCEP, Major U.S. State Government, State of Alaska, State of Colorado, Cemex, Deutsche Edelstahlwerke
Recorded Future, Blackstone
Find out what your peers are saying about McAfee ePolicy Orchestrator vs. Splunk SOAR and other solutions. Updated: April 2025.
849,190 professionals have used our research since 2012.