McAfee ePolicy Orchestrator vs Splunk SOAR comparison

McAfee and Splunk are both solutions in the Security Orchestration Automation and Response (SOAR) category. McAfee is ranked #8 with an average rating of 8.3, while Splunk is ranked #3 with an average rating of 8.1. McAfee holds a 0.5% mindshare in SOAR, compared to Splunk’s 7.3% mindshare. Additionally, 81% of McAfee users are willing to recommend the solution, compared to 85% of Splunk users who would recommend it.

McAfee ePolicy Orchestrator

Read 40 McAfee ePolicy Orchestrator reviews

1,064 Views
239 Comparison Views

81% willing to recommend

Splunk SOAR

Read 44 Splunk SOAR reviews

4,795 Views
2,870 Comparison Views

85% willing to recommend

McAfee ePolicy Orchestrator

Splunk SOAR

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Executive SummaryUpdated on Mar 9, 2025

McAfee ePolicy Orchestrator and Splunk SOAR are competing in the cybersecurity management category. Splunk SOAR has the upper hand due to its superior automation capabilities, despite McAfee ePolicy Orchestrator having more favorable pricing and support.

Features: McAfee ePolicy Orchestrator offers centralized security management, robust policy enforcement, and compliance reporting capabilities. It provides centralized virus signatures and patch updates, easy-to-use console, and integrated reports for signature update status. Splunk SOAR is known for its advanced automation features, comprehensive playbook-driven responses, and seamless integration with other security tools. Its automation playbooks save analysts time, and it is user-friendly with a flexible integration framework.

Room for Improvement: McAfee ePolicy Orchestrator could improve its user interface, scalability, and integration capabilities to match modern demands. Additionally, enhancing their customization options would broaden their usability. Splunk SOAR could benefit from simplifying its deployment process, expanding its pre-built integration options, and improving user accessibility for less technical users.

Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: McAfee ePolicy Orchestrator provides a straightforward deployment process with responsive customer service to ease technical challenges. Splunk SOAR offers strong support but highlights a more complex deployment model due to its extensive customization and integration options, requiring more technical expertise initially. McAfee’s simplicity contrasts with Splunk’s flexibility for advanced configurations.

Pricing and ROI: McAfee ePolicy Orchestrator is generally seen as more cost-effective with a high ROI due to its simpler pricing structure and efficiency. Splunk SOAR’s pricing reflects its sophisticated capabilities, with users deeming its long-term ROI significant due to enhanced automation and reduced manual interventions. McAfee's advantage lies in being budget-friendly, while Splunk offers premium features.

To learn more, read our detailed McAfee ePolicy Orchestrator vs. Splunk SOAR Report (Updated: March 2025).

Buyer's Guide

McAfee ePolicy Orchestrator vs. Splunk SOAR

March 2025

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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)

8th

Average Rating

8.0

Reviews Sentiment

6.8

Number of Reviews

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

Ranking in other categories

No ranking in other categories

Mindshare comparison

As of March 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 7.3%, 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

Head of Content at Pharmaflow

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.

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Shubham Sinha.

Senior Principal Information Security Analyst at Veritas Technologies LLC

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.

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Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"McAfee ePolicy Orchestrator's performance is good."

"It is a scalable solution...I rate its scalability a nine out of ten."

"The feature that I have found most valuable is its general purpose of protecting our endpoints from infections, malicious files, and all those kinds of things. The fact that there are organized policies and policy inheritance. The general management."

"McAfee is helping us to clean all of the viruses from the machines, protecting our desktops from the latest threats."

"Their support is really good. I would rate it a nine out of ten. I have never any issues with their support. They always reply and follow our queries on time."

"If you set it up right, it can really manage a very complex environment which require fine tuning where there are a lot of exceptions. That's what it caters to. It can just do those specifics in those exceptional situations, which is good."

"The solution's best part is that it is very easy to manage McAfee Agent."

"The most valuable feature of the solution is the central management console, which is used for DLP, endpoint security, drive encryption, and application control."

More McAfee ePolicy Orchestrator pros

"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."

"Scalability is the best feature of the solution."

"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."

"Technical support is helpful."

"Splunk SOAR's extensive library of pre-built integrations allows it to connect with a vast array of popular security and IT applications, streamlining workflows across our existing security stack."

"Splunk SOAR's quick response to incidents is the most valuable part."

"I like the integration capabilities of Phantom. It has a lot of integrations with other products. Its searching methodologies are also good. It is also easy to understand and easy to create playbooks."

"The solution’s dashboard is really good and customizable. It also has a good UI."

More Splunk SOAR pros

Cons

"The Virtual Patching feature needs to be improved."

"The solution is difficult to tune to avoid false positives."

"The issues with the integration capabilities of the product, specifically the ones that are deployed on an on-premises model, need to be improved."

"There are some issues we are having with updating our Windows server. So we need to contact support or access our support portal."

"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"

"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."

"McAfee ePolicy Orchestrator could improve by supporting container microservices, such as Docker and Kubernetes."

"The way that ePolicy launches the updates is very slow. It would be great if that was faster."

More McAfee ePolicy Orchestrator cons

"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.."

"Providing Splunk app developers and playbook developers Python Stub files so that way when they create custom code through their IDE, they can have IntelliCode suggestions."

"Splunk's support for integration is subpar and has room for improvement."

"Various aspects of the playbook development process itself can be optimized."

"What we have seen is if the workflow gets halted or if we want to halt a workflow, it cannot be resumed."

"The application does not work properly and does not pass the log-based configuration. I feel that some kind of review should happen in the application. This review should validate things so that we can get the right information. Splunk does not tell us where the IP address is associated with."

"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."

"SOAR is probably the most unreliable product Splunk has and that's because most of it is content driven from what you put into it. There are certain parts of it that have a little bit of difficulty at volume too. It's always changing. There is new stuff coming out for it that's going to make it a little bit better, but it does have some drawbacks."

More Splunk SOAR cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

"McAfee ePolicy Orchestrator is a cheaply priced product, meaning it is not expensive since McAfee provides a free version of ePO, which includes phone support as well."

"McAfee tries to package different things into different products, then sell them as different products with different licenses. They just split everything up into multiple things. That's just their sales pitch and how they do it."

"It's an expensive solution"

"Compared to other Antivirus products, the cost of this solution is a bit high."

"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."

"$The price of McAfee ePolicy Orchestrator is expensive, it is approximately $6,000 to $9,000 per license annually."

"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."

"McAfee ePolicy Orchestrator is not an expensive solution."

More McAfee ePolicy Orchestrator pricing and cost advice

"Splunk SOAR is an expensive solution for an organization of our size."

"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 tool is not cheap."

"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."

"The cost is high and the licensing is on an annual basis."

"Splunk SOAR is more expensive compared to other options for SOAR."

"I found the price of Splunk SOAR to be good."

"The licensing cost is reasonable."

More Splunk SOAR pricing and cost advice

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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Government

14%

Computer Software Company

11%

Manufacturing Company

11%

Financial Services Firm

10%

Computer Software Company

14%

Financial Services Firm

13%

Manufacturing Company

11%

Government

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...

See all answers

What do you like most about McAfee ePolicy Orchestrator?

I like the solution's feasibility. McAfee ePolicy Orchestrator is also better and easier to use than other ePOs.

See all answers

What needs improvement with McAfee ePolicy Orchestrator?

The installation process is quite difficult and requires technical support.

See all answers

What do you like most about Splunk Phantom?

Splunk SOAR's quick response to incidents is the most valuable part.

See all answers

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.

See all answers

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...

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Comparisons

Symantec Data Loss Prevention vs McAfee ePolicy Orchestrator

Compared 54% of the time

Forcepoint Data Loss Prevention vs McAfee ePolicy Orchestrator

Compared 46% of the time

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Cortex XSIAM vs Splunk SOAR

Compared 25% of the time

Palo Alto Networks Cortex XSOAR vs Splunk SOAR

Compared 18% of the time

Tines vs Splunk SOAR

Compared 9% of the time

Fortinet FortiSOAR vs Splunk SOAR

Compared 9% of the time

Torq vs Splunk SOAR

Compared 8% of the time

More Splunk SOAR Competitors

Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

McAfee ePolicy Orchestrator

March 2025

Download McAfee ePolicy Orchestrator product report

Buyer's Guide

Splunk SOAR

March 2025

Download Splunk SOAR product report

Also Known As

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

Phantom

Overview

McAfee ePolicy Orchestrator (McAfee ePO) is the most advanced, extensible, and scalable centralized security management software in the industry. Unifying security management through an open platform, McAfee ePO makes risk and compliance management simpler and more successful for organizations of all sizes.

McAfee

Splunk SOAR offers features like automation and orchestration of manual tasks, speeding up work, detection and response to advanced and emerging threats.

Go from overwhelmed to in-control

Automate manual tasks. Address every alert, every day. Establish repeatable procedures that allow security analysts to stop being reactive and focus on mission-critical objectives to protect your business.

Force multiply your team

Orchestrate and automate repetitive tasks, investigation and response to increase efficiency and productivity, and do more with the people you already have. Make a team of three feel like a team of 10.

From 30 minutes to 30 seconds

Work faster with Splunk SOAR. Respond to threats in seconds. Lower your mean time to respond (MTTR) by automating security tasks and workflows across all of your security tools.

End-to-end security operations made easy

Take advantage of Splunk Enterprise Security and Splunk SOAR joining forces to provide a seamless and intuitive SecOps platform to prevent, detect and respond to advanced and emerging threats.

Splunk

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

Buyer's Guide

McAfee ePolicy Orchestrator vs. Splunk SOAR

March 2025

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