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

Palo Alto Networks Cortex XSOAR vs Splunk SOAR comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Dec 8, 2024

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

Palo Alto Networks Cortex X...
Ranking in Security Orchestration Automation and Response (SOAR)
2nd
Average Rating
8.4
Reviews Sentiment
6.9
Number of Reviews
46
Ranking in other categories
SOC as a Service (2nd)
Splunk SOAR
Ranking in Security Orchestration Automation and Response (SOAR)
3rd
Average Rating
8.2
Reviews Sentiment
6.8
Number of Reviews
43
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
 

Mindshare comparison

As of February 2025, in the Security Orchestration Automation and Response (SOAR) category, the mindshare of Palo Alto Networks Cortex XSOAR is 11.2%, down from 13.2% 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)
 

Q&A Highlights

it_user870255 - PeerSpot reviewer
Jun 15, 2018
 

Featured Reviews

NikhilSharma2 - PeerSpot reviewer
Ability to multiple playbooks to fetch data from multiple firewalls and utomated several tasks, including vulnerability scans and SOCL (Security Orchestration, Automation
Recently, they started implementing microservices in XSOAR, which has improved quality and addressed previous issues. However, they should focus more on licensing costs. The user licensing fees are quite high. For example, I received a quote for XSOAR, and it was $12,000 per user per year. If you have a SOC team of 30 members/analysts, you're looking at a substantial expense. They should consider reducing these costs since this high pricing seems to be more about profit. So, there is room for improvement in the pricing. Moreover, the reporting and dashboard features are decent but could be improved. The user interface (UI) is quite heavy and takes time to load, which is a major drawback.
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 most valuable features are the orchestration because of the way in which it coordinates the loss from all the devices and it provides us with a high-level overview of the critical log information."
"Each incident collected is orchestrated with automation that selects the security analyst to be involved, or provides complex execution plans for managing security incidents."
"It is a scalable solution."
"The product’s stability is good."
"It is a scalable solution."
"The automation is excellent."
"The automation part and the playbook creation part are awesome. The way it is responding to the customers and incidents is also very good. In the SOC environment, I guess it will carry out around 50% of the work."
"I would rate the stability of Cortex XSOAR as nine out of ten."
"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."
"Its ability to integrate with other systems and applications in our environment is pretty easy. Sometimes if we see any complexity we try to involve a consultant to help us. Everything is through the built-in app. Splunk can connect to any assets through the built-in app. It could be in a platform, firewalls, or endpoints. It's easy if it's an app integration."
"The automation part of the product is great."
"Scalability is the best feature of the solution."
"Very flexible integration with other tools"
"It's pretty easy when it comes to setting up assets. If you want to fetch emails or call a REST API, you can set up an asset and grab that information."
"The solution allows us to customize playbooks and incorporate custom code, allowing us to drag and drop elements while still writing code to build the integrations we need."
"The product provides 100% automation for certain processes."
 

Cons

"Palo Alto needs to develop more AI-centric products."
"Creating complex playbooks using coding languages, such as Python, could be easier."
"Corex XSOAR could be improved by reducing the time it takes to process large amounts of data and increasing the number of integrations."
"It's only one cloud right now. It might be helpful for some companies to have an on-premies option."
"XSOAR could have more integration options."
"I think they should increase their collaboration base."
"The product can be tailored for each deployment to respond to specific customer needs, and this complexity may be seen as a downside."
"It is not a very scalable solution."
"Portability is one thing that is currently lacking. The open-source product that I evaluated had portability. It would require a lot of development effort, but it will save the cost of rewriting all the playbooks."
"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 tool's response is slower because it has to search through a huge dataset, which can be improved for latency."
"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 SOAR has room to improve its offering for small-sized customers. The price is not fair for smaller-sized customers."
"It would be ideal if we could automate processes even more."
"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."
"There is a lot of room for improvement with the UI."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"My company did not make any payments towards the licensing costs attached to the product since we were only using its pilot version."
"There is a perception that it is priced very high compared to other solutions."
"There is a yearly license required for this solution and it is expensive."
"Palo Alto offers significant discounts to customers who purchase the products repeatedly."
"The solution's cost is reasonable."
"Cortex XSOAR's price could be lower."
"The pricing is fair. The pricing reflects the value and feature set it offers."
"The solution is expensive."
"Splunk SOAR is an expensive solution for an organization of our size."
"We renewed it this year. This year was the first time there was a dramatic increase in the price. It was kind of non-negotiable. It was just a high increase. We had internal communications, and it was definitely a surprise to us. In a short time frame, we renewed it this year. Prices are going up everywhere, but they are not always justifiable, at least not to our eyes. The pricing this year was definitely a big shock."
"Splunk SOAR is more expensive compared to other options for SOAR."
"It's very overpriced because it is based on the number of users. There is no bulk licensing."
"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 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."
"While I can't confirm the exact pricing, some colleagues have mentioned that Splunk SOAR may be on the costlier side."
report
Use our free recommendation engine to learn which Security Orchestration Automation and Response (SOAR) solutions are best for your needs.
838,640 professionals have used our research since 2012.
 

Answers from the Community

it_user870255 - PeerSpot reviewer
Jun 15, 2018
Jun 15, 2018
I would not recommend Phantom or Demisto, but rather JASK! JASK is modernizing security operations to reduce organizational risk and improve human efficiency through technology consolidation, enhanced AI and machine learning. We are empowering the SOC analyst to focus on investigative and response work, rather than the onerous data ingestion, normalization, parsing, and alert discrimination th...
See 2 answers
CL
May 23, 2018
I would not recommend Phantom or Demisto, but rather JASK! JASK is modernizing security operations to reduce organizational risk and improve human efficiency through technology consolidation, enhanced AI and machine learning. We are empowering the SOC analyst to focus on investigative and response work, rather than the onerous data ingestion, normalization, parsing, and alert discrimination that is required to simply determine what is important. Purpose-built by the JASK team, proven in solving real-world SOC issues, the JASK Autonomous Security Operations Center (ASOC) Platform enhances threat detection and orchestration to improve contextual visibility, expose blind spots and initiate faster response times with advanced insights.
it_user889167 - PeerSpot reviewer
Jun 15, 2018
I would recommend CyberSponse. There is a reason why CyberSponse have been awarded Government and Military contracts over all the competition! Commerical customers need the same power and capability, why settle for anything less!
 

Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
15%
Computer Software Company
12%
Government
10%
Manufacturing Company
9%
Computer Software Company
14%
Financial Services Firm
13%
Manufacturing Company
11%
Government
9%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
 

Questions from the Community

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Palo Alto Networks Cortex XSOAR?
Even though customers often comment on the price, the potential savings come from managing a large number of security events with a limited number of analysts. This leads to economic advantages des...
What needs improvement with Palo Alto Networks Cortex XSOAR?
The complexity of Cortex XSOAR has a trade-off with its versatility. The product can be tailored for each deployment to respond to specific customer needs, and this complexity may be seen as a down...
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?
I rate Splunk SOAR two out of 10 for affordability. 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 ...
What needs improvement with Splunk Phantom?
The dashboard could be improved and some other features. SOAR should integrate network capabilities, allowing us to also monitor the WLAN network. Splunk is also expensive and difficult for beginne...
 

Also Known As

Demisto Enterprise, Cortex XSOAR, Demisto
Phantom
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Cellcom Israel, Blue Cross and Blue Shield of Kansas City, esri, Cylance, Flatiron Health, Veeva, ADT Cybersecurity
Recorded Future, Blackstone
Find out what your peers are saying about Palo Alto Networks Cortex XSOAR vs. Splunk SOAR and other solutions. Updated: January 2025.
838,640 professionals have used our research since 2012.