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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 January 2025, in the Security Orchestration Automation and Response (SOAR) category, the mindshare of Palo Alto Networks Cortex XSOAR is 13.1%, down from 15.0% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Splunk SOAR is 8.3%, down from 9.8% 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 product can automate security tasks."
"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."
"The repository of playbooks and the integration between Palo Alto and IBM QRadar are some useful features"
"The solution provides threat intelligence with EDR."
"It is a scalable solution. I would rate scalability a ten out of ten."
"From the security team's standpoint, the solution has improved our organization's overall cybersecurity."
"It’s easy to install."
"Its agility and scalability are valuable."
"The customizable playbook is the most valuable aspect of the solution."
"Before its use, analyzing each email would take at least 15 to 20 minutes, with some complex cases taking up to 30 minutes...With the automation provided by Splunk Phantom, we could significantly reduce the amount of time and human effort required to complete this task."
"My understanding is the initial setup isn't too hard."
"Splunk integrates with so many products. It provides us with good information for us to be able to do our jobs."
"So far, the interface is very easy to use."
"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."
"When you design a playbook, you can integrate multiple log sources and define rules... After that, the platform automatically compiles all these activities and, based on the results, the analyst only has to indicate whether the result is a true or false positive. That reduces the time and effort involved."
"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."
 

Cons

"I think they should increase their collaboration base."
"Its dashboard features need improvement."
"When Palo Alto bought the solution, the pricing increased by 1.5 times. There's been a 50% increase, which is a lot."
"For building automation, there is not a lot of good documentation. The documentation is there, but it is not very good from my perspective. There should be an improvement in this area. I don't see issues with anything else. In terms of new features, I have heard that other products have EBA functionality. It would be good if this functionality could be added."
"I would like to see Cortex become less dependent on Active Directory and group policies to manage the deployment. Maybe I need to update my understanding of how to deploy it, but that's the way I know how to use it."
"The solution requires DV but does not support open-source DV elastic searches."
"With Palo Alto Networks Cortex XSOAR, managing its setup phase can be a complicated task."
"The complexity of Cortex XSOAR has a trade-off with its versatility. The deployment requires integration and the development of integration modules."
"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."
"The tool's response is slower because it has to search through a huge dataset, which can be improved for latency."
"We want to see improvements made to the APIs such that we can connect to many different systems and data sources."
"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."
"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."
"And most of the challenges that I have faced with the solution can be found in the documentation itself."
"It would be ideal if we could automate processes even more."
"have put a number of ideas on the ideas.splunk.com site for feature requests for the Splunk SOAR product. I posted one of them about three years ago, which finally got implemented in the latest release that just got announced, so the time to implement new features and things like that is a little bit concerning."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The solution's cost is high."
"The solution's pricing needs improvement."
"The solution is based on an annual licensing model that is expensive."
"The solution is a bit on the expensive side."
"It is approx $10,000 or $20,000 per year for two user licenses."
"The price of Palo Alto Networks Cortex XSOAR is comparable to other solutions in the market."
"The solution's cost is reasonable."
"Cortex XSOAR's price could be lower."
"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."
"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."
"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."
"I found the price of Splunk SOAR to be good."
"Splunk SOAR is more expensive compared to other options for SOAR."
"The licensing cost is reasonable."
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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
14%
Computer Software Company
13%
Government
10%
Manufacturing Company
9%
Computer Software Company
14%
Financial Services Firm
14%
Manufacturing Company
11%
Government
10%
 

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: December 2024.
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