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Security Onion vs Splunk Enterprise Security comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Jan 5, 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

Security Onion
Ranking in Log Management
19th
Average Rating
7.6
Reviews Sentiment
5.5
Number of Reviews
3
Ranking in other categories
AWS Marketplace (6th)
Splunk Enterprise Security
Ranking in Log Management
1st
Average Rating
8.4
Reviews Sentiment
7.6
Number of Reviews
303
Ranking in other categories
Security Information and Event Management (SIEM) (1st), IT Operations Analytics (1st)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of February 2025, in the Log Management category, the mindshare of Security Onion is 5.8%, up from 2.0% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Splunk Enterprise Security is 7.8%, down from 12.0% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Log Management
 

Featured Reviews

Jörg Kippe - PeerSpot reviewer
A mature and affordable solution that is easy to install and easy to update
The product takes time to learn, it's not that easy. In the beginning we had a lot of questions. If you want to use such a tool in an real (industrial) environment, you have to ask how to get the network data. Can we do a full packet capture? Can we provide agents to our end systems? There are no simple solutions to these questions. It's a general problem when running such systems in an industrial environment.
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

"Security Onion is the most mature solution in the market."
"The most valuable feature of Security Onion for security monitoring is its ability to find infected ports."
"We use Security Onion for internal vulnerability assessment."
"The user interface is excellent, and since I'm using Splunk as a power user, it's easy to create dashboards."
"It's basically one of the best SIEM products on the market."
"Splunk Enterprise Security is a standard solution providing good customer service and partnership."
"It is a one stop shop as a full monitoring and alerting solution for operations and application analysis for most of our back-end systems."
"The most valuable features include agility and Splunk Enterprise Security's ability to quickly search for alerted items, as well as the capacity to create custom alerts using the SQL language employed by Splunk."
"Splunk helps us be more proactive. We can take predictive action to identify and block threats so that nothing harmful gets into the system."
"Splunk's advantage is its search capability. Its search is notably faster. With Splunk, I can search easily on keywords. That is great."
"Splunk Enterprise Security quickly gives us a view of an endpoint or a user or identity. If I want to look for an identity or an asset, I just quickly go into Splunk Enterprise Security. I know where to go and get a quick analysis for a respective object."
 

Cons

"Security Onion's user interface could be improved."
"The product is not easy to learn."
"The initial setup of the solution is a little bit difficult."
"I do not have any pain points for Splunk Enterprise Security. I am still trying to learn it, but there can be more information on the education side for Splunk Enterprise Security. It would be nice if the certification path was more specific to what I use instead of being so broad."
"Splunk does not build apps. They only go back and validate the apps that somebody has already built. They should have remote consulting support. They have a wonderful solution. They have 24/7 security. Nobody needs to depend on any third party and will therefore just buy Splunk on the cloud."
"The support that is included with the standard licensing fee is very bad."
"The monitoring aspect of Splunk could be improved. We have to do some queries to get as much information as CrowdStrike or other solutions provide. If you run a big query, you will see a delay. That is the only concern we have because it will take some time if you query large data sets."
"In the next releases, I would like to see more pricing flexibility."
"There are new services which are coming up. If Splunk can catch up with the speed of Amazon, and with the integration, instead of us waiting for another year or so, that would be good."
"They can improve their support teams. They can also improve their capability of ingesting data from different IoT sources."
"Its search or filtering capability is nice, but it can be improved. It is currently a bit complicated, and it should be simplified. If we can write the search filter in a more simplified way, it would be better."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"Security Onion is a free solution."
"Security Onion is an open-source solution."
"It is an open-source solution."
"We have seen ROI and improvements as we have continued to use the product, but they are more reactive."
"While Splunk is more expensive than other solutions, we would still choose it because of its capabilities."
"The price of this solution is expensive. However, it has great features. If you want a great solution you need to pay a price matching the features."
"Truly evaluate the data you want to ingest and go slow. Pulling in data that can provide no use to your mission only wastes data against your license."
"Splunk has always been on the expensive side."
"Splunk ES is quite expensive compared to some products on the market."
"Splunk Enterprise Security incurs a significant cost because of the amount of data we send, but we are fine with the value we're getting for that price."
"The price of Splunk is too high for our market."
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Comparison Review

VS
Feb 26, 2015
HP ArcSight vs. IBM QRadar vs. ​McAfee Nitro vs. Splunk vs. RSA Security vs. LogRhythm
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
Computer Software Company
12%
Government
12%
University
11%
Comms Service Provider
10%
Financial Services Firm
15%
Computer Software Company
14%
Manufacturing Company
9%
Government
9%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
No data available
 

Questions from the Community

What do you like most about Security Onion?
The most valuable feature of Security Onion for security monitoring is its ability to find infected ports.
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Security Onion?
Security Onion is an open-source solution. On a scale from one to ten, where ten is expensive and one is cheap, I rate the solution's pricing a six out of ten.
What needs improvement with Security Onion?
The initial setup of the solution is a little bit difficult.
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

Information Not Available
Splunk has more than 7,000 customers spread across over 90 countries. These customers include Telenor, UniCredit, ideeli, McKenney's, Tesco, and SurveyMonkey.
Find out what your peers are saying about Security Onion vs. Splunk Enterprise Security and other solutions. Updated: January 2025.
832,138 professionals have used our research since 2012.