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ServiceNow Security Operations 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

ServiceNow Security Operations
Ranking in Security Orchestration Automation and Response (SOAR)
8th
Average Rating
8.0
Reviews Sentiment
6.8
Number of Reviews
20
Ranking in other categories
Security Incident Response (2nd), Risk-Based Vulnerability Management (10th)
Splunk SOAR
Ranking in Security Orchestration Automation and Response (SOAR)
3rd
Average Rating
8.0
Reviews Sentiment
6.8
Number of Reviews
44
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 ServiceNow Security Operations is 3.8%, down from 4.2% 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)
 

Featured Reviews

KishoreKumar4 - PeerSpot reviewer
A low-cost and open-source tool for incident and change management
If we encounter challenges while deploying, we raise incidents. These incidents are categorized by priority: high, medium, and low. We assign an incident number and notify the relevant teams to address the issue. For instance, if we experience a problem with Cloud services or any other issue, we…
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

"Multiple projects use the ServiceNow tool because it is a low-cost and open-source tool."
"The ease of use is great."
"The solution is stable."
"The solution is available over the cloud and is easy to manage."
"I will recommend it to others as it is an enterprise application used by large companies for ticketing purposes."
"The product has a very simple UI."
"It has helped optimize security costs by consolidating multiple tools into one platform."
"My favorite feature is the application vulnerability scanner."
"Technical support is helpful."
"The most valuable feature is the API connector, depending on how it's formatted and who made the actual app offering for it. The REST API is my favorite component. It's very easy to use. The filters are also really valuable. Those are the two primary features but I enjoy using the rest of it."
"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 most valuable features are the Splunk SOAR apps and playbooks."
"Surprisingly, the mobile app is valuable because it is very convenient for our on-call analysts to respond and get alerted to security alerts and events wherever they are. We are able to harness the power of Splunk SOAR and everything that we are doing, and we are also able to alert our on-call analysts 24/7. From their mobile phone, they can respond to those alerts."
"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."
"It helps increase efficiency and productivity."
"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."
 

Cons

"​Process framework and best practices for ease of integration between IT and security teams via incident, problem, and change.​"
"Customer awareness and understanding of ServiceNow's SecOps capabilities could be improved."
"We'd like customization to be easier in terms of the UI and using the dashboards."
"The initial setup is difficult."
"The product is called SecOps, but it is not security operations in terms of SIEM solutions."
"The threat intelligence module needs a better dashboard."
"In future releases, I would like to add a follow-up and reminder feature. For the tickets in our queue, we could set reminders. This would help us prioritize older tickets before moving on to new ones."
"It is challenging for the customers to understand the processes for SecOps. It needs to be simplified."
"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 beginners to learn. It's hard for a new user to figure out how to visualize old threat data. It took two to three months to learn with hands-on experience how to use the dashboard, visualize events, and analyze threats."
"The number of playbooks on offer should be increased."
"The UI can be more customizable for the clients."
"What we have seen is if the workflow gets halted or if we want to halt a workflow, it cannot be resumed."
"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."
"And most of the challenges that I have faced with the solution can be found in the documentation itself."
"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."
"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

"The product is more expensive than other solutions."
"Compared to competitor tools, ServiceNow Security Operations is more affordable"
"The solution is more expensive than BMC Remedy, the other ITSM tool available in the market."
"It is an expensive product."
"This product is a good value for the money."
"If you're going to implement it on your own, there would be internal costs. If you're going to implement it through a contractor or consultant, you have to pay for that."
"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."
"I don't know the exact price, but for my region, it is very expensive."
"In my opinion, the price is high, but if you want good products, you have to be willing to pay for them."
"The licensing cost is reasonable."
"It's very overpriced because it is based on the number of users. There is no bulk licensing."
"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."
"While I can't confirm the exact pricing, some colleagues have mentioned that Splunk SOAR may be on the costlier side."
"The tool is not cheap."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
21%
Government
10%
Manufacturing Company
10%
Computer Software Company
8%
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 do you like most about ServiceNow Security Operations?
The most valuable aspect of working with ServiceNow is its meaningful and feature-rich product.
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for ServiceNow Security Operations?
The product is more expensive than other solutions like Archer but offers more features, making the pricing justifiable.
What needs improvement with ServiceNow Security Operations?
Report generation within ServiceNow can take some time. Additionally, there are occasional issues when raising a ticket, which can also consume time.
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

No data available
Phantom
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

DXC Technology, Freedom Security Alliance, Prime Therapeutics, Seton Hall University, York Risk Services
Recorded Future, Blackstone
Find out what your peers are saying about ServiceNow Security Operations vs. Splunk SOAR and other solutions. Updated: March 2025.
842,767 professionals have used our research since 2012.