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Splunk Cloud Platform vs Splunk Enterprise Security comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive Summary
 

Categories and Ranking

Splunk Cloud Platform
Average Rating
8.2
Number of Reviews
56
Ranking in other categories
Data Visualization (3rd), IT Alerting and Incident Management (3rd)
Splunk Enterprise Security
Average Rating
8.4
Number of Reviews
301
Ranking in other categories
Log Management (1st), Security Information and Event Management (SIEM) (1st), IT Operations Analytics (1st)
 

Mindshare comparison

While both are Systems Management solutions, they serve different purposes. Splunk Cloud Platform is designed for Data Visualization and holds a mindshare of 0.4%, up 0.3% compared to last year.
Splunk Enterprise Security, on the other hand, focuses on Security Information and Event Management (SIEM), holds 10.9% mindshare, down 14.3% since last year.
Data Visualization
Security Information and Event Management (SIEM)
 

Featured Reviews

Raul Lapaz - PeerSpot reviewer
Aug 17, 2023
Does not require backend maintenance, is easily integrated and utilized
Splunk Cloud Platform helps us with our security incident response. The cloud security logs are integrated with all the cloud providers. The federated search feature enables us to search between Europe and the US, from one Splunk instance to another, all from a single location. This federated search simplifies how we handle data, making it easy to swiftly search for and manage information. We monitor several cloud environments and find it easy to utilize the Splunk Cloud Platform for this purpose. Each cloud provider offers its own prebuilt dashboard, or customers can create their own. The Splunk Cloud Platform offers excellent visibility into multiple environments. In the past, we utilized hybrid integrations, and they seamlessly worked right out of the box. The reporting functionality provided by the Splunk Cloud Platform resembles that of the on-premise platform. It is readily available without requiring integration or the installation of reporting visualizations. From a security standpoint, the Splunk Cloud Platform provides us with comprehensive visibility into all security logs. This enables us to implement security incident responses with great efficiency. Additionally, we have discovered that internal employees, such as product teams, are utilizing the platform as intended for various other use cases. For instance, it has proven valuable in troubleshooting performance issues and monitoring within Kubernetes. As such, we are leveraging a wide array of use cases within the company. Splunk is a highly mature software that has been in the market for many years, which greatly influenced our decision-making process. Another factor was the user-friendly nature of the latest version, making it easy to initiate. We don't require a large workforce for installing components; it's as simple as out-of-the-box. Consequently, minimal time investment is needed for training. The Splunk Cloud Platform assists us in accessing data to meet critical compliance and privacy regulations. For instance, this is particularly important for regulations such as GDPR and HIPAA. We are utilizing Splunk Cloud with a specific focus on HIPAA compliance, allocating extra attention to this aspect. In the case of GDPR, Splunk offers a range of built-in capabilities. For instance, it allows for log masking. Moreover, there are novel features available in Splunk Cloud, such as ingest actions. This feature is exceptionally useful as it enables us to mask the data before it's ingested into Splunk. Consequently, this approach ensures our adherence to compliance regulations, exemplified by GDPR. The Splunk Cloud Platform has had a significant impact on our organization's security posture. It serves as our primary visibility tool and is the main source of trust for all login activities. Without Splunk, we would lose essential visibility and access to security updates. Currently, Splunk stands as one of the primary tools we utilize due to its utmost importance.
Sameep Agarwal. - PeerSpot reviewer
Oct 23, 2023
It has a drag-and-drop interface, so you don't need to know SQL or Java to construct a query
The ingestion happens quickly, so you can run up the data costs if you use the default settings. It isn't a problem for government agencies in the Saudi market, but many of the corporations in India are small or medium-sized enterprises that cannot afford that kind of ingestion system. Splunk needs to be tweaked in JSON so you can limit what is coming from the endpoints, especially the events. One needs to filter that out so that only certain events are ingested, like login failures, Active Directory changes, password reset requests, privilege modifications, etc. Each Windows machine generates about 310 KB of information per event, but we can tweak that down to about 50 KB.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"Dashboards and alerting are the most valuable features. The dashboards let us see how the system looks in terms of anomalies, and the alerts trigger us to go and look at what possible problems are happening."
"Dashboarding has been very powerful. I work with a lot of different customers, so being able to tailor the data for different customers has been valuable. I am able to make visuals and have reports where they can self-serve."
"Not having to maintain any infrastructure is valuable. That frees up a lot of time as well."
"The most valuable feature of Splunk Cloud Platform is the ability to correlate events together and combine the data into one event."
"Splunk has sped up our response and reduced the time we spend manually monitoring any logs for ticketing tools or servers. It saves us around two hours daily."
"The cloud is very fast."
"Everything is maintained by the Splunk support team. Users do not have to maintain any physical servers. They do not have to maintain indexes and searches. It reduces a lot of work on the user side."
"I can trace an event back to its root cause. I can find the root cause instead of just looking at the symptoms across different things."
"Its usability is the best part. It is easy for our developers to use if they want to search their logs, etc."
"Its integration is most valuable. Its UI is also pretty much easy."
"Splunk UBA is useful for fraud detection and for detection of APTs, advanced persistent threats."
"Being able to track impossible travel logins and things of that nature is valuable. We can track user logins from various IPs, various countries, and at various times to see if everything adds up."
"It helps streamline troubleshooting and log analysis."
"The solution's most valuable feature is the dashboard, which allows us to see everything on the same page and provides easy visibility into problems."
"The dashboard and reporting are very good... It provides very good visibility in a hybrid cloud environment, and you can build custom utilization APIs using Splunk."
"The ability to ingest any data and display it in a way that anyone can understand."
 

Cons

"I think the tool has some scalability issues, especially when used in larger organizations."
"The Splunk Cloud Platform dashboard could benefit from some improvements."
"The only thing that is missing from Splunk Cloud is the command-line interface."
"Every time they launch new versions, we experience a few bugs. The most recent version had a couple of bugs in the databases. We contacted the vendor and got assistance solving these bugs, so the environment is more stable."
"There could be better searches, but mainly, it needs to improve the performance with a vast amount of data. That will make it better and easier to use."
"I want to have the ability to process the ingestion before it is sent to the back end and Splunk just announced that the feature is coming, so now it just needs to be released."
"There can be more modules and more integration with other areas in the cloud and on-prem. I am not sure whether it includes network devices and things like that."
"Splunk Cloud's SVC licensing model lacks transparency."
"We do have to educate developers on how to not blow it up. It is a little to easy to write an expensive query and overly stress the system. This could be improved."
"Splunk should align its security principles with those of other vendors like SentinelOne. Splunk has mature APIs that can communicate with various security applications and devices. Splunk can process more to produce an understandable dashboard."
"Splunk is very expensive. The license is based on the volume of the logs ingested. I was responsible for managing the contract with our service integrator. I don't know the precise details of the competing solution, but I have heard that Splunk is more expensive than others. I don't know what the going rate is on the market, but I think there are at least two competitors that are less expensive. We have experienced a few issues with our service providers in terms of log filtering and ingestion, so we continue to pay a bit more per day for our logs."
"While Splunkbase (the app repository) has a lot of great content, some apps are terribly old and could stand to be updated or purged."
"The setup time is quite long."
"Splunk needs to be able to hold more days of data. At the moment it only holds three months of data."
"The threat detection system has room for improvement."
"I think the only thing lacking is that there are some answers that I couldn't find about the tool without reaching out to support, and it had to be escalated to the engineering team."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The licensing costs depend on the state of your environment and the fees are paid on a monthly basis."
"Currently, we have the ingest-based license. They are offering SVC-based licenses as well, but I am not a fan of SVC-based licensing. At the end of the day, I want to predict my budget and how much I am going to pay to the vendor so that I can plan my yearly budget."
"I do not know what that is anymore. I have not been involved with that for a couple of years, but I know we are paying a lot."
"I know that Splunk Cloud Platform is an expensive product."
"The certifications are costly."
"The price for Splunk Cloud Platform is the same as our maintenance costs for Splunk Enterprise on-premises."
"Splunk Cloud Platform's pricing is a little on the higher end."
"Splunk Cloud Platform is an expensive solution."
"Luckily, we come under a large federal agency, and before the pandemic, they signed a large enterprise license agreement. It worked out great and to our advantage because we are a small organization. We got a 300 gig license, and we just did not have the buying power to be able to get products cheaply. Because we all partnered together under the agency umbrella, we were able to get Splunk Enterprise Security, UBA, and ITSI for cheap. This was good considering the fact that some of these premium apps require a minimum number of users, and we do not have the number of people needed to even justify buying it."
"Splunk Enterprise Security is not at all cost-friendly to be deployed in very small enterprises like start-ups."
"Splunk Enterprise Security is expensive."
"Splunk is a bit pricier, but the benefits and ROI are huge."
"It is possible to use a developer's license, which is up to 10GB per day of volume traffic, which is usually enough for most use cases."
"Unlike other security tools, Splunk provides a fixed amount of gigabytes per day, and we are required to pay for any additional usage beyond that limit, in addition to our monthly cost."
"The tool's licensing is good and we haven't received any complaints from the team handling it."
"Splunk is really expensive compared to all the other tools on the market, including Microsoft Sentinel."
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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
26%
Financial Services Firm
13%
Educational Organization
6%
University
6%
Financial Services Firm
16%
Computer Software Company
14%
Government
9%
Manufacturing Company
8%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
 

Questions from the Community

What do you like most about Splunk Cloud Platform?
Splunk has sped up our response and reduced the time we spend manually monitoring any logs for ticketing tools or servers. It saves us around two hours daily.
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Splunk Cloud Platform?
Splunk Cloud is affordable, depending on your license. I don't know how much it costs exactly, but my colleague said it depends on your licensing and which features you use.
What needs improvement with Splunk Cloud Platform?
First-time users may struggle with the user interface. When I first used Splunk, I entered my username and password. After that, we get a dashboard on the left side with apps. At the top, you can c...
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...
 

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Overview

 

Sample Customers

Mindtouch
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 Splunk Cloud Platform vs. Splunk Enterprise Security and other solutions. Updated: March 2023.
814,649 professionals have used our research since 2012.