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ControlUp vs Splunk Observability Cloud comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Dec 28, 2025

Review summaries and opinions

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

ROI

Sentiment score
7.2
Organizations achieve efficiency and cost savings with ControlUp, automating tasks, preventing disasters, and optimizing virtual environments.
Sentiment score
6.9
Splunk Observability Cloud boosts ROI with improved efficiency, reduced downtime, faster problem resolution, and significant operational savings.
This is having a 24/7 junior admin who's really smart, always there, always doing work, but you have to consume his work.
Senior Systems Administrator at a tech vendor with 10,001+ employees
Basically, what we were targeting is the response time of the virtual environment.
Senior IT Engineer Citrix at EDR Media LLC
Using Splunk has saved my organization about 30% of our budget compared to using multiple different monitoring products.
Senior Manager at a financial services firm with 10,001+ employees
Anyone working in front-end management should recognize the market price to see the true value of end-user monitoring.
General Manager at MOCOMSYS
I have definitely seen a return on investment with Splunk Observability Cloud, particularly through how fast it has grown and how comfortable other teams are in relying on its outputs for monitoring and observability.
IT Operations Engineer at ABC Supply Co. Inc.
 

Customer Service

Sentiment score
9.0
ControlUp's responsive, knowledgeable support enhances customer experience, offering integration flexibility and premium benefits for larger organizations.
Sentiment score
7.1
Splunk Observability Cloud's customer service is responsive and helpful but experiences issues with delays and limited staffing in regions.
I was quite happy to work with ControlUp because the support is excellent.
Senior IT Engineer Citrix at EDR Media LLC
Basically, if I could take everything that you do, put it in a tool, and hand you that tool so you don't have to repeat your efforts, then you would be able to make good use of it.
Senior Systems Administrator at a tech vendor with 10,001+ employees
On a scale of 1 to 10, the customer service and technical support deserve a 10.
Systems Administrator at a insurance company with 1,001-5,000 employees
They have consistently helped us resolve any issues we've encountered.
Software Engineer at UKG
They often require multiple questions, with five or six emails to get a response.
Splunk Observability Expert
 

Scalability Issues

Sentiment score
7.6
ControlUp's cloud scalability eases expansion, though pricing concerns arise, highlighting the importance of strategic adaptability and monitoring.
Sentiment score
7.3
Splunk Observability Cloud scales well but can be costly, requiring careful management of pricing and metric limits.
It scales very well; you just have to tell it what you're doing and size it for what you're asking.
Senior Systems Administrator at a tech vendor with 10,001+ employees
We've used the solution across more than 250 people, including engineers.
Splunk Observability Expert
As we are a growing company transitioning all our applications to the cloud, and with the increasing number of cloud-native applications, Splunk Observability Cloud will help us achieve digital resiliency and reduce our mean time to resolution.
Application Developer at UMB Financial
I would rate its scalability a nine out of ten.
Senior Manager at a financial services firm with 10,001+ employees
 

Stability Issues

Sentiment score
8.9
ControlUp is praised for its stability and effective monitoring, with most users finding it reliable and well-supported.
Sentiment score
7.7
Splunk Observability Cloud offers reliable performance with minimal issues, quickly resolving occasional glitches, leading to high user satisfaction.
I would rate its stability a nine out of ten.
Head of DevOps at a tech services company with 1-10 employees
We rarely have problems accessing the dashboard or the page.
Splunk Observability Expert
Unlike NetScout or regular agents for APM, RUM has many problems during the POC phase because customer environments vary widely.
General Manager at MOCOMSYS
 

Room For Improvement

ControlUp needs seamless integration, improved monitoring, GUI enhancements, and additional features for better automation and complete insights.
Splunk Observability Cloud needs improved integration, cost transparency, better UI, enhanced AI, customization, stability, and streamlined processes.
There is area for improvement, maybe in the reporting.
Senior Systems Administrator at a tech vendor with 10,001+ employees
The out-of-the-box customizable dashboards in Splunk Observability Cloud are very effective in showcasing IT performance to business leaders.
IT Operations Engineer at ABC Supply Co. Inc.
The next release of Splunk Observability Cloud should include a feature that makes it so that when looking at charts and dashboards, and also looking at one environment regardless of the product feature that you're in, APM, infrastructure, RUM, the environment that is chosen in the first location when you sign into Splunk Observability Cloud needs to stay persistent all the way through.
Systems Monitoring Engineer II at a government with 10,001+ employees
There is room for improvement in the alerting system, which is complicated and has less documentation available.
Head of DevOps at a tech services company with 1-10 employees
 

Setup Cost

ControlUp pricing involves annual agreements with varied costs; thorough evaluation of licensing options is essential for optimal use.
Splunk Observability Cloud is costly but offers negotiable and flexible pricing justified by its features and solutions.
It is expensive.
Senior IT Engineer Citrix at EDR Media LLC
Splunk is a bit expensive since it charges based on the indexing rate of data.
Senior Manager at a financial services firm with 10,001+ employees
It is expensive, especially when there are other vendors that offer something similar for much cheaper.
Solutions Architect at Ikusi
It appears to be expensive compared to competitors.
Head of DevOps at a tech services company with 1-10 employees
 

Valuable Features

ControlUp offers efficient ROI, real-time insights, robust automation, and proactive management with AI-enhanced performance monitoring and comprehensive visibility.
Splunk Observability Cloud offers user-friendly dashboards, AI analytics, and seamless integration, improving visibility, issue resolution, and operational performance.
Everything works exactly the way it's meant to, a dream come true for anyone who's administering systems because it gives you all the information that you want and all the actions you want to take, all in one place.
Senior Systems Administrator at a tech vendor with 10,001+ employees
It's not only monitoring, but it's also detecting, and it could even fix problems with a lot of automation that you can put in place to fix problems automatically before you even detect them.
Senior IT Engineer Citrix at EDR Media LLC
Splunk provides advanced notifications of roadblocks in the application, which helps us to improve and avoid impacts during high-volume days.
Senior Manager at a financial services firm with 10,001+ employees
For troubleshooting, we can detect problems in seconds, which is particularly helpful for digital teams.
Splunk Observability Expert
It offers unified visibility for logs, metrics, and traces.
Administrator at a tech vendor with 10,001+ employees
 

Categories and Ranking

ControlUp
Ranking in IT Infrastructure Monitoring
19th
Ranking in Digital Experience Monitoring (DEM)
4th
Average Rating
8.6
Reviews Sentiment
7.6
Number of Reviews
13
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
Splunk Observability Cloud
Ranking in IT Infrastructure Monitoring
7th
Ranking in Digital Experience Monitoring (DEM)
2nd
Average Rating
8.2
Reviews Sentiment
7.0
Number of Reviews
75
Ranking in other categories
Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability (8th), Network Monitoring Software (6th), Cloud Monitoring Software (6th), Container Management (6th)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of January 2026, in the IT Infrastructure Monitoring category, the mindshare of ControlUp is 0.9%, up from 0.9% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Splunk Observability Cloud is 2.0%, up from 1.2% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
IT Infrastructure Monitoring Market Share Distribution
ProductMarket Share (%)
Splunk Observability Cloud2.0%
ControlUp0.9%
Other97.1%
IT Infrastructure Monitoring
 

Featured Reviews

reviewer2717526 - PeerSpot reviewer
Senior Systems Administrator at a tech vendor with 10,001+ employees
Delivers comprehensive and customizable system management with increased efficiency
The best features I have found are that it is very customizable, which would be number one, and very extensible through the use of scripts and triggers. The visual look of the interface is very easy to understand what is happening and somewhat why it's happening. It may sound facetious, but it really is everything about it. Everything works exactly the way it's meant to, a dream come true for anyone who's administering systems because it gives you all the information that you want and all the actions you want to take, all in one place. The benefits I have seen from using it so far include the ability to know in advance and take actions based on the information the tool gives you.
Dhananjay Dileep - PeerSpot reviewer
Senior Software Engineer at a consultancy with 10,001+ employees
Unified monitoring has improved end-to-end visibility and reduced detection time across apps
When we have too many detectors in place for one particular app, such as when I have created 50+ detectors through my account, the entire page becomes a bit loaded when creating the 51st detector, feeling heavy and taking time to load. Additionally, it throws random errors; for example, when we try to save one detector, it might throw some random error which is not even related, with something else being wrong, not that particular error, but the underlying root cause might be different. Sometimes the error is just "some problem occurred," and we are not able to point out what the real cause is. This mainly happens when we have too many detectors or too many alerts in place rather than a standard number. One more thing is in the alert rules; if we have a main general alert, and instead of creating a new detector, we are adding a new rule under one detector, when the number of rules also increases, such as when we have 10 or 15 rules under one generic detector, that again creates the same kind of problem, taking some time to save that particular newly added rule, and it might not save at times, just keeps on spinning. Those are the two drawbacks which I spotted recently; other than that, everything looks perfect.
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
14%
Healthcare Company
10%
Computer Software Company
10%
Insurance Company
8%
No data available
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business4
Midsize Enterprise2
Large Enterprise8
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business20
Midsize Enterprise10
Large Enterprise47
 

Questions from the Community

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for ControlUp Real-time?
It is expensive. It is very expensive. I was working in a bank, and even in the bank, which was quite healthy, the ControlUp budget was something we had to defend very harshly.
What is your primary use case for ControlUp Real-time?
I was taking care of a Citrix infrastructure, and as ControlUp is the best monitoring tool for those environments, I was also using ControlUp to monitor those environments.
What do you like most about SignalFx?
The most valuable feature is dashboard creation.
What needs improvement with SignalFx?
Regarding dashboard customization, while Splunk has many dashboard building options, customers sometimes need to create specific dashboards, particularly for applicative metrics such as Java and pr...
What is your primary use case for SignalFx?
The solution involves observability in general, such as Application Performance Monitoring, and generally addresses digital applications, web applications, sites, and mobile applications. I worked ...
 

Also Known As

No data available
Splunk Infrastructure Monitoring, Splunk Real User Monitoring (RUM), Splunk Synthetic Monitoring
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

B/E Aerospace, North Carolina SECU, Vancouver Island Health Authority, University of Florida
Sunrun, Yelp, Onshape, Tapjoy, Symphony Commerce, Chairish, Clever, Grovo, Bazaar Voice, Zenefits, Avalara
Find out what your peers are saying about ControlUp vs. Splunk Observability Cloud and other solutions. Updated: December 2025.
881,082 professionals have used our research since 2012.