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Elastic Observability vs Splunk Enterprise Security comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Jan 25, 2026

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
6.5
Elastic Observability enhances cost-effectiveness by reducing incidents, automating fixes, and visualizing cloud operations, saving time and resources.
Sentiment score
6.3
Users experienced improved efficiency, security, and decision-making with Splunk, despite cost challenges, leading to increased revenue and ROI.
Elastic Observability has saved us time as it's much easier to find relevant pieces across the system in one screen compared to our own software, and it has saved resources too since the same resources can use less time.
Technology Consultant at Hybrid software
The documentation for Splunk Enterprise Security is outstanding. It is well-organized and easy to access.
DevOps&Cloud Engineer Mentee at CertDirectory.io
We couldn't calculate what would have been the cost if they had actually gotten compromised; however, they were in the process, so every investment was returned immediately.
Business Development Manager at Axians Germany
On average, my SecOps team takes probably at least a quarter of the time, if not more, to remediate security incidents with Splunk Enterprise Security compared to our previous solution.
IT Orchestration Architect at Penn State University
 

Customer Service

Sentiment score
7.6
Elastic Observability customers appreciate their helpful support, quick responses, and valuable documentation, despite some challenges in complex issue resolution.
Sentiment score
6.2
Splunk Enterprise Security's support is knowledgeable but inconsistent, with response times varying; community resources are vital for effective solutions.
Elastic support really struggles in complex situations to resolve issues.
Assistant Vice President at QualityKiosk Technologies Pvt. Ltd.
Their excellent documentation typically helps me solve any issues I encounter.
Technology Consultant at Hybrid software
We have paid for Splunk support, and we’re not on the free tier hoping for assistance; we are a significant customer and invest a lot in this service.
Senior System Administrator at a tech services company with 5,001-10,000 employees
I have had nothing but good experiences with Splunk support, receiving timely and helpful replies.
Cyber Security Associate at SAP
We've had great customer success managers who have helped us navigate scaling from 600 gigs to 30 terabytes.
Principal Engineer at Aviatrix
 

Scalability Issues

Sentiment score
7.2
Elastic Observability is praised for scalability and ease of deployment, despite potential complexities and internal process limitations.
Sentiment score
7.3
Splunk Enterprise Security offers scalable architecture, supporting diverse environments and data volumes, though costs increase with large data growth.
I rate the scalability of Elastic Observability as a ten, as we have never seen issues even with a lot of data coming in from more customers, provided we have the appropriate configuration.
Technology Consultant at Hybrid software
Elastic Observability seems to have a good scale-out capability.
Chief Cloud Architect at a tech services company with 11-50 employees
Elastic Observability is easy in deployment in general for small scale, but when you deploy it at a really large scale, the complexity comes with the customizations.
Assistant Vice President at QualityKiosk Technologies Pvt. Ltd.
We currently rely on disaster recovery and backup recovery, which takes time to recover, during which you're basically blind, so I'm pushing my leadership team to switch over to a clustering environment for constant availability.
IT Security Engineer at a financial services firm with 201-500 employees
It is one of the things that separates it from other tooling, and if not, it is the most scalable solution out there.
Systems Development Engineer at a tech vendor with 10,001+ employees
They struggle a bit with pure virtual environments, but in terms of how much they can handle, it is pretty good.
CTO at a tech vendor with 10,001+ employees
 

Stability Issues

Sentiment score
8.2
Elastic Observability is stable and reliable, with high user ratings, efficiently handling large data volumes with proper configuration.
Sentiment score
7.5
Splunk Enterprise Security is highly reliable, with minimal stability issues, but requires careful resource management for optimal performance.
There are some bugs that come with each release, but they are keen always to build major versions and minor versions on time, including the CVE vulnerabilities to fix it.
Assistant Vice President at QualityKiosk Technologies Pvt. Ltd.
It is very stable, and I would rate it ten out of ten based on my interaction with it.
Product Owner at Swisscom
I would rate the stability of Elastic Observability as a ten, as we don't experience any issues.
Technology Consultant at Hybrid software
They test it very thoroughly before release, and our customers have Splunk running for months without issues.
Splunk System Engineer at a non-tech company with 11-50 employees
Splunk has been very reliable and very consistent.
Principal Engineer at Aviatrix
We need more SMEs, and there is no mechanism to tell us about indexer or search head issues.
Senior Manager at a financial services firm with 10,001+ employees
 

Room For Improvement

Elastic Observability needs automation, AI, and customization improvements, addressing complex deployment, market presence, metrics, licensing, and usability issues.
Splunk Enterprise Security needs UI improvements, better training, cost reductions, enhanced integrations, optimized analytics, and increased automation.
For instance, if you have many error logs and want to create a rule with a custom query, such as triggering an alert for five errors in the last hour, all you need to do is open the AI bot, type this question, and it generates an Elastic query for you to use in your alert rules.
Senior Consultant at Skillfield
It lacked some capabilities when handling on-prem devices, like network observability, package flow analysis, and device performance data on the infrastructure side.
Senior Technical Sales at a tech vendor with 1,001-5,000 employees
Some areas such as AI Ops still require data scientists to understand machine learning and AI, and it doesn't have a quick win with no-brainer use cases.
Assistant Vice President at QualityKiosk Technologies Pvt. Ltd.
Improving the infrastructure behind Splunk Enterprise Security is vital—enhanced cores, CPUs, and memory should be prioritized to support better processing power.
Resident Consultant (Security Analyst) at helpag
Splunk Enterprise Security is not something that automatically picks things; you have to set up use cases, update data models, and link the right use cases to the right data models for those detections to happen.
Security & Risk Analyst at a computer software company with 1,001-5,000 employees
For any future enhancements or features, such as MLTK and SOAR platform integration, we need more visibility, training, and certification for the skilled professionals who are working.
Security Consultant at Matiq
 

Setup Cost

Elastic Observability provides competitive pricing, benefiting large enterprises with comprehensive licensing, but may be costly for smaller users.
Splunk Enterprise Security is costly, but its features justify the expense for those with larger budgets.
The license is reasonably priced, however, the VMs where we host the solution are extremely expensive, making the overall cost in the public cloud high.
Product Owner at Swisscom
Elastic Observability is cost-efficient and provides all features in the enterprise license without asset-based licensing.
Chief Cloud Architect at a tech services company with 11-50 employees
Observability is actually cheaper compared to logs because you're not indexing huge blobs of text and trying to parse those.
Senior Consultant at Skillfield
I saw clients spend two million dollars a year just feeding data into the Splunk solution.
CTO at a tech vendor with 10,001+ employees
The platform requires significant financial investment and resources, making it expensive despite its comprehensive features.
System Engineer - Security Presales at Raya Integration
I find it to be affordable, which is why every industry uses it.
Vice President Research And Development at OSINT Ambition
 

Valuable Features

Elastic Observability excels with flexible integration, powerful search, scalability, real-time insights, affordability, and robust support, enhancing efficiency.
Splunk Enterprise Security excels in rapid data searching, real-time monitoring, flexible data ingestion, and comprehensive visualization for enhanced security.
The most valuable feature is the integrated platform that allows customers to start from observability and expand into other areas like security, EDR solutions, etc.
Chief Cloud Architect at a tech services company with 11-50 employees
the most valued feature of Elastic is its log analytics capabilities.
Senior Technical Sales at a tech vendor with 1,001-5,000 employees
All the features that we use, such as monitoring, dashboarding, reporting, the possibility of alerting, and the way we index the data, are important.
Product Owner at Swisscom
This capability is useful for performance monitoring and issue identification.
Staff Performance Engineer at ServiceNow
I assess Splunk Enterprise Security's insider threat detection capabilities for helping to find unknown threats and anomalous user behavior as great.
Splunk System Engineer at a non-tech company with 11-50 employees
Splunk Enterprise Security provides the foundation for unified threat detection, investigation, and response, enabling fast identification of critical issues.
Specialist-Infrastructure Opertions at Allianz Technology
 

Categories and Ranking

Elastic Observability
Ranking in Log Management
14th
Average Rating
8.0
Reviews Sentiment
6.8
Number of Reviews
29
Ranking in other categories
Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability (6th), IT Infrastructure Monitoring (9th), Container Monitoring (4th), Cloud Monitoring Software (7th)
Splunk Enterprise Security
Ranking in Log Management
2nd
Average Rating
8.4
Reviews Sentiment
7.3
Number of Reviews
375
Ranking in other categories
Security Information and Event Management (SIEM) (1st), IT Operations Analytics (1st)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of January 2026, in the Log Management category, the mindshare of Elastic Observability is 1.2%, down from 1.8% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Splunk Enterprise Security is 7.1%, down from 8.0% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Log Management Market Share Distribution
ProductMarket Share (%)
Splunk Enterprise Security7.1%
Elastic Observability1.2%
Other91.7%
Log Management
 

Featured Reviews

Mohammed-Abdelalim - PeerSpot reviewer
Assistant Vice President at QualityKiosk Technologies Pvt. Ltd.
Has provided powerful customization for unique monitoring needs but needs more out-of-the-box capabilities
In my opinion, the best features of Elastic Observability are their flexibility to integrate with other existing systems and the ability to build a unified monitoring tool that can integrate with existing ones and end-to-end user journeys which require a lot of customizations. The greatest feature in Elastic is the ability to customize. This is similar to my comments about customizable dashboards in Elastic because it's visible to the analyst. However, it's very great. Customizing these dashboards can meet the customer's specific use cases and specific stories that they have in their environment, their special environment that doesn't look like other environments. The dashboarding in Elastic is highly customizable to the level of logos. If the customer wants his company logo in the dashboard, it can be done.
reviewer1469784 - PeerSpot reviewer
Senior Manager at a financial services firm with 10,001+ employees
Helps us detect cyber threats quickly and integrate multiple feeds effectively
Overall, the product is good, but when it comes to some infrastructure issues, we have to dig into more logs. There is no straightforward indication of an issue. Health check kind of dashboards are not available. More AI would help us, and more optimization, since security products run more queries. The AI module could suggest solutions, optimizing queries or workload balancing. If the product itself advises on running queries during peak times, it would be similar to what ChatGPT currently offers. We see quite a few issues on stability. Even last week, we faced something, and identifying bottlenecks is not easy. We need more SMEs, and there is no mechanism to tell us about indexer or search head issues. Self-monitoring dashboards could be beneficial. The technical support still requires more improvement. Often, primary support takes a lot of time and forwards most solutions to the engineering side. The primary support team has very limited knowledge to provide.
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Comparison Review

VS
Manager, Enterprise Risk Consulting at a tech company with 1,001-5,000 employees
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
Financial Services Firm
16%
Computer Software Company
14%
Manufacturing Company
8%
Government
6%
Financial Services Firm
13%
Computer Software Company
11%
Manufacturing Company
9%
Government
7%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business9
Midsize Enterprise4
Large Enterprise16
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business109
Midsize Enterprise50
Large Enterprise264
 

Questions from the Community

What do you like most about Elastic Observability?
Elastic Observability significantly improves incident response time by providing quick access to logs and data across various sources. For instance, searching for specific keywords in logs spanning...
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Elastic Observability?
The problem is their licensing model, which is a bit confusing. Many customers struggle to understand their total cost of ownership because Elastic licensing is not dependent on easy, quantifiable ...
What needs improvement with Elastic Observability?
After careful consideration about areas for improvement in Elastic Observability, aspects such as pricing, customization, implementation, and scalability could be improved. As a user of the system,...
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

PSCU, Entel, VITAS, Mimecast, Barrett Steel, Butterfield Bank
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 Elastic Observability vs. Splunk Enterprise Security and other solutions. Updated: December 2025.
881,082 professionals have used our research since 2012.