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Elastic Security vs NetWitness Platform comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Sep 18, 2024

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

Elastic Security
Ranking in Log Management
7th
Ranking in Security Information and Event Management (SIEM)
5th
Average Rating
7.8
Reviews Sentiment
6.8
Number of Reviews
64
Ranking in other categories
Endpoint Detection and Response (EDR) (16th), Security Orchestration Automation and Response (SOAR) (6th), Extended Detection and Response (XDR) (8th)
NetWitness Platform
Ranking in Log Management
22nd
Ranking in Security Information and Event Management (SIEM)
22nd
Average Rating
7.4
Reviews Sentiment
7.4
Number of Reviews
37
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
 

Mindshare comparison

As of April 2025, in the Log Management category, the mindshare of Elastic Security is 3.5%, down from 6.7% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of NetWitness Platform is 0.3%, down from 0.4% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Log Management
 

Featured Reviews

Gajewski Marek - PeerSpot reviewer
Provides good anomaly detection and connectivity reporting
We previously used Splunk but switched to Elastic Security because Splunk was more expensive. Feature-wise, both tools are pretty much the same. They have almost the same functions. Elastic Security has a much better AI assistant that allows you to ask questions like a normal person. With Elastic Security, I can also predict the price and how much it will cost. Splunks's pricing depends on how much data we use and the different add-ons I have to add. The pricing is much better with Elastic Security.
MdZaman - PeerSpot reviewer
Really scalable for enterprise customers
The solution should have more integration capabilities with different platforms. The API is nearly open and scalable, so the solution can integrate with many platforms. The solution has more than 200 log sources in the scalability to support, but this is its limit. Installation is pretty easy. However, there are a couple of modules involved, so it is not as easy as it could be. We are talking about a distributed module, not a single-module type. This is what makes things a bit complex, instead of easier. I rate it as a seven out of ten on its installation and configuration capabilities.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"The solution's most valuable features are anomaly detection and connectivity reporting."
"The stability of the solution is good."
"Elastic has a lot of beats, such as Winlogbeat and Filebeat. Beats are the agents that have to be installed on the terminals to send the data. When we install beats or Elastic agents on every terminal, they don't overload the terminals. In other SIEM solutions such as Splunk or QRadar, when beats or agents are installed on endpoints, they are very heavy for the terminals. They consume a lot of power of the terminals, whereas Elastic agents hardly consume any power and don't overload the terminals."
"The solution is compatible with the cloud-native environment and they can adapt to it faster."
"Elastic provides the capability to index quickly due to the reverse indexes it offers. This data is crucial as it contains critical information. The reverse index allows fast data indexing because of Elastic's efficient search engine."
"The product has huge integration varieties available."
"Elastic Security is very easy to adapt."
"The feature that we have found the most valuable is scalability."
"The software is scalable to whatever is required, and you can also put a lot of resources in the cloud."
"The most valuable feature is that we can create our own connectors for any application, and NetWitness provides the training and tools to do it."
"It gives the ability to investigate into network traffic in the Net and the organization what we couldn't do before."
"The most valuable feature is the hunting ability to work in a CERT."
"Possibility to investigate incidents based on logs and raw packets, such as extracting files sent over the network"
"The solution is really scalable for the high-end power, enterprise customer."
"Setting up NetWitness is straightforward. There are multiple connectors, including standard and specialized connectors. One purpose of the connectors is the enhanced capability integrate the custom applications. NetWitness comes with E6 appliances and application images that we use for the initial configurations and for the OS stack information. From there, you can consider the correlation rules, integrate the different log sources, and easily create correlation rules and backlog reports."
"The packet capture aspect of it is a valuable feature because it is quite different from a traditional SIEM solution that only carries out investigations based on captured logs."
 

Cons

"There isn't really a very good user experience. You need a lot of training."
"In terms of what could be improved with Elastic, in some use cases, especially on the advanced level, they are not ready made, so you'll have to write some scripts."
"Elastic has one problem. In the past, Elastic Security was free. Now, they currently only offer the basic license or a certain period of time."
"There are connectors to gather logs for Windows PCs and Linux PCs, but if we have to get the logs from Syslog then we have to do it manually, and this should be automated."
"With Elastic, you have to build the use cases for the specific requirement. Other products have a simple integration and more use cases to integrate out-of-the-box solutions for SIEM."
"We set up a cron job to delete old logs so that we wouldn't hit a disk space issue. Such a feature should be available in the UI, where old logs can be deleted automatically. (Don’t know if this feature is already there)."
"If you compare this with CrowdStrike or Carbon Black, they can improve."
"We're using the open-source edition, for now, I think maybe they can allow their OLED plugin to be open source, as at the moment it is commercialised."
"An area for improvement would be better automation and more inbuilt use cases."
"Nowadays, their support is a little subpar compared to other solutions. I rate RSA support six out of 10."
"Log aggregation is an issue with this solution because there are a huge number of alerts in a single instance."
"It should have a monitoring feature. It would help us analyze the current state of attacks faster from a single platform."
"The documentation is not as structured as I would like, personally, and I think that it can be improved and made much more user-friendly."
"Lots of competing products have vulnerability protection built into their products, and this solution would be improved by including that support."
"I'd like to see improvement in its ease of use. It's basically unusable. It's overly complex."
"The solution should have more integration capabilities with different platforms."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"We use the open-source version, so there is no charge for this solution."
"I can say that the product is cheaply priced."
"The licensing cost of Elastic Security is based on the daily ingestion rate. I can't recall the exact figure, but for 10GB of log action daily, it would cost around $20,000."
"The product offers an amazing pricing structure. Price-wise, the product is very competitive."
"The tool's pricing is flexible and comes at unit cost. You don't have to pay for everything."
"The solution is not expensive and costs around ten dollars a month."
"We are using the free, open-source version of this solution."
"This is an open-source product, so there are no costs."
"We have yearly licensing costs. The license fee can be based on the volume of EPS. Some organizations may have, as a gentlemanly gesture, 10,000 EPS and get a 3,000 EPS license but actually use 5,000 EPS."
"In comparison to other SIEM solutions such as Splunk, NetWitness is less costly."
"This is a pricey solution; it's not cheap."
"It is cheap."
"The product price was reasonable for my region and the market."
"Our license is for one year."
"Compared to the competition, the is price is not that high."
"RSA NetWitness Logs and Packets do not have a subscription model, it's a one-time purchase. There is only a perpetual license."
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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
17%
Government
10%
Financial Services Firm
9%
Comms Service Provider
7%
Financial Services Firm
18%
Computer Software Company
17%
Government
6%
Insurance Company
6%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
 

Questions from the Community

Datadog vs ELK: which one is good in terms of performance, cost and efficiency?
With Datadog, we have near-live visibility across our entire platform. We have seen APM metrics impacted several times lately using the dashboards we have created with Datadog; they are very good c...
What do you like most about Elastic Security?
Elastic provides the capability to index quickly due to the reverse indexes it offers. This data is crucial as it contains critical information. The reverse index allows fast data indexing because ...
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Elastic Security?
Elastic Security is considered cost-effective, especially at lower EPS levels. However, a direct comparison was not made due to different pricing structures.
What do you like most about NetWitness Platform?
The product's initial setup phase was not at all difficult.
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for NetWitness Platform?
The product price was reasonable for my region and the market.
What needs improvement with NetWitness Platform?
From an improvement perspective, the NetWitness Platform needs to release new features and improve in areas like log correlation. The tool needs to have easier integrations with the cloud. Building...
 

Also Known As

Elastic SIEM, ELK Logstash
RSA Security Analytics
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Texas A&M, U.S. Air Force, NuScale Power, Martin's Point Health Care
Los Angeles World Airports, Reply
Find out what your peers are saying about Elastic Security vs. NetWitness Platform and other solutions. Updated: March 2025.
845,406 professionals have used our research since 2012.