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Elastic Stack 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:
 

Categories and Ranking

Elastic Stack
Ranking in Log Management
11th
Average Rating
8.0
Reviews Sentiment
6.5
Number of Reviews
18
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
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 February 2026, in the Log Management category, the mindshare of Elastic Stack is 3.5%, down from 4.5% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Splunk Enterprise Security is 6.9%, down from 7.8% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Log Management Market Share Distribution
ProductMarket Share (%)
Splunk Enterprise Security6.9%
Elastic Stack3.5%
Other89.6%
Log Management
 

Featured Reviews

LB
Senior Consultant at Skillfield
Offers robust out-of-the-box integrations and streamlines logging processes effortlessly
There are improvements needed for Elastic Stack. It is mostly based on Lucene, and the heart of Elastic Stack is Lucene, which has some limitations. Anything built on top of Lucene often feels an add-on, and that includes vector databases. Elastic Stack can store vector embeddings as well and perform AI and machine learning tasks out of the box without excessive configuration. The main improvements involve increasing speed and compression capabilities; I have seen databases that claim to achieve significantly better compression. While Elastic Stack can manage vast amounts of data, if the mapping is not specified correctly, the indexing time can be slow, especially with many events per second. Improper mapping usually means that every document received gets indexed for all fields, which is not desired. Elastic consultants typically optimize this, but out of the box, as data volume increases, scaling becomes necessary. They are working on these improvements in new versions.
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.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"The detection rules in Elastic Stack are the most valuable feature. The search capabilities are excellent and fast. As we collect logs from workstations and devices, the detection rules run on top of the logs and detect any suspicious activity, raising alerts accordingly. Integration with Elastic Stack depends on the specific integration. Elastic provides some bridging integrations that make it easy, but require custom integration. Most integrations are simple, but customization can be challenging because we need to do some parsing. There's something called Elastic Common Schema, and we need to parse the source logs to match this schema, which can be a bit challenging."
"Elastic Stack has made a positive impact as we can now see our logs."
"The scripting model in Elastic Stack allows me to query logs and then put the data into Grafana."
"Prior to the latest updates, data lake management was a standout feature. The hybrid capability for on-premise and cloud integration was also crucial. Now, with Elastic Defense, the agent simplifies security monitoring, making it a key asset."
"I have experienced a return on investment from the use of the solution."
"The only beneficial aspect of Elastic Stack is that it's open source."
"It is an excellent tool for monitoring purposes."
"The biggest strength of Elastic Stack is its brilliant archiving capabilities."
"Scalability-wise, the tool is awesome since you can add or reduce your resources in an easy way."
"I haven't had the chance to properly sink my teeth into Enterprise Security but so far I like that they added the MITRE ATT&CK features."
"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."
"It is a very stable solution. I never really had a hiccup with the tool."
"Now with Splunk Enterprise Security, we have everything in one place—the notables are created automatically, but they can also create their own notables based on the investigation, which improved and reduced about 50% of the manual work that was done before versus what we are doing now."
"The ability to digest any information and then correlate it in accordance with what you need is valuable. The ability to connect to pretty much everything and bring the information in the same format is also valuable. On top of that, we can use their language in order to create and customize the dashboards, correlations, or analytics that we want to incorporate."
"We can ingest and correlate data from virtually any type of system."
"The two features I appreciate most in Splunk Enterprise Security are the content management system and the inter-incident review dashboard."
 

Cons

"There could be better documentation."
"Support could be improved. The error code is not helpful. We have to ask for it or pass it on to community forums."
"AI-enablement would be a big improvement in Elastic Stack...If there is room for an ML model in Elastic Stack, then it would be good."
"Elastic Stack's search capabilities can be challenging, especially when searching for precise data from past years, such as two or ten years ago. Its indexing performance for exact data retrieval may decrease as the data volume grows. Therefore, I believe there is room for improvement in the product's search functionality. It needs to improve its pricing as well."
"When people try to move the data from another source to Elastic Stack for visualization, they face challenges when connecting to Elastic Stack from such different sources."
"Elastic Stack should be more simplified with ready-to-use widgets."
"The tool's pricing can be improved."
"Elastic Stack should be more simplified with ready-to-use widgets. Also, incorporating AI capabilities is essential as monitoring and observability tools are now adding AI features."
"Features related to content management must be improved."
"I would like to see more SIEM functionality and a better ticket tool."
"We find that the maintenance process could be a lot better."
"Most of my interaction is with the user community, which is how Splunk wants it. When I need help, that community is very hit or miss."
"If possible, we would like to have not only a log monitoring system but a network monitoring feature in this solution as well."
"The pricing of Splunk Enterprise Security is not very affordable, and I have seen many companies planning to leave because of cost concerns."
"The access and identity features could be improved. For example, let's say we have onboarded 65 logs. Now, we can identify the various processes, but we run into trouble when we're updating the processes for AWS CloudTrail, EDR, MDR, and XDR."
"I'd love to see more integrations, which is one of the primary points of the key node with Splunk Enterprise Security."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"I used the open-source version of Elastic Stack, because of which I did not have to pay anything."
"It depends on the specifics, but generally, Elastic is economical for certain use cases."
"The pricing is reasonable."
"We are using the open-source community version of the product."
"If I compare Elastic Stack to the other products in the market, I would say that the tool is available at a competitive price."
"Ultimately, the pricing depends upon the capacity planning that the enterprise architect does."
"The product is expensive."
"I rate the solution's pricing a six out of ten."
"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 price of this solution is expensive. However, it has great features. If you want a great solution you need to pay a price matching the features."
"Splunk Enterprise Security is an expensive solution."
"The price of Splunk Enterprise Security is high."
"The pricing is based on the volume of data fed into it, which can lead to substantial costs. This pricing model is complex and unpredictable, making cost management difficult."
"Splunk Enterprise Security's pricing is based on data volume, which generally suits large enterprises."
"Splunk can be expensive, as its licensing is based on the daily data ingestion volume."
"I work on the technical side, so I don't know precise figures. However, I know that Splunk is a premium product, so it's somewhat costly. Still, you get a lot of unique features for the money."
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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
Computer Software Company
11%
Financial Services Firm
10%
Government
9%
Manufacturing Company
8%
Financial Services Firm
13%
Computer Software Company
10%
Manufacturing Company
9%
Government
6%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business10
Midsize Enterprise3
Large Enterprise6
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business109
Midsize Enterprise50
Large Enterprise264
 

Questions from the Community

What do you like most about Elastic Stack?
The tool is huge, and it performs brilliantly. I tested it for malware, and within two weeks of launching, the product alerted me about a network intrusion. This was a tough test for it, but it per...
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Elastic Stack?
My experience with Elastic Stack pricing indicates that it is node-based. While I do not have complete pricing details, they are available online. If I choose Elastic Cloud, it includes licensing a...
What needs improvement with Elastic Stack?
I would like to improve Elastic Stack by addressing the current big problem we face with importing logs and log files, such as syslogs. To import these log files, we need to design the ingest pipel...
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

Information Not Available
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 Stack vs. Splunk Enterprise Security and other solutions. Updated: December 2025.
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