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ELK Kibana vs Splunk Enterprise Security comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive Summary

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

ELK Kibana
Average Rating
7.2
Number of Reviews
4
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
Splunk Enterprise Security
Average Rating
8.4
Reviews Sentiment
7.3
Number of Reviews
375
Ranking in other categories
Log Management (2nd), Security Information and Event Management (SIEM) (1st), IT Operations Analytics (1st)
 

Featured Reviews

KJ
Engineer at Raytheon Technologies
Visualization tools are optimized providing us with increased flexibility
One area that could be improved is security. Being an open source product, if you want to add security, if you want to add authentication, you've got to use a third party plugin that may or may not cost you, or alternatively upgrade to their subscription service, which is a downside as well. I think the types of visualizations are nice, but I think there's room to add more without having to go to third party plugins to do that. Just comparing the total number of visualizations that it provides compared to Grafana, you can see that it's lacking. The UI experience isn't as rich as it is with Grafana or certain other tools. I would like to see better authentication options, typical authentication options, like active directory and LDAP as well, just a richer UI with more graph type options.
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

"Having a tool where you can find logs that were generated months ago, and being able to search over a long period of time, is great."
"The optimization and flexibility of visualization tools."
"The automatic update of the graphs from a dashboard is very convenient."
"We can ingest and correlate data from virtually any type of system."
"The varied prebuilt feature is the most valuable because it ensures that we have complete coverage over all of the key questions."
"It definitely does help with both auditing and as well as regular monitoring. SOC does more monitoring, but ES also gives you other features that are auditing-related. The dashboards are also beneficial."
"We have a more secure, robust environment, which keeps the harmful software out of the zone required."
"Splunk Enterprise Security enhances business resilience and assists with threat detection by centralizing security data."
"We used it to create a custom anomaly detection data model to monitor the activity of our back-end services on an hourly basis relative to the past three months of activity."
"The two features I appreciate the most in Splunk Enterprise Security are the built-in searches, which have been very easy for us to get started with right out of the box, and the fact that it accesses all of our other systems."
"Splunk has significantly reduced the time in performing the task of aggregating logs, reviewing as well as time spent during investigations."
 

Cons

"Having a kind of wizard that would help you when you are typing your search would make it easier and quicker to refine your search, and ultimately find what you are looking for."
"Security could be improved thereby avoiding the necessity of a third party plugin."
"This solution should allow the user to combine two indices into one graph."
"There were only one or two issues related to the user account, but nothing major."
"The product must improve insider threat detection."
"Splunk could improve its default machine-learning models. Also, Splunk Enterprise's native threat intelligence isn't that good. I prefer a custom threat intelligence model."
"We see quite a few issues on stability. Even last week, we faced something, and identifying bottlenecks is not easy."
"The search could be improved. Now, it is a bit difficult to write search queries because they become quite long, then maintaining those long search queries is a quite challenging."
"There is another new term called benign positives. It is better to clearly identify each definition of those terms since it has not been popular in the industry, and everyone needs to be aware of those things."
"In terms of the interface, it could include some improvements for the look and feel."
"Splunk's reporting functionality would benefit from enhanced customization capabilities, allowing users to tailor reports to their specific needs for better data visualization and analysis."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

Information not available
"The licensing is good, but the pricing absolutely needs some work. It is very high."
"The price of Splunk is reasonable."
"The tool's licensing is good and we haven't received any complaints from the team handling it."
"The price of Splunk Enterprise Security fluctuates based on the customer, but I believe it's quite costly, especially for our clientele."
"The price of Splunk Enterprise Security is high."
"I remember Splunk being relatively affordable. Kibana was more reasonable, but you get more with Splunk. If I was suggesting something, I would probably suggest Splunk because it is better to pay a little bit more and get a lot more."
"Regarding the product's pricing, I think it has always been difficult to have a conversation with Splunk."
"Splunk is costly but it’s worth it due to the high-end features."
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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
No data available
Financial Services Firm
13%
Computer Software Company
11%
Manufacturing Company
9%
Government
7%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
No data available
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business109
Midsize Enterprise50
Large Enterprise264
 

Questions from the Community

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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

Sprint, Grab, Volkswagen, Autopilot, Voyages-SNCF.com, Just Eat, Accenture, Dell, Verizon Wireless, Kaidee, Green Man Gaming, Compare Group, Tango, Quizlet
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 Salesforce, Apache, Splunk and others in Data Visualization. Updated: January 2026.
881,114 professionals have used our research since 2012.