Try our new research platform with insights from 80,000+ expert users

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
7.4
Number of Reviews
327
Ranking in other categories
Log Management (2nd), Security Information and Event Management (SIEM) (1st), IT Operations Analytics (1st)
 

Featured Reviews

KJ
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.
ROBERT-CHRISTIAN - PeerSpot reviewer
Has many predefined correlation rules and is brilliant for investigation and log analysis
It is very complicated to write your own correlation rules without the help of Splunk support. What Splunk could do better is to create an API to the standard SIEM tools, such as Microsoft Sentinel. The idea would be to make it less painful. In ELK Stack, Kibana is the query language with which you can search log files. I believe Splunk has also a query language in which they search their log files, but once you have identified the log file that you want to use for further security correlation, you want to very quickly transport that into your SIEM tool, such as Microsoft Sentinel. That is something that Splunk could make a little bit less painful because it is a lot of effort to find that log file and forward it. An API with Microsoft Sentinel or a similar SIEM tool would be a good idea.

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 automatic update of the graphs from a dashboard is very convenient."
"The optimization and flexibility of visualization tools."
"It has reduced the time to resolution, time to investigate, and time to troubleshoot for debugging issues."
"The logs on the solution are excellent."
"It's extremely scalable. It's a very robust solution and certainly has the capability of handling far bigger data requirements than a lot of the other tools. Generally what ends up happening with me is that my clients tend, for the most part, to be mid-tier organizations where the cost of that solutions would be accompanying requirements for people just becomes way too prohibitive. Especially considering the model that they use for costing, which is based on the volume of data. Of course, they're going to put everything including the Coke machine as the ability to collect data off of it, because of course the more they can put through the tool the more money they make."
"The best features I've experienced over the past six years with Splunk Enterprise Security are the ability to create use cases and the flexibility to customize searches and use cases based on our specific requirements."
"Splunk Enterprise Security helped improve our organization’s ability to ingest and normalize data."
"The most valuable feature is that it's very good for log aggregation."
"The scalability of the solution is amazing because it can collect a lot of data and you can have your own structure to monitor this data."
"Splunk would be my choice for the presentation layer because it comes with inbuilt reports and a dashboard that you can customize."
 

Cons

"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."
"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."
"I think the machine learning should be emphasized. Now, it's really important to analyze Big Data, data mining. A SIEM solution, like Splunk, needs an improved data mining solution, artificial intelligence."
"Missing capability for audio/video and image processing."
"An improved user interface along with multi-tenancy support would be beneficial."
"Splunk is such a large product. Allowing it to be more easily used by people who have not had a lot of training on it would be an improvement."
"The solution's automation could be improved."
"​On the technical side, it would be nice to see aspects of the recent acquisition of Phantom make it into the core Splunk Enterprise, not just become a part of the premium Enterprise Security.​"
"The threat detection system has room for improvement."
"Splunk is more expensive than other solutions."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

Information not available
"It is expensive, but it is a good tool. It is worth the cost."
"The pricing can be better. We are already considering Elastic because Splunk is too expensive. You have to pay based on per-day ingestion. There should be a more flexible model for the use cases where one day you have a huge amount, and on other days, it is quite less."
"Our customers often complain that the price of Splunk is too high."
"Splunk Enterprise Security is an expensive solution."
"Personnel costs are saved by not having to involve the domain developers from multiple teams when tracing a problem that spans multiple platforms."
"Truly evaluate the data you want to ingest and go slow. Pulling in data that can provide no use to your mission only wastes data against your license."
"It is quite expensive."
"Splunk's cost is very high. They need to review the pricing. They have to go back and totally readdress the market."
report
Use our free recommendation engine to learn which Data Visualization solutions are best for your needs.
866,286 professionals have used our research since 2012.
 

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
No data available
Computer Software Company
14%
Financial Services Firm
14%
Manufacturing Company
8%
Government
7%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
No data available
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business105
Midsize Enterprise44
Large Enterprise225
 

Questions from the Community

Ask a question
Earn 20 points
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: July 2025.
866,286 professionals have used our research since 2012.