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Grafana Loki vs Splunk Enterprise Security comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Apr 6, 2025

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

Grafana Loki
Ranking in Log Management
4th
Average Rating
8.2
Reviews Sentiment
7.8
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
7.6
Number of Reviews
315
Ranking in other categories
Security Information and Event Management (SIEM) (1st), IT Operations Analytics (1st)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of July 2025, in the Log Management category, the mindshare of Grafana Loki is 8.6%, up from 4.9% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Splunk Enterprise Security is 7.3%, down from 10.1% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Log Management
 

Featured Reviews

Volodymyr Bondarchuk - PeerSpot reviewer
Integrations enhance monitoring but problem-solving proves challenging
Different types of integrations with various sources are the most helpful and useful features of Grafana Loki that I found for myself. As part of Kubernetes technology, I noticed benefits from using this product such as availability, configuration balancing, high availability solutions for high performance, and failover clustering. It provides a clear picture about the state of the system and gives needed information for taking action and quickly fixing problems.
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

"I appreciate the capability to process logs from microservices and seamlessly integrate them into Grafana."
"We are using Grafana Loki as a database for real-time metrics."
"Different types of integrations with various sources are the most helpful and useful features of Grafana Loki that I found for myself."
"The most valuable features of the solution stem from the fact that it is an open-source tool that is stable and flexible."
"The effectiveness of filters is pivotal for optimizing the search process and extracting the specific information we need from the extensive log data."
"The most valuable part of Loki is the ability to filter logs by keywords and devices."
"The log collection feature is good and the solution is easily understandable. v"
"Loki also utilizes the same service discovery mechanism as used by Prometheus. So, whatever labeled metadata you see in Prometheus, you have the exact same metadata in the Loki system. Given this level of intricacy and the attempt to address these challenges, I firmly believe that Loki deserves praise for the work."
"It gives me notifications of notable events."
"It is easy to use in any environment."
"If you want to understand how it can analyze or find out incidents, the visibility is good."
"Being able to aggregate detection and alerts from various sources is valuable. Like everyone else, we have a wide range of tools in our shop. We are able to stop at one spot and look at all the data. All the data is able to come through, and we can then jump from source to source or index to index. We can dig deep whenever we need to and get a good high-level understanding."
"The ability to analyze huge amounts of sales data and accurate prediction of sales forecasting is the most valuable feature."
"The solution's most valuable feature is its data modeling."
"The flexibility of the search capability is most valuable. You can use it for more than just a basic log aggregator. It is powerful in that regard."
"The most valuable function is the notable events. When I joined the team, I asked them what they could currently see, and they said nothing. I was pretty shocked. I know for a fact that they're using Enterprise Security or at least they had purchased it. I told them that there are several dashboards within Splunk that we can leverage. There is also notable events where we can see potential incidents or potential alerts about the infrastructure and the network itself."
 

Cons

"The solution has shortcomings regarding security monitoring-oriented features that need improvement."
"It's not intended for proprietary services, so you have to struggle with configuration a lot."
"We had a well-structured dashboard with a functional query. However, an issue arose when the Kubernetes pod restarted. The statistics from our Grafana query would reset, dropping to zero and starting anew. This was particularly noticeable with linear graphs, which are expected to show consistent growth."
"The correlation of requests is not simple in Grafana Loki and can be improved."
"The platform's stability needs improvement."
"I would rate Grafana Loki a seven out of ten because it is open source, and sometimes there can be problems that are difficult to fix without official support."
"My main concern is the recommended production-grade setup. They suggest using tools like Tanka or Jsonnet. They should simplify the process to increase adoption."
"We encountered certain limitations when it came to alerting, particularly when dealing with specific data sources."
"It would be great if I could have a certain dialogue box in Splunk that uses innovative AI tools like ChatGPT, which are available now in the tech department."
"Resource usage can probably be described as an area with shortcomings in the product where improvements are required."
"Stability is there, but every release has some bugs."
"The documentation and training resources available for knowledge and training can be expanded. We need to learn more about Splunk Enterprise Security and new security attacks."
"I've never had too many issues with the stability. Years ago we had indexes crash but that was more on us. We didn't understand how to properly size Splunk."
"The glass table feature does not perform as expected."
"The solution could improve by increasing the performance. We have run into problems when large amounts of data are processed."
"Search head clustering is often temperamental in its current state and should be improved, replaced by something better, or be reverted to search head pooling."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The pricing structure varies based on the number of users; there might be specific taxes to pay for it."
"My company doesn't need to pay for the licensing cost of the solution."
"We use a free version."
"You can use the free version of Grafana Loki on-premises."
"Grafana Loki is an open-source solution."
"Since we are using the open-source version of Grafana Loki, we are not paying anything for the solution."
"Grafana Loki is a free, open-source solution."
"The cost is less than other paid services like CloudWatch."
"Pricing is probably its weakest spot. As compared to some competitors, Splunk is really expensive."
"The licensing model can be expensive, but the value it provides is significant."
"Our ROI is high."
"I think that most of the monitoring solutions are expensive."
"It is pretty straightforward and based on the sizing. If I compare it with other competitors, it makes sense."
"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."
"The price is comparable."
"It is economical than other solutions."
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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%
Financial Services Firm
10%
Comms Service Provider
9%
Manufacturing Company
8%
Computer Software Company
15%
Financial Services Firm
14%
Manufacturing Company
8%
Government
7%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
 

Questions from the Community

What do you like most about Grafana Loki?
We are using Grafana Loki as a database for real-time metrics.
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Grafana Loki?
Since it is an open source tool, there are no charges or fees.
What needs improvement with Grafana Loki?
I have no ideas at this moment about what could be improved in Grafana Loki.
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 Grafana Loki vs. Splunk Enterprise Security and other solutions. Updated: June 2025.
860,592 professionals have used our research since 2012.