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Grafana Loki vs Splunk Enterprise Security comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Jul 13, 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
7.4
Number of Reviews
327
Ranking in other categories
Security Information and Event Management (SIEM) (1st), IT Operations Analytics (1st)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of August 2025, in the Log Management category, the mindshare of Grafana Loki is 8.4%, up from 5.5% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Splunk Enterprise Security is 7.4%, down from 9.6% 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

"The most valuable feature of the solution is the tool's GUI. The solution's GUI is very user-friendly."
"Different types of integrations with various sources are the most helpful and useful features of Grafana Loki that I found for myself."
"Loki significantly saves time in troubleshooting by quickly pinpointing network issues."
"The tool can be used in multi-cluster environments."
"The most valuable feature of Grafana Loki is the dashboards which are really simple to create."
"The product's most valuable features are ease of installation, management, and reporting. It has an efficient ability to set thresholds for alerts, as well."
"The most valuable feature is the capability to set up alerts, which becomes necessary when we need to receive notifications for specific events."
"The solution's stability has never been a problem. Stability-wise, I rate the solution a nine to ten out of ten."
"The most valuable feature of Splunk is the log monitoring."
"Splunk has facilitated the correlation of information security logs to look for incidents which could cause damage to the company's infrastructure, as well as financial losses from leaks."
"The initial setup is pretty straightforward."
"Its dashboard is valuable. If you have a good knowledge of how to create a dashboard, you can create any dashboard related to cybersecurity. If fine-tuned, the alarms that are triggered for instant review are also very valuable and useful."
"I like the ease with which dashboards can be created."
"Internal tracking is helpful because we do not like to deal with multiple ticketing systems, and I am not a fan of ServiceNow. We are able to keep everything internal and utilize Enterprise Security."
"What I really like is that even if you have already collected the data, you can extract fields and can build searches."
"It is a one stop shop as a full monitoring and alerting solution for operations and application analysis for most of our back-end systems."
 

Cons

"The platform's stability needs improvement."
"Enhancing speed could be a game-changer, and while it might vary depending on the application, it's a factor worth exploring."
"Visualization-wise, Grafana Loki's dashboard looks a little outdated compared to other open-source visualization tools like Chronograf."
"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."
"I do not see any areas for improvement at the moment."
"In Grafana Loki, the creation of metrics is not so easy, making it an area that could be made easier."
"We face some bugs when we install the latest version of Grafana Loki."
"There is a need for some change in the alerting types of the product. In short, a few changes in the alert area are needed due to minor shortcomings."
"The threat detection library needs to increase the frequency at which the playbooks are updated."
"Splunk could have more built-in use case presets that customers can build on and customize."
"An improved user interface along with multi-tenancy support would be beneficial."
"It needs more formatting control without having to be an admin."
"Free-floating panels in the dashboards are like a glass table."
"The pricing can be better."
"Splunk does not provide any default threat intelligence like Microsoft Sentinel, but you can integrate any third-party threat intelligence with Splunk. By default, no threat intelligence suite is there, whereas, with IBM QRadar or Microsoft Sentinel, the default feature of threat intelligence is there. It is free. If Splunk can provide a default threat intelligence suite, it would be better."
"Splunk Enterprise Security can be improved mainly from the user interface regarding the visualizations. They are working on it, yet there are only five to ten very basic visualizations."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The pricing structure varies based on the number of users; there might be specific taxes to pay for it."
"I use the solution's open-source version. Grafana Loki is a completely free solution for me."
"You can use the free version of Grafana Loki on-premises."
"Since we are using the open-source version of Grafana Loki, we are not paying anything for the solution."
"My company doesn't need to pay for the licensing cost of the solution."
"I use the open-source version of the product."
"I find the licensing structure quite reasonable, as the free license effectively meets my requirements."
"We use a free version."
"Although Splunk is an expensive product, it is designed to be utilized across your organization in order to maximize your ROI and lower your TCO."
"The license for Splunk Enterprise Security is expensive."
"The pricing and licensing of the product are quite high."
"I think that most of the monitoring solutions are expensive."
"Licensing is a yearly, one-time cost."
"Our customers often complain that the price of Splunk is too high."
"While Splunk offers generous developer licenses and obtaining annual licenses is straightforward, the cost is a major consideration."
"Splunk's costing is a little more difficult. The pricing method is complicated, and the way that costing is calculated in Splunk is a little more difficult."
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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
10%
Manufacturing Company
8%
Computer Software Company
14%
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: July 2025.
865,295 professionals have used our research since 2012.