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Graylog vs Splunk Enterprise Security comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Jan 5, 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

Graylog
Ranking in Log Management
16th
Average Rating
8.0
Reviews Sentiment
6.7
Number of Reviews
19
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
305
Ranking in other categories
Security Information and Event Management (SIEM) (1st), IT Operations Analytics (1st)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of April 2025, in the Log Management category, the mindshare of Graylog is 6.6%, up from 5.7% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Splunk Enterprise Security is 7.4%, down from 11.1% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Log Management
 

Featured Reviews

Andrey Mostovykh - PeerSpot reviewer
Real-time analysis, easy setup, and open source
We stopped using it for analytics because of its price, and at the moment, we are using it mostly for log centralization. If you use it with high traffic for analytical purposes, as well as for the logs, the infrastructure costs are unbelievable. Graylog is a great product backed by Elasticsearch as the storage and query engine. It is just an interface on top of Elasticsearch and some Elasticsearch management. The indexes that are kept in Elasticsearch are managed by Graylog software. Elasticsearch is a decent product, but it's very infrastructure-heavy. It requires lots of resources, and if you make a mistake with provisioning, you are likely to not get a cluster back. We had a couple of outages like that, and we hated that. So, we ended up over-provisioning resources just to avoid such situations from happening. If you have a whole team trying to fix the Graylog instance for two days, that's a bit too much. That may be my Norwegian take on it, but the engineering resources are expensive. It's better to just provision the infrastructure. Overall, the product is great, and the features are just fine, but the infrastructure cost is what is killing it. The infrastructure cost is the main issue. I like the rest. If the infrastructure costs could be lower, it would be fantastic. I'm not sure if they can improve the infrastructure cost with the way Elasticsearch is. If they keep using Elasticsearch, maybe there are some opportunities there, or they can support other backends with cheaper storage. They could have a different backend to replace Elasticsearch or do some tweaks to Elasticsearch to reduce the costs. There could be partial parsing of logs or parsing on demand so that when you write data through Graylog to Elasticsearch, it doesn't need to crunch in every detail requiring that much CPU.
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

"Storing logs in Elasticsearch means log retrieval is extremely fast, and full text search is available by default."
"Message forwarding through the in-built module."
"UDP is a fast and lightweight protocol, perfect for sending large volumes of logs with minimal overhead."
"I am very proud of how very stable the solution is."
"We're using the Community edition, but I know that it has really good dashboarding and alerts."
"The solution's most valuable feature is its new interface."
"It has data adapters and lookup tables that utilize HTTP calls to APIs."
"We run a containerized microservices environment. Being able to set up streams and search for errors and anomalies across hundreds of containers is why a log aggregation platform like Graylog is valuable to us."
"The solution's most valuable feature is the aggregation of all the logs in one place, using enterprise securities built-in or ESCU use cases to find them."
"Splunk allows us to find insights that we were not able to with traditional BI tools using ETL​. It allows us to dig into raw events."
"We evaluated several solutions and selected Splunk due to the functionality and cost."
"The solution has made us more secure."
"Its usability is the best part. It is easy for our developers to use if they want to search their logs, etc."
"It gives us the liberty to do more in terms of use cases."
"Being able to track impossible travel logins and things of that nature is valuable. We can track user logins from various IPs, various countries, and at various times to see if everything adds up."
"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."
 

Cons

"Since container orchestration systems are popular and Graylog fits the niche well, perhaps they could officially support running in docker containers on Kubernetes as a StatefulSet as a use case. That way, the declarative nature of Kubernetes config files would document their best case deployment scenario-"
"Its scalability gets complicated when we have to update or edit multiple nodes."
"The biggest problem is the collector application, as we wanted to avoid using Graylog Collector Sidecar due to its architecture."
"More complex visualizations and the ability to execute custom Elasticsearch queries would be great."
"I would like to see some kind of visualization included in Graylog."
"Lacks sufficient documentation."
"I would like to see a default dashboard widget that shows the topology of the clusters defined for the graylog install."
"There should be some user groups and an auto sign-in feature.​"
"The upgrading process could be smoother."
"We do have to educate developers on how to not blow it up. It is a little to easy to write an expensive query and overly stress the system. This could be improved."
"Enterprise security: Splunk must work on clarifying the solution to customers and explain how to gain more from it."
"I would like some additional AI capabilities to provide additional information about things going wrong and things going well."
"Splunk is more expensive than other solutions."
"The algorithms customization of Splunk could improve. They have limited algorithms for machine learning support. If they can allow the user to add more machine learning algorithms, such as the ability to choose the algorithm that a user might want. Additionally, they should provide the required libraries for those algorithms, and then analyzes the data for use."
"Its search or filtering capability is nice, but it can be improved. It is currently a bit complicated, and it should be simplified. If we can write the search filter in a more simplified way, it would be better."
"Its performance can be better. Sometimes, it takes longer when we do queries."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"Graylog is a free open-source solution. The free version has a capacity limitation of 2 GB daily, if you want to go above this you have to purchase a license."
"Having paid official support is wise for projects."
"I use the free version of Graylog."
"It's an open-source solution that can be used free of charge."
"We're using the Community edition."
"I am using a community edition. I have not looked at the enterprise offering from Graylog."
"We are using the free version of the product. However, the paid version is expensive."
"​You get a lot out-of-the-box with the non-enterprise version, so give it a try first."
"Splunk is a bit pricier, but the benefits and ROI are huge."
"It is quite expensive."
"The tool's licensing is good and we haven't received any complaints from the team handling it."
"Splunk differs from other SIEM solutions by using a gigabyte-based pricing model, rather than the agent-based licenses common with its competitors."
"The licensing model can be expensive, but the value it provides is significant."
"It can be cost-prohibitive when you start to scale and have terabytes of data. Its cost model is based on how much data it processes a day. If they're able to create scaled-down niche or custom package offerings, it may help with the cost. Instead of the full-blown features, if they can narrow the scope where it can only be used for a specific purpose, it would kind of create that market for the product, and it may help with the costing. When you start using it as a central aggregator and you're pumping tons of logs at it, pretty soon, you'll start hitting your cap on what it can process a day. Once you've got that, you're kind of defeating the purpose because you're going to have to scale back."
"I think we recently switched to the SVC pricing compared to the ingest pricing."
"Splunk should be able to integrate with other product using the free version."
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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%
Comms Service Provider
10%
Government
8%
University
7%
Financial Services Firm
15%
Computer Software Company
14%
Manufacturing Company
8%
Government
8%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
 

Questions from the Community

What do you like most about Graylog?
The product is scalable. The solution is stable.
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Graylog?
We are using the free version of the product. However, the paid version is expensive.
What needs improvement with Graylog?
When it comes to configuring the processing pipeline, writing the rules can be very tedious, especially since the documentation isn't extensive on how the functions provided for these rules work. P...
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...
 

Also Known As

Graylog2
No data available
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Blue Cross Blue Shield, eBay, Cisco, LinkedIn, SAP, King.com, Twilio, Deutsche Presse-Agentur
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 Graylog vs. Splunk Enterprise Security and other solutions. Updated: March 2025.
845,406 professionals have used our research since 2012.