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IBM Watson for Cyber Security 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

IBM Watson for Cyber Security
Ranking in Security Information and Event Management (SIEM)
55th
Average Rating
8.0
Number of Reviews
4
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
Splunk Enterprise Security
Ranking in Security Information and Event Management (SIEM)
1st
Average Rating
8.4
Reviews Sentiment
7.6
Number of Reviews
308
Ranking in other categories
Log Management (2nd), IT Operations Analytics (1st)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of May 2025, in the Security Information and Event Management (SIEM) category, the mindshare of IBM Watson for Cyber Security is 0.2%, down from 0.3% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Splunk Enterprise Security is 9.5%, down from 12.6% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Security Information and Event Management (SIEM)
 

Featured Reviews

Elena Stefanovska - PeerSpot reviewer
Knowledgeable support, reliable, and useful compliance policies
IBM Watson for Cyber Security can be deployed on-premise or in the cloud and it is used as a SIEM solution The most valuable features of IBM Watson for Cyber Security are ease of use and out-of-the-box reports and compliance policies. Additionally, if there are aspects that are missing IBM add…
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 features of IBM Watson for Cyber Security are ease of use and out-of-the-box reports and compliance policies. Additionally, if there are aspects that are missing IBM add them in the next release."
"The most valuable feature of this product is innovation, where the research and upgrading of technology never ends."
"The customer support is very good."
"IBM Watson for Cyber Security is very stable."
"The solution's newly developed dashboard is pretty amazing."
"We can ingest and correlate data from virtually any type of system."
"One of the most valuable features is threat hunting. We can do threat hunting and identify if there is any malicious activity happening within our environment, which is a key feature for us."
"Splunk Enterprise Security comes with 300 pre-deployed use cases that can be easily customized to meet the specific needs of our organization, without the need to purchase additional tools."
"Scalability-wise, the tool is awesome since you can add or reduce your resources in an easy way."
"The client site login is pretty extensible and probably cost-effective."
"The risk-based alerting is excellent."
"The benefits include the easy integration with other Splunk tools including Splunk UEBA, Splunk ITSI, and Splunk Core. The ease of integration and the organization's experience and familiarity with searching and passing logs through Splunk are the main benefits."
 

Cons

"The dashboard could improve in IBM Watson for Cyber Security."
"In the future, I would like to see threat intelligence included."
"They need to continue to build the AI capabilities."
"This is an expensive product, so making it more cost-effective would be an improvement."
"I would like to see an updated dashboard. The dashboard is a little out-of-date. It could be made prettier."
"An area of improvement would be the licensing of the solution. They need a free license, which would allow faster lead times."
"Splunk does not build apps. They only go back and validate the apps that somebody has already built. They should have remote consulting support. They have a wonderful solution. They have 24/7 security. Nobody needs to depend on any third party and will therefore just buy Splunk on the cloud."
"Professional support is great, but too expensive."
"Splunk Enterprise Security provides us with the relevant context to help guide our investigations, but it would be interesting to add even more context, for instance, in order to raise the level of risk."
"Delays in responses from the technical team can pose challenges for both vendors and clients, especially considering that Splunk applications and machine solutions are critical assets."
"The upgrading process could be smoother."
"More training on PetaData using artificial intelligence techniques to identify the events which are not normal and exceptions that would help the organization identify threats and malware on the go with results."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"IBM Watson for Cyber Security is very simple to license and is priced well."
"The price of this solution should be lower, although I understand why IBM charges a premium price."
"The variables and the flexibility that Splunk provides are helpful, especially in a hybrid and multi-cloud environment."
"I think that most of the log analytics solutions are expensive and I'm not sure if it's worth it."
"It is expensive. That is why many customers have moved to IBM QRadar. The price is definitely a challenge for customers."
"In addition to the licensing fee, there is also a support and maintenance charge."
"Splunk is really expensive."
"Splunk is costly but it’s worth it due to the high-end features."
"The tool's pricing model is great. You can choose between workloads or volume."
"Most people share the same thought that the ingestion rates can get pretty pricey. There is a lot of work we do to curate the data that we send to Splunk so that it is not too noisy or too expensive."
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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
No data available
Financial Services Firm
15%
Computer Software Company
15%
Manufacturing Company
8%
Government
8%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
No data available
 

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

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 IBM Watson for Cyber Security vs. Splunk Enterprise Security and other solutions. Updated: April 2025.
851,604 professionals have used our research since 2012.