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NetWitness Platform vs Splunk Enterprise Security comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Jan 25, 2026

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

NetWitness Platform
Ranking in Log Management
35th
Ranking in Security Information and Event Management (SIEM)
32nd
Average Rating
7.4
Reviews Sentiment
7.4
Number of Reviews
36
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
Splunk Enterprise Security
Ranking in Log Management
2nd
Ranking in Security Information and Event Management (SIEM)
1st
Average Rating
8.4
Reviews Sentiment
7.3
Number of Reviews
375
Ranking in other categories
IT Operations Analytics (1st)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of February 2026, in the Security Information and Event Management (SIEM) category, the mindshare of NetWitness Platform is 0.9%, up from 0.6% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Splunk Enterprise Security is 7.1%, down from 9.8% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Security Information and Event Management (SIEM) Market Share Distribution
ProductMarket Share (%)
Splunk Enterprise Security7.1%
NetWitness Platform0.9%
Other92.0%
Security Information and Event Management (SIEM)
 

Featured Reviews

MOTASHIM Al Razi - PeerSpot reviewer
CISO at One Bank Limited
It is a stable solution, but they should make the user interface easier to understand
The solution's initial setup takes work. We have to organize multiple paths and many features. The deployment process takes less than a week. But it takes a month to complete if we want to make the solution smarter by integrating it with various devices. I rate the process as a six out of ten.
reviewer1469784 - PeerSpot reviewer
Senior Manager at a financial services firm with 10,001+ employees
Helps us detect cyber threats quickly and integrate multiple feeds effectively
Overall, the product is good, but when it comes to some infrastructure issues, we have to dig into more logs. There is no straightforward indication of an issue. Health check kind of dashboards are not available. More AI would help us, and more optimization, since security products run more queries. The AI module could suggest solutions, optimizing queries or workload balancing. If the product itself advises on running queries during peak times, it would be similar to what ChatGPT currently offers. We see quite a few issues on stability. Even last week, we faced something, and identifying bottlenecks is not easy. We need more SMEs, and there is no mechanism to tell us about indexer or search head issues. Self-monitoring dashboards could be beneficial. The technical support still requires more improvement. Often, primary support takes a lot of time and forwards most solutions to the engineering side. The primary support team has very limited knowledge to provide.

Quotes from Members

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:
 

Pros

"It gives the ability to investigate into network traffic in the Net and the organization what we couldn't do before."
"The product's initial setup phase was not at all difficult."
"It's fully scalable. There is no limit. Of course, the license limits per day the number of terabytes. In my opinion, it's very flexible."
"The solution is really scalable for the high-end power, enterprise customer."
"The most valuable feature is that we can create our own connectors for any application, and NetWitness provides the training and tools to do it."
"The most valuable features are the threat prediction and network forensics."
"The most valuable features are its ingestion of logs and raising of alerts based on those logs."
"It gives the capability for the incident response team to correlate logs to identify any kind of problem like malware and incidents in a general sense, both for logs and packets."
"I am enjoying our implementation of risk-based alerting. That has helped very much with cutting out a lot of the noise that we have. It has reduced our alert volume significantly. There is about an 80% reduction."
"The compatibility with the add-ons helps us add more data in the same compatible format and use data models to elaborate and make it faster."
"The solution's most valuable feature is its data modeling."
"The product is adept at log mining."
"Correlating data across different systems via one interface will allow you to know your environment or identify incident data in ways you never imagined."
"We evaluated several solutions and selected Splunk due to the functionality and cost."
"The ability to rapidly diagnose problems in production and non-production, across hundreds of log files, is the most valuable feature."
"Splunk helps us be more proactive. We can take predictive action to identify and block threats so that nothing harmful gets into the system."
 

Cons

"The initial setup is very complex and should be simplified."
"It is not so easy to customize this product."
"Sometimes, it gives me static when integrating Windows-based systems. It should produce a precise log of sorts as to where the problem is. For example, a few days ago because of the McAfee application firewall, I couldn't get access to the particular Windows machine. So, my team and I had to figure out by ourselves that there was a virus responsible for the obstacle. This solution should trigger a meaningful log or message indicating the reason the user or implementer can't get into the machine."
"The product's licensing models are complex to understand. This particular area needs improvement."
"Security needs improvement."
"The initial setup was complex because it takes a lot of time to complete the implementation."
"There is no support for this product in this country, so problems have to be resolved through global technical teams."
"They should implement algorithms to digest that data and produce additional, more advanced reporting, alerting and support of internal security teams."
"The Splunk platform is not unified. We have all of these different tools and they feel a bit disjointed."
"If we want to filter alerts, currently it's a very manual process. We identify IP addresses and usernames and must manually filter them."
"I find that the learning curve for Splunk is relatively lengthy."
"Splunk needs to be able to hold more days of data. At the moment it only holds three months of data."
"Resource usage can probably be described as an area with shortcomings in the product where improvements are required."
"There can be a bit of complexity around some fields during the initial setup."
"The system can be intimidating, and sometimes the concepts conveyed in the documentation require adjustment."
"DMC should be a little more intuitive with better dashboarding. Seeing the cause of data flow can be tough to track down."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The product is expensive."
"It is cheap."
"In comparison to other SIEM solutions such as Splunk, NetWitness is less costly."
"The licenses are good but the cost is very expensive."
"The new pricing and licensing mechanisms are fair. I would advise always to get the full solution (i.e., not only Logs)."
"There is a licensing fee and the customer can choose whether he wishes this to be subscription-based or perpetual."
"Our license is for one year."
"We are on an annual license for the use of the solution."
"It is expensive. That is why many customers have moved to IBM QRadar. The price is definitely a challenge for customers."
"It is a bit costly."
"Splunk Enterprise Security's pricing is competitive."
"The pricing of Splunk Enterprise Security is somewhat high, but comparing it with its benefits, it's acceptable. It depends on the type of business."
"There is an annual license required to use this solution."
"ROI is estimated at saving my team roughly 10 to 12 man hours per week in troubleshooting for our company as well as what our profits had been from our services of installing, configuring, and supporting other clients with the product."
"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 of Splunk Enterprise Security fluctuates based on the customer, but I believe it's quite costly, especially for our clientele."
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Comparison Review

VS
Manager, Enterprise Risk Consulting at a tech company with 1,001-5,000 employees
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
Financial Services Firm
13%
Performing Arts
8%
Computer Software Company
8%
Manufacturing Company
7%
Financial Services Firm
13%
Computer Software Company
10%
Manufacturing Company
9%
Government
6%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business8
Midsize Enterprise7
Large Enterprise20
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business109
Midsize Enterprise50
Large Enterprise264
 

Questions from the Community

What do you like most about NetWitness Platform?
The product's initial setup phase was not at all difficult.
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for NetWitness Platform?
The pricing is comparable to others, and I consider the cost to be intermediate. Specific cost details are unknown to me.
What needs improvement with NetWitness Platform?
There is currently no need for improvement in the SIEM ( /categories/security-information-and-event-management-siem ), though there could be potential enhancements by integrating with AI.
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

RSA Security Analytics
No data available
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Los Angeles World Airports, Reply
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 NetWitness Platform vs. Splunk Enterprise Security and other solutions. Updated: February 2026.
881,733 professionals have used our research since 2012.