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Security Onion 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

Security Onion
Ranking in Log Management
18th
Average Rating
7.6
Reviews Sentiment
5.5
Number of Reviews
3
Ranking in other categories
AWS Marketplace (5th)
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 Security Onion is 5.7%, up from 2.9% 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

Jörg Kippe - PeerSpot reviewer
A mature and affordable solution that is easy to install and easy to update
The product takes time to learn, it's not that easy. In the beginning we had a lot of questions. If you want to use such a tool in an real (industrial) environment, you have to ask how to get the network data. Can we do a full packet capture? Can we provide agents to our end systems? There are no simple solutions to these questions. It's a general problem when running such systems in an industrial environment.
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 Security Onion for security monitoring is its ability to find infected ports."
"Security Onion is the most mature solution in the market."
"We use Security Onion for internal vulnerability assessment."
"Splunk has machine learning which is a valuable feature."
"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 are much faster finding and addressing issues with Splunk."
"The speed of the search engine"
"The most valuable features are how stable and easy to use Splunk is."
"Splunk can extract all kinds of data. There's no limitation on what kind of structured and unstructured data one needs to extract — it can access any kind of data, including machine-generated data."
"It has helped us look at modern technology, as well as penetrate our legacy systems, to see where the bottlenecks are."
"Splunk Enterprise Security's dashboards are a key asset."
 

Cons

"Security Onion's user interface could be improved."
"The product is not easy to learn."
"The initial setup of the solution is a little bit difficult."
"An area of improvement would be the licensing of the solution. They need a free license, which would allow faster lead times."
"Most importantly, Splunk can be outrageously expensive. That is the problem with both Splunk and Sentinel. Their pricing literally explodes based on the amount of data you feed in."
"Stability is there, but every release has some bugs."
"Sometimes, the data does not match what we're looking for, or the tool contains incorrect data."
"Splunk is not very user-friendly. It has a complex architecture in comparison to other solutions on the market."
"The initial setup is complex, but this is necessary. We needed to take into consideration how to direct log files from thousands of machines to Splunk, and how to ingest those files."
"The implementation and the scanning of the logs can be difficult."
"This is a costly solution."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"Security Onion is an open-source solution."
"Security Onion is a free solution."
"It is an open-source solution."
"The subscription is monthly."
"The pricing is very complicated, and it is very pricey. You do require a lot of different licenses in order to get a comprehensive solution that is not just the SIEM solution."
"Splunk Enterprise Security is expensive but the solution is equipped with a lot of features."
"I think that most of the monitoring solutions are expensive."
"The licensing model can be expensive, but the value it provides is significant."
"The Splunk licensing is high."
"I am not personally involved with the pricing of the solution."
"This product could use better pricing in general."
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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
12%
University
11%
Government
11%
Comms Service Provider
11%
Financial Services Firm
15%
Computer Software Company
14%
Manufacturing Company
8%
Government
8%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
No data available
 

Questions from the Community

What do you like most about Security Onion?
The most valuable feature of Security Onion for security monitoring is its ability to find infected ports.
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Security Onion?
Security Onion is an open-source solution. On a scale from one to ten, where ten is expensive and one is cheap, I rate the solution's pricing a six out of ten.
What needs improvement with Security Onion?
The initial setup of the solution is a little bit difficult.
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 Security Onion vs. Splunk Enterprise Security and other solutions. Updated: March 2025.
845,406 professionals have used our research since 2012.