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Security Onion 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

Security Onion
Ranking in Log Management
22nd
Average Rating
7.6
Reviews Sentiment
5.5
Number of Reviews
3
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
Splunk Enterprise Security
Ranking in Log Management
2nd
Average Rating
8.4
Reviews Sentiment
7.3
Number of Reviews
375
Ranking in other categories
Security Information and Event Management (SIEM) (1st), IT Operations Analytics (1st)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of February 2026, in the Log Management category, the mindshare of Security Onion is 3.4%, down from 5.8% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Splunk Enterprise Security is 6.9%, down from 7.8% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Log Management Market Share Distribution
ProductMarket Share (%)
Splunk Enterprise Security6.9%
Security Onion3.4%
Other89.7%
Log Management
 

Featured Reviews

Anish Bajracharya - PeerSpot reviewer
Postgraduate at a educational organization with 1,001-5,000 employees
Provides good threat hunting by finding infected ports, but its initial setup is difficult
The most valuable feature of Security Onion for security monitoring is its ability to find infected ports. I have used the Squert tool within Security Onion the most for threat hunting The initial setup of the solution is a little bit difficult. I have been using Security Onion for one year.…
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

"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."
"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."
"My favorite example of improving of organization is saving a $60k/mo in payroll fraud and $10k/mo in wasted API credits by using simple searches and clear reports."
"We saw the granularity that we could get from Splunk far exceeded what we already had. We had the ability to have our security team really focus on the platform and stay within the platform, but they could correlate with a variety of other stakeholders, and our stakeholders were growing."
"The solution's most valuable feature is its data modeling."
"Ease of correlation, creating correlation searches are easy and you can combine multiple sources with little effort"
"The alerts are very effective."
"The ability to ingest any data and display it in a way that anyone can understand."
"The features I appreciate the most in Splunk Enterprise Security are the scheduled alerts and the search function."
 

Cons

"The initial setup of the solution is a little bit difficult."
"Security Onion's user interface could be improved."
"The product is not easy to learn."
"Their technical support sucks."
"An area of improvement would be the licensing of the solution. They need a free license, which would allow faster lead times."
"Splunk Enterprise Security can be improved by bringing back some of the operational use cases."
"Improving the infrastructure behind Splunk Enterprise Security is vital—enhanced cores, CPUs, and memory should be prioritized to support better processing power. When we execute heavy, resource-intensive queries over long periods, the performance dips."
"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."
"The access and identity features could be improved. For example, let's say we have onboarded 65 logs. Now, we can identify the various processes, but we run into trouble when we're updating the processes for AWS CloudTrail, EDR, MDR, and XDR."
"More control with Splunk Cloud as it seems a bit limited. I used to manage an on-premise instance of Splunk Enterprise and really liked having more control over it."
"The ingestion happens quickly, so you can run up the data costs if you use the default settings. It isn't a problem for government agencies in the Saudi market, but many of the corporations in India are small or medium-sized enterprises that cannot afford that kind of ingestion system."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"Security Onion is a free solution."
"Security Onion is an open-source solution."
"It is an open-source solution."
"From what I have seen so far, Splunk has multiple cost models. The one that we are using is pretty good when it comes to ingesting data into the environment. It has worked out pretty well."
"The license for Splunk Enterprise Security is expensive."
"I am fine with the licensing, but in terms of the cost, it is expensive for the data that we have. We have an open discussion with our account rep about this."
"Splunk Enterprise Security is not a cheap product, but I think it is worth every dollar that you pay."
"Pricing and licensing is quite expensive. But for the value the product provides, it seems at par in the market."
"Our ROI is high."
"It is economical than other solutions."
"Splunk Enterprise Security is affordable."
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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
University
12%
Government
11%
Comms Service Provider
10%
Computer Software Company
9%
Financial Services Firm
13%
Computer Software Company
10%
Manufacturing Company
9%
Government
6%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
No data available
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business109
Midsize Enterprise50
Large Enterprise264
 

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: February 2026.
881,707 professionals have used our research since 2012.