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AlienVault OSSIM vs Splunk Enterprise Security comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Oct 19, 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

AlienVault OSSIM
Ranking in Security Information and Event Management (SIEM)
12th
Average Rating
7.4
Reviews Sentiment
7.1
Number of Reviews
31
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
7.3
Number of Reviews
374
Ranking in other categories
Log Management (2nd), IT Operations Analytics (1st)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of January 2026, in the Security Information and Event Management (SIEM) category, the mindshare of AlienVault OSSIM is 1.9%, down from 4.3% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Splunk Enterprise Security is 7.4%, down from 10.0% 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 Security7.4%
AlienVault OSSIM1.9%
Other90.7%
Security Information and Event Management (SIEM)
 

Featured Reviews

BP
Independent Contractor at a comms service provider with 5,001-10,000 employees
Enables cost-effective security management for small businesses
Scaling for USM is always challenging for any product unless it is purpose-built or overbuilt at the front end. They will use Palo Alto and its competitors, and LevelBlue will manage that implementation. The main area where the AlienVault product was lacking around the 2018 timeframe was in its ability to scale. By pushing it to a cloud-based system, they've largely alleviated scale issues. It's native in Amazon but will also run in Azure. They have worked with cloud service providers to offer enough throughput at a cost reasonable for a corporation. Scaling was their biggest problem, and they've largely conquered those issues.
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

"Better than other SIEM solutions because almost everything can be integrated."
"The most valuable features of AlienVault OSSIM are case management, ease of configuration, and investigation."
"The solution is free to use."
"OSSIM is the only solution that includes the large number of modules that we need: a vulnerability scanner, a network IDS system, a host IDS system."
"The initial setup is straightforward."
"The paid version of the solution has reporting and better scalability options."
"AlienVault OSSIM is an enterprise solution that sells easily. It is rated highly by organizations."
"The threat policies of the solution are always very advanced and the best in the market. They are very persistent in terms of keeping up with security protocols."
"The consolidated overview of all the events that come in through our environment and an easy-to-access interface for all our end users are valuable."
"Its search is very flexible, allowing you to search anything by typing a sentence."
"The most valuable feature is the incident dashboard, and the extensive use of correlation searches, which isn't available with a standard Splunk search package. This feature is important to me because it enables SOC analysts to do their job more efficiently and be able to investigate or mediate incidents at a faster pace."
"The features of Splunk Enterprise Security that I prefer the most are risk-based alerting, the new Mission Control, and the integrations that are coming into place between Mission Control and Splunk SOAR."
"Support is quick and competent."
"The best feature I've seen is the ability to easily change the query based on the dashboard or based on the chart we have to create, allowing any value or metric we want to add to that particular chart while keeping the rest of the dashboard settings intact."
"Splunk works based on parsing log files."
"The best part of Splunk Enterprise Security is its customizable settings."
 

Cons

"The solution is not scalable."
"We need more dashboards and we need more customization for dashboards."
"There are somewhat more false positives with the user behavior analytics, which could benefit from an additional machine learning model to detect user patterns more rapidly."
"The incidence reporting could be better."
"It takes some time. It does not give me a prompt response for any such [malicious] traffic. It takes time to get that alert from the AlienVault system."
"AlienVault OSSIM could improve by having better integration with some of the newer tools."
"The documentation could be improved."
"There needs to be more support or some kind of training program so users can self-learn the system more effectively."
"Improving the infrastructure behind Splunk Enterprise Security is vital—enhanced cores, CPUs, and memory should be prioritized to support better processing power."
"The on-premise integration with SOAR could be more simple; the cloud version integrates with SOAR very easily, but the on-premise SOAR and on-premise Splunk Enterprise Security are really not that easy, so I would appreciate if that could be improved."
"Splunk does not provide any default threat intelligence like Microsoft Sentinel, but you can integrate any third-party threat intelligence with Splunk. By default, no threat intelligence suite is there, whereas, with IBM QRadar or Microsoft Sentinel, the default feature of threat intelligence is there. It is free. If Splunk can provide a default threat intelligence suite, it would be better."
"The technical support still requires more improvement. Often, primary support takes a lot of time and forwards most solutions to the engineering side."
"The Web Application Firewall will send you too much information because it's more dedicated to security than a normal firewall."
"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."
"Its pricing model and integration with third-party services can be improved. We had faced an issue with integration. The alerting feature is currently not available with Splunk, but it is definitely available with Datadog and PagerDuty. They should include this feature. A few dashboards in Splunk look quite old and are not that modern. They aren't bad, but improving these dashboards will definitely make Splunk more attractive and usable. I read in a few blog posts that there were a few security incidents related to Splunk agents. So, it can be made more secure."
"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."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"We are using a free version of the solution. If you purchase a license there are more features available but the price is a little high. The solution should be cheaper to allow more customers to be able to afford it."
"We are using the community version, which can be used for free."
"When comparing AlienVault OSSIM to Microsoft Sentinel, AlienVault OSSIM incurs additional costs due to its licensing price structure. If you are using AlienVault for security purposes at a certain level it can have a higher price point than the current pricing of Microsoft Sentinel."
"OSSIM is open source, and USM is the paid license. So, if you want, you can switch to USM. There you will have to buy a license, and they have a support team that helps you out on issues you face."
"The tool's licensing costs are yearly."
"AlienVault OSSIM is free."
"The solution is open source, so it's free to use."
"AlienVault OSSIM is expensive compared to its competitors."
"Splunk's costing is a little more difficult. The pricing method is complicated, and the way that costing is calculated in Splunk is a little more difficult."
"The license for Splunk Enterprise Security is expensive."
"Splunk is expensive based on our current requirements, but it's obviously worth what we pay."
"I work on the technical side, so I don't know precise figures. However, I know that Splunk is a premium product, so it's somewhat costly. Still, you get a lot of unique features for the money."
"Splunk Enterprise Security is affordable."
"The price of Splunk Enterprise Security is reasonable, falling somewhere in the middle range."
"Splunk can be an expensive solution. It all depends on how we configure the alerts and the events from the endpoints. You can save some money if you do that correctly. If not, it becomes an expensive solution."
"I would highly recommend anyone evaluating this option to download the free trial which allows for the ingestion of 500MB of data per day in order to get a feel for what Splunk does at its core. It will get pricey once your ingestion rates start to sky rocket, but I would consider it expensive given the amount of information that it allows you to analyze and react on straight out-of-the-box."
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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
Computer Software Company
13%
Comms Service Provider
13%
Financial Services Firm
9%
Manufacturing Company
8%
Financial Services Firm
13%
Computer Software Company
12%
Manufacturing Company
9%
Government
7%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business18
Midsize Enterprise9
Large Enterprise8
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business109
Midsize Enterprise50
Large Enterprise263
 

Questions from the Community

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for AlienVault OSSIM?
It depends. I would need to review their cost models, but generally, they are on a scaled basis based on throughput usage. Because it's a software as a service solution for their core product for U...
What needs improvement with AlienVault OSSIM?
Scaling for USM is always challenging for any product unless it is purpose-built or overbuilt at the front end. They will use Palo Alto and its competitors, and LevelBlue will manage that implement...
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

OSSIM
No data available
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Council Rock School District
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 AlienVault OSSIM vs. Splunk Enterprise Security and other solutions. Updated: December 2025.
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