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AlienVault OSSIM 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

AlienVault OSSIM
Ranking in Security Information and Event Management (SIEM)
13th
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
375
Ranking in other categories
Log Management (2nd), IT Operations Analytics (1st)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of February 2026, in the Security Information and Event Management (SIEM) category, the mindshare of AlienVault OSSIM is 1.7%, down from 4.2% 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%
AlienVault OSSIM1.7%
Other91.2%
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

"The product is majorly used for threat detection of the agents on servers and endpoints."
"There are a lot of people you will find using OSSIM since they are also offering OTX as a service"
"The initial setup was straightforward. I didn't have any problems."
"The paid version of the solution has reporting and better scalability options."
"Better than other SIEM solutions because almost everything can be integrated."
"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 tool's security detection is good. It helps us with login tracking and generating reports. We aim to identify potential issues, such as brute-force attacks on user accounts or server-level anomalies. For instance, if I receive a report indicating a server is at an abnormal level, I investigate and address the issue."
"Splunk Enterprise Security has helped improve my organization's business resilience, as we were able to detect an attack that was happening after hours and prevent it thanks to the detections."
"Splunk has significantly helped with aggregation and correlation of critical logs. Not having to grep on each individual server has made everyone more efficient."
"Integration with the cloud is pretty important and good for us. We found the integration with a lot of tools, not all tools yet, valuable. It does make the transfer of data, log files, and other things easier for us."
"It has helped us look at modern technology, as well as penetrate our legacy systems, to see where the bottlenecks are."
"Our clients are easily able to modify and evolve their implementations."
"It allows us to digest the information, the data, the different data streams, so we can make decisions based upon information that we receive, and it is pretty robust."
"I like the search feature and the indexing. It's very fast and comprehensive."
"Splunk RBA or risk-based alerting definitely made our lives a lot easier; we went from hundreds of alerts having to be triaged a day, that generally could be false positives or just noise, and bubble them into one overall alert that we can look at on a per-day basis and see what's rising to the top and respond faster, have a higher rate of true positives and find evil a lot quicker."
 

Cons

"I don't like to work on OSSIM because it is unpredictable."
"AlienVault OSSIM on-premise version is more difficult to implement than the cloud version. Additionally, they should add integration between several different environments at once and improve their online knowledge base."
"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."
"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 solution needs more integration with cyber intelligence systems."
"AlienVault OSSIM is costly."
"AlienVault OSSIM could improve by having better integration with some of the newer tools."
"When comparing AlienVault OSSIM to other solutions it looks a bit outdated. Additionally, they need to improve their integration."
"If you have to do your own stuff, such as customized charts, it is a little bit more work, but once you're familiar with the Splunk query language, you can pretty much do whatever you want. In terms of features, it should probably have the features that other competitors provide."
"I would like to see future development in terms of ML (Machine Learning)."
"The upgrading process could be smoother."
"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."
"The system can be intimidating, and sometimes the concepts conveyed in the documentation require adjustment."
"One main change I would suggest is related to the incident board: when an incident is resolved, it should not appear on the incident board. It's just a rare occurrence that we open up the incident."
"Sometimes, there is latency in the logs."
"Splunk Enterprise Security can be improved by having more focus on the data health monitoring aspect, which will definitely be helpful."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"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."
"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."
"The price of AlienVault OSSIM is too high sometimes for us to present to our customers. The price should be lower. We are on a three-year license to use the solution. We had to pay extra for the support."
"We are using the community version, which can be used for free."
"The tool's licensing costs are yearly."
"AlienVault OSSIM is an open-source solution."
"AlienVault OSSIM is expensive compared to its competitors."
"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."
"While Splunk offers generous developer licenses and obtaining annual licenses is straightforward, the cost is a major consideration."
"I am not personally involved with the pricing of the solution."
"Splunk Enterprise Security is expensive."
"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 is not a cheap solution and the license is billed annually."
"Splunk is really expensive."
"The pricing model is expensive and a nightmare based on the amount of data."
"The pricing could be made more competitive."
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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
11%
Financial Services Firm
9%
Manufacturing Company
8%
Financial Services Firm
13%
Computer Software Company
11%
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 Enterprise264
 

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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