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Cortex XSIAM 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:
 

ROI

Sentiment score
4.6
Cortex XSIAM enhances incident management and provides significant financial returns by automating detection and response, reducing staffing needs.
Sentiment score
6.3
Splunk Enterprise Security improves efficiency and threat detection, reducing time and costs despite its expense for larger organizations.
The documentation for Splunk Enterprise Security is outstanding. It is well-organized and easy to access.
DevOps&Cloud Engineer Mentee at CertDirectory.io
We couldn't calculate what would have been the cost if they had actually gotten compromised; however, they were in the process, so every investment was returned immediately.
Business Development Manager at Axians Germany
On average, my SecOps team takes probably at least a quarter of the time, if not more, to remediate security incidents with Splunk Enterprise Security compared to our previous solution.
IT Orchestration Architect at Penn State University
 

Customer Service

Sentiment score
5.8
Cortex XSIAM support varies; premium service excels, while non-premium experiences depend on distributor expertise and sometimes face delays.
Sentiment score
6.3
Splunk Enterprise Security is highly rated for support expertise, though some users report delays and inconsistent experiences.
With premium support, core Palo Alto technical experts handle issues directly.
Team Lead, Security at seamlessinfotech.com
It is ineffective in terms of responding to basic queries and addressing future requirements.
Associate Director at a financial services firm with 5,001-10,000 employees
The Palo Alto support team is fully responsive and helpful.
SOC Analyst at OVELOSEC
We have paid for Splunk support, and we’re not on the free tier hoping for assistance; we are a significant customer and invest a lot in this service.
Senior System Administrator at a tech services company with 5,001-10,000 employees
I have had nothing but good experiences with Splunk support, receiving timely and helpful replies.
Cyber Security Associate at SAP
We've had great customer success managers who have helped us navigate scaling from 600 gigs to 30 terabytes.
Principal Engineer at Aviatrix
 

Scalability Issues

Sentiment score
6.5
Cortex XSIAM is scalable for various business sizes with cloud-based integration, but lacks on-premises deployment and mixed reviews.
Sentiment score
7.4
Splunk Enterprise Security offers excellent scalability, managing large data volumes and supporting effortless growth across industries.
Without proper integration, scaling up with more servers is meaningless.
Associate Director at a financial services firm with 5,001-10,000 employees
Cortex XSIAM is highly scalable.
SOC Analyst at OVELOSEC
We currently rely on disaster recovery and backup recovery, which takes time to recover, during which you're basically blind, so I'm pushing my leadership team to switch over to a clustering environment for constant availability.
IT Security Engineer at a financial services firm with 201-500 employees
It is one of the things that separates it from other tooling, and if not, it is the most scalable solution out there.
Systems Development Engineer at a tech vendor with 10,001+ employees
They struggle a bit with pure virtual environments, but in terms of how much they can handle, it is pretty good.
CTO at a tech vendor with 10,001+ employees
 

Stability Issues

Sentiment score
7.6
Cortex XSIAM is praised for its stability, rapid issue resolution, and efficient performance despite minor post-update challenges.
Sentiment score
7.5
Splunk Enterprise Security is praised for stability and reliability, despite challenges with resource demands and custom configurations.
The product was easy to install and set up and worked right.
Owner at Xelere
Overall, Cortex XSIAM is stable.
SOC Analyst at OVELOSEC
It works really nice and performs really efficiently after configuration.
IT COMMUNICATIONS AND NETWORKS at Américas BPS
They test it very thoroughly before release, and our customers have Splunk running for months without issues.
Splunk System Engineer at a non-tech company with 11-50 employees
Splunk has been very reliable and very consistent.
Principal Engineer at Aviatrix
We need more SMEs, and there is no mechanism to tell us about indexer or search head issues.
Senior Manager at a financial services firm with 10,001+ employees
 

Room For Improvement

Cortex XSIAM needs improved integration, performance, interface, pricing, support, ASM, AI, onboarding, tagging, and identity management enhancements.
Splunk Enterprise Security needs UI improvements, better integration, richer documentation, competitive pricing, and enhanced AI and threat detection.
Obtaining validation for integrations from Palo Alto takes around eight months, which is quite long.
Associate Director at a financial services firm with 5,001-10,000 employees
Cortex XSIAM needs improvements in terms of data onboarding, parsers, and third-party integration supports.
SOC Analyst at OVELOSEC
Cortex XSIAM is on the expensive side and requires substantial improvement in pricing.
Solutions Architect at ostec
Improving the infrastructure behind Splunk Enterprise Security is vital—enhanced cores, CPUs, and memory should be prioritized to support better processing power.
Resident Consultant (Security Analyst) at helpag
Splunk Enterprise Security is not something that automatically picks things; you have to set up use cases, update data models, and link the right use cases to the right data models for those detections to happen.
Security & Risk Analyst at a computer software company with 1,001-5,000 employees
For any future enhancements or features, such as MLTK and SOAR platform integration, we need more visibility, training, and certification for the skilled professionals who are working.
Security Consultant at Matiq
 

Setup Cost

Cortex XSIAM is viewed as competitively priced but complex, aligning with market expectations despite some regional variations.
Splunk Enterprise Security offers robust insights but can be costly for high data volumes, challenging affordability for smaller businesses.
The first impression is that XSIAM would be more expensive than others we tried.
Owner at Xelere
The product is very expensive.
Associate Director at a financial services firm with 5,001-10,000 employees
Cortex XSIAM is pretty expensive, and the licensing process is not very comfortable.
Director at MICROLOGIC NETWORKS PRIVATE LIMITED
I saw clients spend two million dollars a year just feeding data into the Splunk solution.
CTO at a tech vendor with 10,001+ employees
The platform requires significant financial investment and resources, making it expensive despite its comprehensive features.
System Engineer - Security Presales at Raya Integration
I find it to be affordable, which is why every industry uses it.
Vice President Research And Development at OSINT Ambition
 

Valuable Features

Cortex XSIAM excels in machine learning threat detection, SOAR features, and advanced automation for efficient security management.
Splunk Enterprise Security offers real-time threat detection, customization, and integration, enhancing security operations and data management capabilities.
The advanced visualization capabilities of the product are important for understanding security trends in an organization.
Solutions Architect at ostec
One of the valued aspects of the product is its use of artificial intelligence to detect security vulnerabilities.
Owner at Xelere
The flexibility for creating manual workflows stands out.
Associate Director at a financial services firm with 5,001-10,000 employees
This capability is useful for performance monitoring and issue identification.
Staff Performance Engineer at ServiceNow
I assess Splunk Enterprise Security's insider threat detection capabilities for helping to find unknown threats and anomalous user behavior as great.
Splunk System Engineer at a non-tech company with 11-50 employees
Splunk Enterprise Security provides the foundation for unified threat detection, investigation, and response, enabling fast identification of critical issues.
Specialist-Infrastructure Opertions at Allianz Technology
 

Categories and Ranking

Cortex XSIAM
Ranking in Security Information and Event Management (SIEM)
13th
Average Rating
8.6
Reviews Sentiment
6.7
Number of Reviews
15
Ranking in other categories
Identity Threat Detection and Response (ITDR) (7th), AI-Powered Cybersecurity Platforms (8th)
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 December 2025, in the Security Information and Event Management (SIEM) category, the mindshare of Cortex XSIAM is 2.6%, up from 2.1% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Splunk Enterprise Security is 8.0%, down from 10.4% 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 Security8.0%
Cortex XSIAM2.6%
Other89.4%
Security Information and Event Management (SIEM)
 

Featured Reviews

reviewer2666148 - PeerSpot reviewer
Associate Director at a financial services firm with 5,001-10,000 employees
Integration challenges highlight the need for manual workflows
The standard integrations are very limited, and the integrations available are not listed in the marketplace. Obtaining validation for integrations from Palo Alto takes around eight months, which is quite long. The solution would benefit from having more standard playbooks and templates available, as in other partners. Currently, everything must be created from scratch. In terms of incident response automation, it is quite poor due to the lack of integration with all security tools, making manual intervention necessary.
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.
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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
12%
Financial Services Firm
10%
Manufacturing Company
9%
Government
7%
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 Business9
Midsize Enterprise2
Large Enterprise4
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business109
Midsize Enterprise50
Large Enterprise263
 

Questions from the Community

What do you like most about Cortex XSIAM?
It is an effective solution in terms of performance and functionalities.
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Cortex XSIAM?
I did not participate in pricing discussions for Cortex XSIAM solutions, so I cannot provide a review regarding prices for this solution.
What needs improvement with Cortex XSIAM?
Cortex XSIAM is on the expensive side and requires substantial improvement in pricing. There are other features that could be improved, including integration with vendors such as CyberArk. I would ...
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 Cortex XSIAM vs. Splunk Enterprise Security and other solutions. Updated: December 2025.
879,259 professionals have used our research since 2012.