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Elastic Security vs Graylog Enterprise vs Splunk Enterprise Security comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive Summary

Review summaries and opinions

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:
 

Mindshare comparison

As of October 2025, in the Log Management category, the mindshare of Elastic Security is 2.9%, down from 5.0% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Graylog Enterprise is 6.0%, up from 6.1% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Splunk Enterprise Security is 7.7%, down from 9.1% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Log Management Market Share Distribution
ProductMarket Share (%)
Splunk Enterprise Security7.7%
Elastic Security2.9%
Graylog Enterprise6.0%
Other83.4%
Log Management
 

Featured Reviews

SyedAli17 - PeerSpot reviewer
Centralized monitoring improves security posture through rapid data processing
The processing part of Elastic Security is very interesting for us since we handle almost 7,000 to 8,000 alerts per minute. We require rapid processing speed for alerts and event data, and Elastic Security is very efficient at handling this level of data. Additionally, Elastic Security helps improve the security posture of Pakistan through centralized visibility and real-time processing.
Ivan Kokalovic - PeerSpot reviewer
Facilitates backend service monitoring with efficient log retrieval and API flexibility
Graylog is valuable because it bridges technical knowledge to non-technical teams, presenting complex backend processes in a simple timeline. It boosts the knowledge of sales and customer support teams by allowing them to see the backend operations without needing to read the code. Its API is flexible for visualization, and its powerful search engine efficiently handles large volumes of log data. Moreover, its stability, fast search capabilities, and compatibility with languages like ANSI SQL enhance its utility in IT infrastructure.
Kyle Vernham - PeerSpot reviewer
Built-in searches and unified data access streamline alert investigation and boosts analyst efficiency
The two features I appreciate the most in Splunk Enterprise Security are the built-in searches, which have been very easy for us to get started with right out of the box, and the fact that it accesses all of our other systems. You can access it as a pane of glass rather than having to search individually. We also have the option to compare our analysts from our service to service. Splunk Enterprise Security helps our SOC team prioritize and investigate high-fidelity alerts more effectively by providing a more in-depth look and the ability to access a lot more of our data. Instead of jumping from several segmented systems, it allows us to have everything brought together in one place. For example, you have to move from our purview to our build system and to Splunk Enterprise Security, and it enables us to streamline that process. The built-in features of Splunk Enterprise Security, which we recently procured, have given us a good starting point and demonstrated the value of the product, providing an easy way to sell it to our company. The ease of getting everything into our purview helps us, and it serves as a good start for the investigation part in one location rather than what we usually have, which is jumping from system to system to system. Splunk Enterprise Security plays a role in our company's strategy to combat insider threats and advanced persistent threats by currently being in its technical test phase. We are still rolling it out, and it should help us find any insider threats based on information that our policy states should not be present in our system. Splunk Enterprise Security's risk-based alerting (RBA) has impacted our alert volume and analyst productivity because we've got many different systems feeding into it. However, it has helped to make it easier for our analysts to go through a set of events rather than 100 alerts. RBA allows us to streamline the process and customize it for our analysts. When it comes to leveraging Splunk Enterprise Security's dashboards and visualizations to communicate security posture to executives, it's pretty straightforward for any type of information. The visualization is easy to understand, but I haven't had any direct conversations with our executives.

Quotes from Members

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:
 

Pros

"We chose the product based on the ability to scan for malware using a malware behavioral model as opposed to just a traditional hash-based antivirus. Therefore, it's not as intensive."
"The most valuable feature is the search function, which allows me to go directly to the target to see the specific line a customer is searching for."
"I can look at events from more than one source across multiple different locations and find patterns or anomalies. The machine learning capabilities are helpful, and I can create rules for notifications to be more proactive rather than responding after something has gone wrong."
"Elastic has a lot of beats, such as Winlogbeat and Filebeat. Beats are the agents that have to be installed on the terminals to send the data. When we install beats or Elastic agents on every terminal, they don't overload the terminals. In other SIEM solutions such as Splunk or QRadar, when beats or agents are installed on endpoints, they are very heavy for the terminals. They consume a lot of power of the terminals, whereas Elastic agents hardly consume any power and don't overload the terminals."
"The most valuable feature is the machine learning capability."
"The most valuable feature is the ability to collect authentication information from service providers."
"The most valuable feature is the speed, as it responds in a very short time."
"The cost is reasonable. It's not overly pricey."
"Message forwarding through the in-built module."
"We run a containerized microservices environment. Being able to set up streams and search for errors and anomalies across hundreds of containers is why a log aggregation platform like Graylog is valuable to us."
"I like the correlation and the alerting."
"Allowing us to set up alerts and integrate with platforms we already use, such as Slack and OpsGenie to alert users of these errors proactively, is also a very useful feature."
"UDP is a fast and lightweight protocol, perfect for sending large volumes of logs with minimal overhead."
"Real-time UDP/GELF logging and full text-based searching."
"Graylog is valuable because it bridges technical knowledge to non-technical teams, presenting complex backend processes in a simple timeline."
"We're using the Community edition, but I know that it has really good dashboarding and alerts."
"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."
"Splunk has significantly helped with aggregation and correlation of critical logs. Not having to grep on each individual server has made everyone more efficient."
"The user interface is excellent, and since I'm using Splunk as a power user, it's easy to create dashboards."
"It has increased our business resilience. It's a top-of-the-line SIEM security product. It's the best tool for our security analysts which helps them do their job better. That then protects our company from adversary actors."
"The end-to-end visibility into our environment that Splunk provides is impressive. We just need to use it better."
"The speed of the search engine"
"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."
"The graph visualization is the most valuable feature."
 

Cons

"Upgrades currently released as stacks when it should be a plugin or an extension to save removal and reinstallation."
"I would like the process of retrieving archived data and viewing it in Kibana to be simplified."
"Elastic Security can be a bit difficult to use if a person only has experience in SMBs with tools like Zoho. The product can also be difficult for those who have never dealt with query language."
"We'd like to see some more artificial intelligence capabilities."
"The solution should generate an automatic product that integrates with ELK Stack to use artificial intelligence."
"There are connectors to gather logs for Windows PCs and Linux PCs, but if we have to get the logs from Syslog then we have to do it manually, and this should be automated."
"The tool should improve its scalability."
"Elastic Security could improve the documentation. It would help if they were more simple and clean."
"More complex visualizations and the ability to execute custom Elasticsearch queries would be great."
"I would like to see some kind of visualization included in Graylog."
"When it comes to configuring the processing pipeline, writing the rules can be very tedious, especially since the documentation isn't extensive on how the functions provided for these rules work."
"It would be great if Graylog could provide a better Python package in order to make it easier to use for the Python community."
"Lacks sufficient documentation."
"I would like to see a default dashboard widget that shows the topology of the clusters defined for the graylog install."
"More customization is always useful."
"The infrastructure cost is the main issue. I like the rest. If the infrastructure costs could be lower, it would be fantastic."
"There's been a big push for SBC compute over the ingestion model, which will hamper us."
"There were only one or two issues related to the user account, but nothing major."
"It would be good if the solution had some kind of copilot to automate or help write correlation searches."
"It is a challenge to manage the environment in such a way, that one’s log, even with the bandwidth license, isn’t exceeded."
"One thing that I probably dislike the most about the Splunk product is their support."
"The configuration had a bit of a learning curve."
"The UI can be difficult to understand for non-technical people."
"It can be tough to determine if you are getting all of the value out of your investment at times."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The solution is free."
"This is an open-source product, so there are no costs."
"Compared to other tools, Elastic Security is a cheaper solution."
"It's a monthly cost with Elastic SIEM, but I am not sure of the exact cost."
"Compared to other products such as Dynatrace, this is one of the cheaper options."
"Elastic Security is free to use."
"The pricing is in the middle. I think it is not an expensive experience if we compare it with big names, for example, QRadar, and also Oxide. I think Elastic Security is quite cheap. I would rate the pricing of this solution a five out of ten."
"The product offers an amazing pricing structure. Price-wise, the product is very competitive."
"It's open source and free. They have a paid version, but we never looked into that because we never needed the features of the paid version."
"We're using the Community edition."
"I am using a community edition. I have not looked at the enterprise offering from Graylog."
"It's an open-source solution that can be used free of charge."
"We are using the free version of the product. However, the paid version is expensive."
"If you want something that works and do not have the money for Splunk or QRadar, take Graylog.​​"
"Graylog is a free open-source solution. The free version has a capacity limitation of 2 GB daily, if you want to go above this you have to purchase a license."
"There is an open source version and an enterprise version. I wouldn't recommend the enterprise version, but as an open source solution, it is solid and works really well."
"Truly evaluate the data you want to ingest and go slow. Pulling in data that can provide no use to your mission only wastes data against your license."
"Splunk is expensive based on our current requirements, but it's obviously worth what we pay."
"I believe there is room for improvement in reducing costs, particularly in the financial aspect, as Splunk tends to be pricier compared to other options."
"Expensive compared to other options."
"Pricing can be a limiting factor. You have to continuously tune what you are bringing in and make sure what you bring in is of value."
"The tool's licensing is good and we haven't received any complaints from the team handling it."
"Splunk Enterprise Security incurs a significant cost because of the amount of data we send, but we are fine with the value we're getting for that price."
"While Splunk offers generous developer licenses and obtaining annual licenses is straightforward, the cost is a major consideration."
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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
15%
Government
10%
Comms Service Provider
8%
Financial Services Firm
7%
Computer Software Company
16%
Comms Service Provider
10%
Educational Organization
8%
Government
8%
Computer Software Company
14%
Financial Services Firm
14%
Manufacturing Company
8%
Government
7%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business40
Midsize Enterprise11
Large Enterprise14
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business8
Midsize Enterprise4
Large Enterprise7
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business110
Midsize Enterprise50
Large Enterprise257
 

Questions from the Community

Datadog vs ELK: which one is good in terms of performance, cost and efficiency?
With Datadog, we have near-live visibility across our entire platform. We have seen APM metrics impacted several time...
What do you like most about Elastic Security?
Elastic provides the capability to index quickly due to the reverse indexes it offers. This data is crucial as it con...
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Elastic Security?
I am satisfied with the pricing, setup cost, and licensing cost. It is a pure 10.
What do you like most about Graylog?
The product is scalable. The solution is stable.
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Graylog?
I am not familiar with the pricing details of Graylog, as I was not responsible for that aspect. It was determined th...
What needs improvement with Graylog?
An improvement I would suggest is in Graylog's user interface, such as allowing for font size adjustments. A potentia...
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 a...
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 ingest...
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 monitor...
 

Also Known As

Elastic SIEM, ELK Logstash
Graylog2
No data available
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Texas A&M, U.S. Air Force, NuScale Power, Martin's Point Health Care
Blue Cross Blue Shield, eBay, Cisco, LinkedIn, SAP, King.com, Twilio, Deutsche Presse-Agentur
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 Wazuh, Splunk, Grafana Labs and others in Log Management. Updated: October 2025.
870,697 professionals have used our research since 2012.