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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 April 2026, in the Log Management category, the mindshare of Elastic Security is 3.0%, down from 3.7% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Graylog Enterprise is 4.1%, down from 6.4% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Splunk Enterprise Security is 6.8%, down from 7.7% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Log Management Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
Splunk Enterprise Security6.8%
Graylog Enterprise4.1%
Elastic Security3.0%
Other86.1%
Log Management
 

Featured Reviews

Laurentiu Popescu - PeerSpot reviewer
Chief Product Officer at ClusterPower
Has improved threat detection with deep log analysis and streamlined investigation workflows
The most useful features I find in Elastic Security are the forensic ones that allow us to carry deeper analysis into the logs for in-depth investigations, and the dashboards, with the reporting dashboard being quite user-friendly. Elastic Security is quite good at identifying threats, as it is part of the deep investigation tool that I mentioned before. Unless we need to look further into a certain log, we can carry out a deeper analysis and forensics on those particular logs. I can assess the impact of Elastic Security's real-time data analysis on our threat response efficiency as working pretty good. We are looking for real-time analysis because we have a continuous inflow of logs from different sources: from our cloud, from Active Directory, from our network. So it works pretty well.
NC
Security Officer at JSC "Moldtelecom" S.A.
Log analysis has become clearer and faster but visualization and extensibility still need work
The problem was with the complexity and the cost to add extensions. We found this very expensive to buy another version with additional features. I think that Graylog Enterprise does not have customizable dashboards. I did not see them in Graylog Enterprise because most of the time we used the open source free version, which is limited. I think Graylog Enterprise should improve some things that they have in the paid version and perhaps provide users with a menu that gives examples of parsing logs and draws graphics so that people do not need to improve another system such as Grafana. This would be interesting. When it comes to functionalities, I found the log management in Graylog Enterprise acceptable. It is very simple to use and to collect logs. It has support for different protocols and different ports, and the sidecar is easy to use. However, in visualization, I think it needs to be much better.
Sathis-Kumar - PeerSpot reviewer
Senior Manager at Bank of America
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 is the search function, which allows me to go directly to the target to see the specific line a customer is searching for."
"The product has huge integration varieties available."
"The scalability is good. It can be scaled easily in the production environment."
"Based on my experience, it's quite easy and manageable with small scale implementations, and the time to market is quite fast."
"This is definitely a product that I recommend using."
"My advice is that this is a good product to use if you are financially contained, and you want to start with something small."
"The solution is compatible with the cloud-native environment and they can adapt to it faster."
"The most valuable feature of Elastic Security is that you can install agents, and they are not separately licensed."
"The ability to write custom alerts is key to information security and compliance."
"What I like about Graylog is that it's real-time and you have access to the raw data. So, you ingest it, and you have access to every message and every data item you ingest. You can then build analytics on top of that. You can look at the raw data, and you can do some volumetric estimations, such as how big traffic you have, how many messages of data of a type you have, etc."
"The best feature of Graylog is the Elasticsearch integration. We can integrate and we can run filters, such as an event of interest, and those logs we can send to any SIEM tool or as an analytic. Additionally, there are clear and well-documented implementation instructions on their website to follow if needed."
"This has increased productivity for the dev and support teams, because we are directly notifying them."
"Everything stands out as valuable, including the fact that I can quantify and qualify the logs, create pipelines and process the logs in any way I like, and create charts or data maps."
"Feature-wise or from the end user perspective, Graylog is just great."
"Graylog's search functionality, alerting functionality, user management, and dashboards are useful."
"The product is scalable. The solution is stable."
"Splunk Enterprise Security helps me detect threats faster depending on the type of log I'm using. If I have a current company's log, I can easily detect it faster."
"Splunk Enterprise Security would provide better capabilities and out-of-box detections."
"The features of Splunk Enterprise Security that I have found most valuable include the risk-based score and UBA/UEBA, user behavior analytics, or user and entity behavior analytics."
"We use the solution as a log collector, and to analyze and provide alerts from the IT instructor."
"Splunk has give us the capability to easily track problems and their status."
"The features of Splunk Enterprise Security that I prefer most are the correlation engine and the common information model, basically the aggregation of data."
"The most valuable feature is that it's very good for log aggregation."
"We've seen quite extensive ROI, however, it's more of a qualitative assessment and I don't have numbers to share."
 

Cons

"In terms of what could be improved with Elastic, in some use cases, especially on the advanced level, they are not ready made, so you'll have to write some scripts."
"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."
"It's a little bit of a learning curve to understand the logic of searching for things and trying to find what you're looking for in Elastic Security."
"The process of designing dashboards is a little cumbersome in Kibana."
"When we buy Elastic, training is not included for free with Elastic. We have to pay extra for the training."
"There isn't really a very good user experience. You need a lot of training."
"One limitation of Elastic Security is that it does not have built-in workflows for all tasks. For example, if you need a workflow for compliance, you will need to create a custom workflow."
"Because of the notification issue we moved to Logentries, as it provides a simple way to get notification whenever a server encounters an error or something unexpected happens (which we have defined using Regex)."
"The support from the Graylog community is helpful, but they can do better."
"I would like to see some kind of visualization included in Graylog."
"Over six months, I had two similar issues where searches were performed on field "messages". It exhausted all the memory of the ES node causing an ES crash and a Graylog halt."
"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 initial setup was really complex because I did it myself."
"Over six months, I had two similar issues where searches were performed on field "messages". It exhausted all the memory of the ES node causing an ES crash and a Graylog halt."
"Graylog could improve the process of creating rules. We have to create them manually by doing parses and applying them."
"The analytics of Splunk could be improved."
"The price of Splunk is too high for our market."
"I'd say I am happy with the technical support, not elated. They provide great support, but sometimes they don't have the answers that I need."
"It will be helpful for customers if they can create some real-world cases, and we can find a case study to align with. I know that Splunk has tremendous potential. We only include a tiny piece of it. There is a lot of stuff that we need to learn. If Splunk can provide more real-time examples, that will be helpful for customers."
"Custom visualizations are real hard. While the default visualizations are good, creating enhanced visualizations are complex."
"It is important to make sure that everything is built off of the threat models and all the underlying items within Splunk."
"The only thing which can be improved is that they are too subjective on whom their Splunk4Good initiative can be applied."
"On the technical side, it would be nice to see aspects of the recent acquisition of Phantom make it into the core Splunk Enterprise, not just become a part of the premium Enterprise Security."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"There is no charge for using the open-source version."
"This is an open-source product, so there are no costs."
"The tool's pricing is flexible and comes at unit cost. You don't have to pay for everything."
"I can say that the product is cheaply priced."
"The base product is open-source but if you need advanced security features then you need to pay for the subscription. Elastic Security's price is reasonable in some cases and in other cases it's not."
"The product offers an amazing pricing structure. Price-wise, the product is very competitive."
"I find it better than Splunk in terms of cost-effectiveness. For cost-effectiveness, I would rate it a nine out of 10."
"Compared to other tools, Elastic Security is a cheaper solution."
"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."
"Having paid official support is wise for projects."
"I am using a community edition. I have not looked at the enterprise offering from Graylog."
"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."
"Consider Enterprise support if you have atypical needs or setup requirements.​"
"We are using the free version of the product. However, the paid version is expensive."
"I use the free version of Graylog."
"Setup cost is cheap: It is free, it is user-friendly, and it is fast."
"Price-wise, if you compare QRadar to Splunk for SIEM functionality then they are in the same range but when you integrate SOAR with these solutions, Splunk takes the lead and is more competitive."
"I think we recently switched to the SVC pricing compared to the ingest pricing."
"Splunk Enterprise Security is not at all cost-friendly to be deployed in very small enterprises like start-ups."
"The solution is a little expensive."
"The solution is costly."
"The price of Splunk is reasonable."
"We have an unlimited one, and we pay yearly, but I don't know how much it costs. Previously, I worked for a startup, and when they started building it up, it was complicated for them because they didn't have the budget for that many licenses. It was very costly for them. So, startups might find it a little bit problematic because of the licensing, but for bigger companies, there is no issue."
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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
10%
Government
9%
Comms Service Provider
9%
Manufacturing Company
7%
Computer Software Company
13%
Comms Service Provider
11%
University
8%
Government
8%
Financial Services Firm
12%
Computer Software Company
9%
Manufacturing Company
9%
Government
6%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business40
Midsize Enterprise11
Large Enterprise15
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business10
Midsize Enterprise5
Large Enterprise10
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business112
Midsize Enterprise50
Large Enterprise267
 

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 is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Graylog?
I am not sure about the pricing, setup cost, and licensing because that was dealt with by a different team that handl...
What needs improvement with Graylog?
The documentation for Graylog Enterprise can be improved, as this has been a pain point. I think the visualization as...
What is your primary use case for Graylog?
I remember using Graylog Enterprise in the past at a software house where we used it for logging. During that time, w...
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, Cribl and others in Log Management. Updated: March 2026.
885,444 professionals have used our research since 2012.