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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

"Elastic Security offers advanced features such as machine learning and integration with ChatGPT."
"The scalability is good. It can be scaled easily in the production environment."
"Elastic Security helps improve the security posture of Pakistan through centralized visibility and real-time processing."
"The intelligence of the system has been very impressive. It's not quite AI, but the technical bit where it correlates information, based on the seen attacks within an organization is good."
"Elastic Security offers advanced features such as machine learning and integration with ChatGPT."
"The product has huge integration varieties available."
"Elastic Security makes data communication easier."
"The most valuable feature is the machine learning capability."
"We have scaled from a single machine installation (a VM with a Graylog + ES + MongoDB) to (2 Graylog + 2 ES + 3 MongoDB). This was done smoothly with a minimal impact on logging."
"Message forwarding through the in-built module."
"Graylog's search functionality, alerting functionality, user management, and dashboards are useful."
"It has data adapters and lookup tables that utilize HTTP calls to APIs."
"I am very proud of how very stable the solution is."
"It is used as a log manager/SIEM. It provides visibility into the infrastructure and security related events."
"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."
"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."
"I like the ease with which dashboards can be created."
"Splunk Enterprise Security is a standard solution providing good customer service and partnership."
"I have not seen any outages in the product in the past two years that it has been running in our company, so I think it is good when it comes to the stability part."
"On the cloud, we are pushing through less than half a petabyte of data. So far, it has been fairly stable because it runs on all the underlying AWS infrastructures."
"We are much faster finding and addressing issues with Splunk."
"Ease of correlation, creating correlation searches are easy and you can combine multiple sources with little effort"
"The scalability is good."
"Splunk Enterprise Security helps my SOC team prioritize and investigate high-fidelity alerts more effectively by enabling us to quickly gather information, collaborate, and provide various teams with access to the same information, allowing them to follow the workflow to complete the task."
 

Cons

"The process of designing dashboards is a little cumbersome in Kibana. Unless you are an expert, you will not be able to use it. The process should be pretty straightforward. The authentication feature is what we are looking for. We would love to have a central authentication system in the open-source edition without the need for a license or an enterprise license. If they can give at least a simple authentication system within a company. In a large organization, authentication is very essential for security because logs can contain a lot of confidential data. Therefore, an authentication feature for who accesses it should be there."
"The tool should improve its scalability."
"We'd like to see some more artificial intelligence capabilities."
"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."
"There is room for improvement in the Kibana dashboard and in the asset management for the program."
"The solution's query building is not that intuitive compared to other solutions."
"The solution could offer better reporting features."
"The Integration module could be improved. It is a pain to build integration with any product. We have to do parking and so on. It's not like other commercial solutions that use profile integration. I would also see more detection features on the SIEM side."
"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."
"More complex visualizations and the ability to execute custom Elasticsearch queries would be great."
"Dashboards, stream alerts and parsing could be improved."
"Since container orchestration systems are popular and Graylog fits the niche well, perhaps they could officially support running in docker containers on Kubernetes as a StatefulSet as a use case. That way, the declarative nature of Kubernetes config files would document their best case deployment scenario-"
"The area in Graylog that needs to be improved or enhanced would be the integrations."
"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 hope to see improvements in Graylog for more interactivity, user-friendliness, and creating alerts. The initial setup is complex."
"Graylog needs to improve their authentication. Also, the fact that Graylog displays logs from the top down is just ridiculous."
"I feel the solution to be too slow."
"To improve Splunk Enterprise Security, I would suggest allowing third-party SOAR solutions to work with it."
"Regarding customer service and technical support, their support is the worst I have ever run into in any industry."
"Writing queries is a bit complicated sometimes."
"The Splunk platform is not unified. We have all of these different tools and they feel a bit disjointed."
"Being able to have a one-stop shop where you have the alert, but then you can generate the case right there from Splunk Enterprise Security instead of having to pivot to another tool such as Mission Control. You do not have to keep bouncing between them, so if you could do it all in one place, that would be great. The new release is supposed to start getting in that direction."
"The solution could use a different licensing model."
"This is a costly solution."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"There is no charge for using the open-source version."
"It is easy to deploy, easy to use, and you get everything you need to become operational with it, and have nothing further to pay unless you want the OLED plugin."
"We use the open-source version, so there is no charge for this solution."
"I find it better than Splunk in terms of cost-effectiveness. For cost-effectiveness, I would rate it a nine out of 10."
"Affordable but with additional costs"
"We are using the free, open-source version of this solution."
"It's a monthly cost with Elastic SIEM, but I am not sure of the exact cost."
"This is an open-source product, so there are no costs."
"Consider Enterprise support if you have atypical needs or setup requirements.​"
"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."
"We are using the free version of the product. However, the paid version is expensive."
"I use the free version of Graylog."
"I am using a community edition. I have not looked at the enterprise offering from Graylog."
"If you want something that works and do not have the money for Splunk or QRadar, take Graylog.​​"
"Having paid official support is wise for projects."
"We're using the Community edition."
"It's definitely worth it."
"Splunk is a bit pricier, but the benefits and ROI are huge."
"Its price is fair. Like with anything else, if you go into the cloud, different providers cost more, and you are able to throttle back or throttle up. The cost is comparable with anything else."
"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."
"I assume that the pricing is reasonable, because if it was too costly, there are other alternatives."
"It's a yearly subscription."
"I think we recently switched to the SVC pricing compared to the ingest pricing."
"It's a little bit expensive for a small to medium enterprise."
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Comparison Review

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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.