We performed a comparison between Elastic Security and Splunk based on our users’ reviews in five categories. After reading all of the collected data, you can find our conclusion below.
Comparison Results: Splunk comes out on top in this comparison. It is easier to use and has better support than Elastic Security. Splunk users also report a significant ROI. Elastic Security does come out on top in the pricing and ease of deployment categories, however.
"The most valuable feature is definitely the ability that Devo has to ingest data. From the previous SIEM that I came from and helped my company administer, it really was the type of system where data was parsed on ingest. This meant that if you didn't build the parser efficiently or correctly, sometimes that would bring the system to its knees. You'd have a backlog of processing the logs as it was ingesting them."
"The querying and the log-retention capabilities are pretty powerful. Those provide some of the biggest value-add for us."
"The ability to have high performance, high-speed search capability is incredibly important for us. When it comes to doing security analysis, you don't want to be doing is sitting around waiting to get data back while an attacker is sitting on a network, actively attacking it. You need to be able to answer questions quickly. If I see an indicator of attack, I need to be able to rapidly pivot and find data, then analyze it and find more data to answer more questions. You need to be able to do that quickly. If I'm sitting around just waiting to get my first response, then it ends up moving too slow to keep up with the attacker. Devo's speed and performance allows us to query in real-time and keep up with what is actually happening on the network, then respond effectively to events."
"The most powerful feature is the way the data is stored and extracted. The data is always stored in its original format and you can normalize the data after it has been stored."
"The strength of Devo is not only in that it is pretty intuitive, but it gives you the flexibility and creativity to merge feeds. The prime examples would be using the synthesis or union tables that give you phenomenal capabilities... The ability to use a synthesis or union table to combine all those feeds and make heads or tails of what's going on, and link it to go down a thread, is functionality that I hadn't seen before."
"In traditional BI solutions, you need to wait a lot of time to have the ability to create visualizations with the data and to do searches. With this kind of platform, you have that information in real-time."
"The user experience [is] well thought out and the workflows are logical. The dashboards are intuitive and highly customizable."
"Devo provides a multi-tenant, cloud-native architecture. This is critical for managed service provider environments or multinational organizations who may have subsidiaries globally. It gives organizations a way to consolidate their data in a single accessible location, yet keep the data separate. This allows for global views and/or isolated views restricted by access controls by company or business unit."
"Elastic Security allows us to deliver visibility in a few hours, which makes our customers more confident in our service."
"The most valuable features of the solution are the prevention methods and the incident alerts."
"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."
"We've found the initial setup to be quite straightforward."
"Elastic is straightforward, easy to integrate, and highly customizable."
"Its flexibility is most valuable. We can have a number of scenarios, and we can get logs from anything. If we know how to use Logstash, we can tweak it in many ways. This makes the logging search on Elastic very easy."
"One of the most valuable features of this solution is that it is more flexible than AlienVault."
"I like the indexing of the logs."
"It's basically one of the best SIEM products on the market."
"Our clients are easily able to modify and evolve their implementations."
"The feature that I have found most valuable with Splunk is the ability to sift through a bunch of data very quickly."
"Its compatibility with other SIEMS is very useful."
"The initial setup is pretty straightforward."
"The most valuable feature of Splunk is the management and built-in workflows."
"The most valuable feature is that it's very good for log aggregation."
"Splunk is a user-friendly solution."
"Technical support could be better."
"Some third-parties don't have specific API connectors built, so we had to work with Devo to get the logs and parse the data using custom parsers, rather than an out-of-the-box solution."
"I would like to have the ability to create more complex dashboards."
"From our experience, the Devo agent needs some work. They built it on top of OS Query's open-source framework. It seems like it wasn't tuned properly to handle a large volume of Windows event logs. In our experience, there would definitely be some room for improvement. A lot of SIEMs on the market have their own agent infrastructure. I think Devo's working towards that, but I think that it needs some improvement as far as keeping up with high-volume environments."
"Some basic reporting mechanisms have room for improvement. Customers can do analysis by building Activeboards, Devo’s name for interactive dashboards. This capability is quite nice, but it is not a reporting engine. Devo does provide mechanisms to allow third-party tools to query data via their API, which is great. However, a lot of folks like or want a reporting engine, per se, and Devo simply doesn't have that. This may or may not be by design."
"The biggest area with room for improvement in Devo is the Security Operations module that just isn't there yet. That goes back to building out how they're going to do content and larger correlation and aggregation of data across multiple things, as well as natively ingesting CTI to create rule sets."
"Where Devo has room for improvement is the data ingestion and parsing. We tend to have to work with the Devo support team to bring on and ingest new sources of data."
"An admin who is trying to audit user activity usually cannot go beyond a day in the UI. I would like to have access to pages and pages of that data, going back as far as the storage we have, so I could look at every command or search or deletion or anything that a user has run. As an admin, that would really help. Going back just a day in the UI is not going to help, and that means I have to find a different way to do that."
"The problem with ELK is it's difficult to administer. When you have a problem, it can be very, very difficult to rebuild indexes."
"The price of this product could be improved, especially the additional costs. I would also like to see better-quality graphics."
"Its documentation should be a bit better. I have to spend at least a couple of hours to find the solution for a simple thing. When we buy Elastic, training is not included for free with Elastic. We have to pay extra for the training. They should include training in the price."
"There is room for improvement in the Kibana dashboard and in the asset management for the program."
"It is difficult to anticipate and understand the space utilization, so more clarity there would be great."
"This type of monitoring is not very mature just yet. We need more real-time information in a way that's easier to manage."
"We're using the open-source edition, for now, I think maybe they can allow their OLED plugin to be open source, as at the moment it is commercialised."
"The biggest challenge has been related to the implementation."
"This is a costly solution."
"It's difficult to set up initially, and their billing model is also a bit complicated."
"Technical support needs to be more responsive."
"The algorithms customization of Splunk could improve. They have limited algorithms for machine learning support. If they can allow the user to add more machine learning algorithms, such as the ability to choose the algorithm that a user might want. Additionally, they should provide the required libraries for those algorithms, and then analyzes the data for use."
"The product is relatively expensive."
"The complexity could be worked on so that it's even easier and faster."
"The solution could improve by increasing the performance. We have run into problems when large amounts of data are processed."
"It could be more user friendly, in terms of the end-user experience."
See how Devo allows you to free yourself from data management, and make machine data and insights accessible.
Elastic Security is ranked 7th in Log Management with 18 reviews while Splunk is ranked 1st in Log Management with 69 reviews. Elastic Security is rated 7.4, while Splunk is rated 8.2. The top reviewer of Elastic Security writes "It is quite comprehensive and you're able to do a lot of tasks". On the other hand, the top reviewer of Splunk writes "Very versatile for many use cases". Elastic Security is most compared with Wazuh, Graylog, Datadog, IBM QRadar and Nagios Log Server, whereas Splunk is most compared with Microsoft Sentinel, Dynatrace, Azure Monitor, IBM QRadar and LogRhythm NextGen SIEM. See our Elastic Security vs. Splunk report.
See our list of best Log Management vendors and best Security Information and Event Management (SIEM) vendors.
We monitor all Log Management reviews to prevent fraudulent reviews and keep review quality high. We do not post reviews by company employees or direct competitors. We validate each review for authenticity via cross-reference with LinkedIn, and personal follow-up with the reviewer when necessary.
Generally Elastic is very strong in datasearch, and Splunk has a strong security solution. However Elastic has partnered with SIEM provider empow and together this integration provides a very strong platform both in datasearch and next generation SIEM.
Here's a thorough article on ELK vs. Splunk and here's a description from Elastic on what's included in the different versions.
Splunk: hard to use, expensive with predatory pricing, few OOTB rules, SOAR is a premium, good luck training analyst on their platform in under six months. SPLUNK SEARCH.
ELK Stack: easy to use, open-source, no predatory pricing, more robust use cases OOTB, loved and used by millions all over the globe, open ecosystem that can integrate with almost any major IT stack out of the box. LUCENE.
We use ELK or other freeware stacks in isolated small scenarios.
Think of a small or medium company with a „midsized“ webshop. You can easily do your Log management with an ELK-Stack, let's say size 5 up to 10 GB, no Problem. Please keep in mind to order Hardware. The best thing on ELK is that you can start immediately you don't have to wait for licensing and it's easy to build the first small things.
Another Example:
Your Marketing Dep. wants to do some singular evaluations and very specialized marketing stuff. It is temporary and they don't have the budget for licensing. The results are not for permanent use. Just use ELK.
In my opinion, ELK is only cost-effective if you don't need to buy their professional service. You must leave the cases small.
If you are looking for bigger scenarios or you want to build-up a SIEM, SOC or even doing elevated things like SOAR it is a very different kind of thing.
There can be account issues that a developer usually won't mind at the first glance but a Controller will.
You have to look at the Total Cost of Ownership, Scalability, Time to Market, Secureness of future development, maintenance e.g.
If you want to build up a complex scenario with the secureness of scalability you should go with SPLUNK. If tomorrow there is a better tool with lower costs and less need for input of manpower I will refer to this.