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Elastic Stack vs Splunk Enterprise Security comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Jan 25, 2026

Review summaries and opinions

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

Categories and Ranking

Elastic Stack
Ranking in Log Management
15th
Average Rating
8.0
Reviews Sentiment
6.5
Number of Reviews
18
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
Splunk Enterprise Security
Ranking in Log Management
1st
Average Rating
8.4
Reviews Sentiment
7.2
Number of Reviews
403
Ranking in other categories
Security Information and Event Management (SIEM) (1st), IT Operations Analytics (1st)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of June 2026, in the Log Management category, the mindshare of Elastic Stack is 2.2%, down from 5.4% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Splunk Enterprise Security is 6.8%, down from 7.3% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Log Management Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
Splunk Enterprise Security6.8%
Elastic Stack2.2%
Other91.0%
Log Management
 

Featured Reviews

LB
Senior Consultant at Skillfield
Offers robust out-of-the-box integrations and streamlines logging processes effortlessly
There are improvements needed for Elastic Stack. It is mostly based on Lucene, and the heart of Elastic Stack is Lucene, which has some limitations. Anything built on top of Lucene often feels an add-on, and that includes vector databases. Elastic Stack can store vector embeddings as well and perform AI and machine learning tasks out of the box without excessive configuration. The main improvements involve increasing speed and compression capabilities; I have seen databases that claim to achieve significantly better compression. While Elastic Stack can manage vast amounts of data, if the mapping is not specified correctly, the indexing time can be slow, especially with many events per second. Improper mapping usually means that every document received gets indexed for all fields, which is not desired. Elastic consultants typically optimize this, but out of the box, as data volume increases, scaling becomes necessary. They are working on these improvements in new versions.
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 solution's technical support is good...Elastic Stack offers good value for value for money based on the product's features and what they offer."
"The biggest strength of Elastic Stack is its brilliant archiving capabilities."
"The only beneficial aspect of Elastic Stack is that it's open source."
"We can group a lot of alarms into one automation alarm supervision. The alarm supervision allows us to put the alarm under the same. It's quite helpful for us. We used that to suppress our alarms. Elastic already provides the agent. It is easy to integrate Elastic Stack with other devices and vendors."
"It supports various integrations. It's open source and has excellent community support."
"Prior to the latest updates, data lake management was a standout feature. The hybrid capability for on-premise and cloud integration was also crucial. Now, with Elastic Defense, the agent simplifies security monitoring, making it a key asset."
"It is a very scalable solution...I didn't face any problem with this scalability part of the solution since we only have a few pieces of equipment in our company."
"The machine learning capabilities are valuable."
"Internal tracking is helpful because we do not like to deal with multiple ticketing systems, and I am not a fan of ServiceNow. We are able to keep everything internal and utilize Enterprise Security."
"Regarding scalability, Splunk Enterprise Security is way ahead compared to other products, and I would score it at the maximum."
"Splunk provides a free version so you can test it before purchasing."
"The ability to manage large amounts of generated data and to protect all devices from unauthorized use are the most valuable features."
"Splunk's schema on demand is incredibly useful. I do not have to worry about what my users will need when we onboard their data."
"It saves us a lot of time, just in man-hours, and being able to look at hundreds or thousands of servers simultaneously."
"We can do things in minutes instead of days."
"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."
 

Cons

"Improvements are needed in the solution in areas like SOAR and TIP, where there are certain shortcomings."
"Elastic Stack's search capabilities can be challenging, especially when searching for precise data from past years, such as two or ten years ago. Its indexing performance for exact data retrieval may decrease as the data volume grows. Therefore, I believe there is room for improvement in the product's search functionality. It needs to improve its pricing as well."
"It lacks a clear NDR (Network Detection and Response) feature. If Elastic could enhance this aspect, it would significantly boost its capabilities."
"It should facilitate easier manual integration."
"When people try to move the data from another source to Elastic Stack for visualization, they face challenges when connecting to Elastic Stack from such different sources."
"I would rate the technical support by Elastic as five or six out of ten. They should improve their response time and first-level support, particularly knowledge, which is very important for using Elasticsearch."
"While Elastic Stack can manage vast amounts of data, if the mapping is not specified correctly, the indexing time can be slow, especially with many events per second."
"The solution is expensive, particularly the training and certification. If customers want to increase their use of Elastic Stack, they should consider reducing the cost of certification and training."
"We had an instance when Splunk failed and it took us a couple of days to recover."
"We find that the maintenance process could be a lot better."
"If you monitor too much, you can lose performance on your systems."
"One improvement I want to foresee is that the AI or agent needs to be fed with accurate data, not false data, so that whenever it performs automation on your behalf, it doesn't misconfigure anything."
"It is a challenge to manage the environment in such a way, that one’s log, even with the bandwidth license, isn’t exceeded."
"A few more analysis aids might help."
"Cost is something which is a major factor."
"It would be nice to have more advanced UEBA in Splunk Enterprise Security. Additionally, it would be beneficial if they offered more threat intel feeds for free."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"Ultimately, the pricing depends upon the capacity planning that the enterprise architect does."
"If I compare Elastic Stack to the other products in the market, I would say that the tool is available at a competitive price."
"I used the open-source version of Elastic Stack, because of which I did not have to pay anything."
"I rate the solution's pricing a six out of ten."
"We are using the open-source community version of the product."
"The product is expensive."
"It depends on the specifics, but generally, Elastic is economical for certain use cases."
"The pricing is reasonable."
"The pricing model is expensive and a nightmare based on the amount of data."
"Pricing is probably its weakest spot. As compared to some competitors, Splunk is really expensive."
"We have seen ROI and improvements as we have continued to use the product, but they are more reactive."
"Splunk Enterprise Security is priced lower than competitors."
"I remember Splunk being relatively affordable. Kibana was more reasonable, but you get more with Splunk. If I was suggesting something, I would probably suggest Splunk because it is better to pay a little bit more and get a lot more."
"From what I have seen so far, Splunk has multiple cost models. The one that we are using is pretty good when it comes to ingesting data into the environment. It has worked out pretty well."
"Licensing is a yearly, one-time cost."
"Splunk is costly but it’s worth it due to the high-end features."
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Use our free recommendation engine to learn which Log Management solutions are best for your needs.
900,644 professionals have used our research since 2012.
 

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
Financial Services Firm
10%
Computer Software Company
10%
Government
8%
Manufacturing Company
7%
Financial Services Firm
14%
Manufacturing Company
9%
Computer Software Company
8%
Construction Company
6%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business9
Midsize Enterprise3
Large Enterprise7
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business126
Midsize Enterprise59
Large Enterprise277
 

Questions from the Community

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Elastic Stack?
My experience with Elastic Stack pricing indicates that it is node-based. While I do not have complete pricing details, they are available online. If I choose Elastic Cloud, it includes licensing a...
What needs improvement with Elastic Stack?
I would like to improve Elastic Stack by addressing the current big problem we face with importing logs and log files, such as syslogs. To import these log files, we need to design the ingest pipel...
What is your primary use case for Elastic Stack?
Elastic Stack is primarily used for everything related to security, including security systems, checking the security system, and also servers and networks.
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 Elastic Stack vs. Splunk Enterprise Security and other solutions. Updated: June 2026.
900,644 professionals have used our research since 2012.