No more typing reviews! Try our Samantha, our new voice AI agent.

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
14th
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
7.3
Number of Reviews
387
Ranking in other categories
Security Information and Event Management (SIEM) (1st), IT Operations Analytics (1st)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of May 2026, in the Log Management category, the mindshare of Elastic Stack is 2.5%, down from 5.2% 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 Stack2.5%
Other90.7%
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

"Elastic Stack has made a positive impact as we can now see our logs."
"The biggest strength of Elastic Stack is its brilliant archiving capabilities."
"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."
"The centralized logging capabilities of Elastic Stack have helped me streamline my logging processes significantly because there are many open-source tools available, such as Filebeat and Logstash, to collect the logs."
"I have benefited from the security features provided by X-Pack in Elastic Stack, particularly the SIEM capability, which is very good for checking security issues."
"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 tool is huge, and it performs brilliantly. I tested it for malware, and within two weeks of launching, the product alerted me about a network intrusion. This was a tough test for it, but it performed admirably. The alerting system is excellent, and searching through logs is incredibly efficient. What's impressive is that all three products or options are integrated into one solution. This means I don't need separate logging, monitoring, or antivirus solutions."
"I think the ecosystem is well supported, and for logs, it was faster compared to our previous previous log management."
"However, for the most part, we have been satisfied with the product and its capabilities."
"Combating insider threats and advanced persistent threats is an amazing feature of Splunk Enterprise Security, and it gives us the visibility that we need for those detections that other software doesn't have."
"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."
"When I compare it to different SIEM solutions, Splunk Enterprise Security has incident management and a threat intelligence component that is native and not limited the way different SIEM solutions are."
"Technical support is excellent! It is of top notch level."
"It's a great investment, especially if you want to strengthen your security stance."
"The log aggregation is great."
"The most valuable features of Splunk Enterprise Security are the enterprise search bar and the dashboards."
 

Cons

"It should facilitate easier manual integration."
"Elastic Stack should work on their dashboards and integration process."
"The stability of the solution is rated as three or four out of ten as we frequently encounter issues."
"The main issue related to Elastic Stack is in the area of its licensing."
"Improving integration capabilities, especially with authentication systems, firewalls, and security controls, is a crucial area for improvement in Elastic Stack. Additionally, enhancing functionality to handle large Yara queries more efficiently would be beneficial, as many EDR solutions can run such queries faster than Elastic Stack's current limitations."
"Support could be improved. The error code is not helpful. We have to ask for it or pass it on to community forums."
"Agent deployment is a little tough in the on-premise version."
"Elastic Stack should be more simplified with ready-to-use widgets. Also, incorporating AI capabilities is essential as monitoring and observability tools are now adding AI features."
"The support that is included with the standard licensing fee is very bad."
"Splunk Enterprise Security can be improved by bringing back some of the operational use cases."
"There's been a big push for SBC compute over the ingestion model, which will hamper us."
"There are limitations with Splunk not detecting all user activity, especially on mainframes and network devices."
"They can incorporate the SOAR solution within the actual product so that we do not require two different products, two different installations, and two different pricing methods. In regards to UBA, I am familiar with the UBA that existed two years ago. I am not updated about it today, but two years ago, UBA required such an amount of data that from a cost perspective, it was not worth it. When you compare it to what you get out of the box with Microsoft Sentinel without additional costs, there is no match."
"It currently has limited default rules and customizations. If they can concentrate more on the compliance part and the security information part, it would be helpful."
"We can only increase the environment. For instance, with an ES server, we cannot make a cluster of ES. If you have two servers and want to make a cluster of these two servers for ES, that is not possible."
"The analytics of Splunk could be improved."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"It depends on the specifics, but generally, Elastic is economical for certain use cases."
"I rate the solution's pricing a six out of ten."
"The product is expensive."
"We are using the open-source community version of the product."
"Ultimately, the pricing depends upon the capacity planning that the enterprise architect does."
"I used the open-source version of Elastic Stack, because of which I did not have to pay anything."
"The pricing is reasonable."
"If I compare Elastic Stack to the other products in the market, I would say that the tool is available at a competitive price."
"Licensing is a yearly, one-time cost."
"Further reductions would be fantastic, and I believe that more and more people would flock to it."
"It is expensive. I used to buy it early on, but then they combined it into a higher-up organization. They buy it for multiple systems now. Last time, I paid around 60K for it. There is just the licensing fee. That's all."
"I would highly recommend anyone evaluating this option to download the free trial which allows for the ingestion of 500MB of data per day in order to get a feel for what Splunk does at its core. It will get pricey once your ingestion rates start to sky rocket, but I would consider it expensive given the amount of information that it allows you to analyze and react on straight out-of-the-box."
"Splunk Enterprise Security is an expensive solution."
"This solution is costly. Splunk is obviously a great product, but you should only choose this product if you need all the features provided. Otherwise, if you don't need all the features to meet your requirements, there are probably other products that will be more cost-effective. It's cost versus the functionality requirement."
"Pricing and licensing are quite high compared to other tools or SIEM tools, but the features justify it."
"The variables and the flexibility that Splunk provides are helpful, especially in a hybrid and multi-cloud environment."
report
Use our free recommendation engine to learn which Log Management solutions are best for your needs.
893,221 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
Computer Software Company
10%
Financial Services Firm
10%
Government
8%
Comms Service Provider
7%
Financial Services Firm
14%
Manufacturing Company
9%
Computer Software Company
9%
Comms Service Provider
5%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business10
Midsize Enterprise3
Large Enterprise6
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business118
Midsize Enterprise51
Large Enterprise269
 

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: April 2026.
893,221 professionals have used our research since 2012.