Try our new research platform with insights from 80,000+ expert users

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
2nd
Average Rating
8.4
Reviews Sentiment
7.3
Number of Reviews
381
Ranking in other categories
Security Information and Event Management (SIEM) (1st), IT Operations Analytics (1st)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of March 2026, in the Log Management category, the mindshare of Elastic Stack is 3.3%, down from 4.8% 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%
Elastic Stack3.3%
Other89.9%
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

"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."
"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."
"Elastic Stack has made a positive impact as we can now see our logs."
"Elastic Stack is mainly used to monitor servers and APIs. It helps ensure the software's availability and sends notifications at the right time so the system is not down for a long time. The tool's stability and advanced features, such as anomaly detection, are the most valuable features. The benefit of using it is real-time monitoring."
"The machine learning capabilities are valuable."
"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 scripting model in Elastic Stack allows me to query logs and then put the data into Grafana."
"The community marketplace is useful; often, you do not need to rely on Splunk Enterprise Security support due to the wealth of online documentation available—Splunk docs are truly beneficial."
"We have a one stop dashboard for health of some of our services where you can click in and it takes you to other dashboards that have custom near real-time metrics that show the application's health."
"Our clients are easily able to modify and evolve their implementations."
"We can ingest and correlate data from virtually any type of system."
"It gives me notifications of notable events."
"Low barrier to start searching with the ability to normalize data on the fly."
"Splunk Enterprise Security is able to process a huge amount of data without any issues."
"Splunk incorporates a lot of elements that help to reduce security risks. For it to reach certain compliance, we need to have some security insight. Splunk is a very good SIEM, it’s a top solution, but the best feature is its cost of visibility. We have all the most important features to detect vulnerabilities or risks."
 

Cons

"The implementation of dashboards in the solution needs to be made easier...I had some issues with the ports and configuration since it was kind of complex to implement with Docker."
"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."
"Elastic Stack should work on their dashboards and integration process."
"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."
"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 tool's pricing can be improved."
"Support could be improved. The error code is not helpful. We have to ask for it or pass it on to community forums."
"Improvements are needed in the solution in areas like SOAR and TIP, where there are certain shortcomings."
"Splunk can improve its third-party device application plugins."
"It is very complicated to write your own correlation rules without the help of Splunk support."
"You do need a lot of training and certification with this product."
"The on-premise integration with SOAR could be more simple; the cloud version integrates with SOAR very easily, but the on-premise SOAR and on-premise Splunk Enterprise Security are really not that easy, so I would appreciate if that could be improved."
"The Enterprise Security app could be improved. We have had trouble with it working from the first day."
"Considering the contract thing and the whole legal area, it takes forever to get the contracts signed and to be able to agree to the terms and conditions for my company as well as for Splunk's team."
"Customizing our commands should be simpler. Creating custom commands in Splunk requires a long, complex process. For example, we have a command to add all the column data, but we don't have a command to get the average of the column data at the end. It would be useful to have a blank at the end to create our commands and leave the rest to others."
"Splunk could have more built-in use case presets that customers can build on and customize."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The product is expensive."
"It depends on the specifics, but generally, Elastic is economical for certain use cases."
"The pricing is reasonable."
"I used the open-source version of Elastic Stack, because of which I did not have to pay anything."
"We are using the open-source community version of the product."
"If I compare Elastic Stack to the other products in the market, I would say that the tool is available at a competitive price."
"Ultimately, the pricing depends upon the capacity planning that the enterprise architect does."
"I rate the solution's pricing a six out of ten."
"I am not personally involved with the pricing of the solution."
"Further reductions would be fantastic, and I believe that more and more people would flock to it."
"Although Splunk is an expensive product, it is designed to be utilized across your organization in order to maximize your ROI and lower your TCO."
"Unlike other security tools, Splunk provides a fixed amount of gigabytes per day, and we are required to pay for any additional usage beyond that limit, in addition to our monthly cost."
"It is expensive. That is why many customers have moved to IBM QRadar. The price is definitely a challenge for customers."
"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."
"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."
"Splunk Enterprise Security's pricing is competitive."
report
Use our free recommendation engine to learn which Log Management solutions are best for your needs.
884,797 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
11%
Financial Services Firm
9%
Government
9%
Manufacturing Company
8%
Financial Services Firm
12%
Computer Software Company
10%
Manufacturing Company
9%
Government
6%
 

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 Business112
Midsize Enterprise50
Large Enterprise267
 

Questions from the Community

What do you like most about Elastic Stack?
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 per...
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 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: March 2026.
884,797 professionals have used our research since 2012.