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Grafana Loki vs Splunk Enterprise Security comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Jul 13, 2025

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

Grafana Loki
Ranking in Log Management
4th
Average Rating
8.2
Reviews Sentiment
7.8
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
7.5
Number of Reviews
322
Ranking in other categories
Security Information and Event Management (SIEM) (1st), IT Operations Analytics (1st)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of July 2025, in the Log Management category, the mindshare of Grafana Loki is 8.6%, up from 4.9% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Splunk Enterprise Security is 7.3%, down from 10.1% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Log Management
 

Featured Reviews

Volodymyr Bondarchuk - PeerSpot reviewer
Integrations enhance monitoring but problem-solving proves challenging
Different types of integrations with various sources are the most helpful and useful features of Grafana Loki that I found for myself. As part of Kubernetes technology, I noticed benefits from using this product such as availability, configuration balancing, high availability solutions for high performance, and failover clustering. It provides a clear picture about the state of the system and gives needed information for taking action and quickly fixing problems.
ROBERT-CHRISTIAN - PeerSpot reviewer
Has many predefined correlation rules and is brilliant for investigation and log analysis
It is very complicated to write your own correlation rules without the help of Splunk support. What Splunk could do better is to create an API to the standard SIEM tools, such as Microsoft Sentinel. The idea would be to make it less painful. In ELK Stack, Kibana is the query language with which you can search log files. I believe Splunk has also a query language in which they search their log files, but once you have identified the log file that you want to use for further security correlation, you want to very quickly transport that into your SIEM tool, such as Microsoft Sentinel. That is something that Splunk could make a little bit less painful because it is a lot of effort to find that log file and forward it. An API with Microsoft Sentinel or a similar SIEM tool would be a good idea.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"The product's most valuable features are ease of installation, management, and reporting. It has an efficient ability to set thresholds for alerts, as well."
"Grafana agent is very lightweight and does not cost significant resources of our cluster."
"Grafana Loki is easy to monitor and detect errors."
"We are using Grafana Loki as a database for real-time metrics."
"The log collection feature is good and the solution is easily understandable. v"
"The most valuable features of the solution stem from the fact that it is an open-source tool that is stable and flexible."
"The most valuable feature is the capability to set up alerts, which becomes necessary when we need to receive notifications for specific events."
"I appreciate the capability to process logs from microservices and seamlessly integrate them into Grafana."
"From the class that I took this week, being able to create notable events from whatever you find in the data set is pretty useful."
"It has a rapid response search environment in the event of an incident."
"Its compatibility with other SIEMS is very useful."
"The compatibility with the add-ons helps us add more data in the same compatible format and use data models to elaborate and make it faster."
"The most valuable feature is the incident dashboard, and the extensive use of correlation searches, which isn't available with a standard Splunk search package. This feature is important to me because it enables SOC analysts to do their job more efficiently and be able to investigate or mediate incidents at a faster pace."
"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."
"Splunk Enterprise Security's dashboards are a key asset."
"Correlation search, in general, is valuable because it allows us to search multiple data sources easily."
 

Cons

"The solution has shortcomings regarding security monitoring-oriented features that need improvement."
"Visualization-wise, Grafana Loki's dashboard looks a little outdated compared to other open-source visualization tools like Chronograf."
"I do not see any areas for improvement at the moment."
"We face some bugs when we install the latest version of Grafana Loki."
"There is a need for some change in the alerting types of the product. In short, a few changes in the alert area are needed due to minor shortcomings."
"Enhancing speed could be a game-changer, and while it might vary depending on the application, it's a factor worth exploring."
"The product must improve its UI."
"It's not intended for proprietary services, so you have to struggle with configuration a lot."
"The support and the pricing can be better"
"Stability is there, but every release has some bugs."
"Splunk's ability to analyze malicious activities scores an 8 out of 10, but there's room for improvement. By analyzing emerging patterns, Splunk could identify and predict potential threats more effectively."
"It is a hugely complicated product."
"Its user interface for everything other than the charts can be improved. Some parts of it can be simplified a bit, such as when importing documents that have the network traffic. When you're going through the information about the network traffic, you have to have the expertise, but even if a program is supposed to be for IT support, it is good to make it user-friendly because it gets easier to train people. When something goes wrong, the more difficult a program is in terms of UI, the harder it is to fix the issue."
"The access and identity features could be improved. For example, let's say we have onboarded 65 logs. Now, we can identify the various processes, but we run into trouble when we're updating the processes for AWS CloudTrail, EDR, MDR, and XDR."
"If it could be made available as a service, this would be much better than as a product."
"This is a costly solution."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The cost is less than other paid services like CloudWatch."
"Grafana Loki is an open-source solution."
"I find the licensing structure quite reasonable, as the free license effectively meets my requirements."
"The pricing structure varies based on the number of users; there might be specific taxes to pay for it."
"I use the open-source version of the product."
"My company doesn't need to pay for the licensing cost of the solution."
"Since we are using the open-source version of Grafana Loki, we are not paying anything for the solution."
"I use the solution's open-source version. Grafana Loki is a completely free solution for me."
"Pricing is pretty fair."
"It is a pretty high cost solution, but if your organization has the funds, it can bring many benefits."
"Splunk Enterprise Security is expensive."
"The licensing costs are high for Splunk Enterprise Security."
"It's a little bit expensive for a small to medium enterprise."
"It is expensive. I work for multiple clients. I am working for more than five clients, but most of the clients are switching from Splunk to Sentinel because of the cost. Even though Sentinel is very limited, clients are moving to Sentinel."
"Luckily, we come under a large federal agency, and before the pandemic, they signed a large enterprise license agreement. It worked out great and to our advantage because we are a small organization. We got a 300 gig license, and we just did not have the buying power to be able to get products cheaply. Because we all partnered together under the agency umbrella, we were able to get Splunk Enterprise Security, UBA, and ITSI for cheap. This was good considering the fact that some of these premium apps require a minimum number of users, and we do not have the number of people needed to even justify buying it."
"It is possible to use a developer's license, which is up to 10GB per day of volume traffic, which is usually enough for most use cases."
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Comparison Review

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Feb 26, 2015
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Computer Software Company
17%
Financial Services Firm
10%
Comms Service Provider
10%
Manufacturing Company
8%
Financial Services Firm
14%
Computer Software Company
14%
Manufacturing Company
8%
Government
7%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
 

Questions from the Community

What do you like most about Grafana Loki?
We are using Grafana Loki as a database for real-time metrics.
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Grafana Loki?
Since it is an open source tool, there are no charges or fees.
What needs improvement with Grafana Loki?
I have no ideas at this moment about what could be improved in Grafana Loki.
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 Grafana Loki vs. Splunk Enterprise Security and other solutions. Updated: July 2025.
863,901 professionals have used our research since 2012.