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Grafana Loki vs Splunk Enterprise Security comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Oct 19, 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
3rd
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
7.3
Number of Reviews
369
Ranking in other categories
Security Information and Event Management (SIEM) (1st), IT Operations Analytics (1st)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of October 2025, in the Log Management category, the mindshare of Grafana Loki is 7.9%, up from 6.5% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Splunk Enterprise Security is 7.7%, down from 9.1% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Log Management Market Share Distribution
ProductMarket Share (%)
Splunk Enterprise Security7.7%
Grafana Loki7.9%
Other84.4%
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.
Kyle Vernham - PeerSpot reviewer
Built-in searches and unified data access streamline alert investigation and boosts analyst efficiency
The two features I appreciate the most in Splunk Enterprise Security are the built-in searches, which have been very easy for us to get started with right out of the box, and the fact that it accesses all of our other systems. You can access it as a pane of glass rather than having to search individually. We also have the option to compare our analysts from our service to service. Splunk Enterprise Security helps our SOC team prioritize and investigate high-fidelity alerts more effectively by providing a more in-depth look and the ability to access a lot more of our data. Instead of jumping from several segmented systems, it allows us to have everything brought together in one place. For example, you have to move from our purview to our build system and to Splunk Enterprise Security, and it enables us to streamline that process. The built-in features of Splunk Enterprise Security, which we recently procured, have given us a good starting point and demonstrated the value of the product, providing an easy way to sell it to our company. The ease of getting everything into our purview helps us, and it serves as a good start for the investigation part in one location rather than what we usually have, which is jumping from system to system to system. Splunk Enterprise Security plays a role in our company's strategy to combat insider threats and advanced persistent threats by currently being in its technical test phase. We are still rolling it out, and it should help us find any insider threats based on information that our policy states should not be present in our system. Splunk Enterprise Security's risk-based alerting (RBA) has impacted our alert volume and analyst productivity because we've got many different systems feeding into it. However, it has helped to make it easier for our analysts to go through a set of events rather than 100 alerts. RBA allows us to streamline the process and customize it for our analysts. When it comes to leveraging Splunk Enterprise Security's dashboards and visualizations to communicate security posture to executives, it's pretty straightforward for any type of information. The visualization is easy to understand, but I haven't had any direct conversations with our executives.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"The most valuable feature is the capability to set up alerts, which becomes necessary when we need to receive notifications for specific events."
"The most valuable feature of the solution is the tool's GUI. The solution's GUI is very user-friendly."
"Grafana Loki is easy to monitor and detect errors."
"The solution's stability has never been a problem. Stability-wise, I rate the solution a nine to ten out of ten."
"We are using Grafana Loki as a database for real-time metrics."
"The most valuable features of the solution stem from the fact that it is an open-source tool that is stable and flexible."
"Loki also utilizes the same service discovery mechanism as used by Prometheus. So, whatever labeled metadata you see in Prometheus, you have the exact same metadata in the Loki system. Given this level of intricacy and the attempt to address these challenges, I firmly believe that Loki deserves praise for the work."
"Grafana agent is very lightweight and does not cost significant resources of our cluster."
"Splunk Enterprise Security is probably one of the first products that actually could handle all the ingest and do all the correlation without crumbling under its own weight."
"The dashboard is amazing. Out-of-the-box dashboard is very good. It is very user-friendly."
"Being able to track impossible travel logins and things of that nature is valuable. We can track user logins from various IPs, various countries, and at various times to see if everything adds up."
"The UI of Splunk makes it easier for our analysts to move around and see what they need to see."
"Splunk RBA or risk-based alerting definitely made our lives a lot easier; we went from hundreds of alerts having to be triaged a day, that generally could be false positives or just noise, and bubble them into one overall alert that we can look at on a per-day basis and see what's rising to the top and respond faster, have a higher rate of true positives and find evil a lot quicker."
"The ability to analyze huge amounts of sales data and accurate prediction of sales forecasting is the most valuable feature."
"What is nice about the solution is that it makes it easy to build the queries, search for the events and then do analysis."
"In the past we used the different application to collect logs. We used SurfWatch and VMware to do so. But, we found that the Splunk has more capacity to do more in less time. They provide a aster speed to index all the events , and this is a huge asset."
 

Cons

"I would rate Grafana Loki a seven out of ten because it is open source, and sometimes there can be problems that are difficult to fix without official support."
"It would be beneficial if Loki could directly access Windows Server logs or events directly from the servers."
"The solution's scalability depends on the team managing the Grafana instance."
"We had a well-structured dashboard with a functional query. However, an issue arose when the Kubernetes pod restarted. The statistics from our Grafana query would reset, dropping to zero and starting anew. This was particularly noticeable with linear graphs, which are expected to show consistent growth."
"In Grafana Loki, the creation of metrics is not so easy, making it an area that could be made easier."
"We face some bugs when we install the latest version of Grafana Loki."
"We encountered certain limitations when it came to alerting, particularly when dealing with specific data sources."
"The platform's stability needs improvement."
"Splunk Enterprise Security can be improved by having more focus on the data health monitoring aspect, which will definitely be helpful."
"When we do a rollout from the server or host or anything, we'd like to see more automation. It would save us time."
"Writing queries is a bit complicated sometimes."
"Stability is there, but every release has some bugs."
"One main change I would suggest is related to the incident board: when an incident is resolved, it should not appear on the incident board."
"Endpoint access is the only issue I can think to mention, even though the endpoint access we have with Cisco is fine."
"I'd love to see more integrations, which is one of the primary points of the key node with Splunk Enterprise Security."
"The user interface feels clunky to navigate and interact with in Splunk Enterprise Security compared to other case management solutions where it feels easier to use at a high level."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"You can use the free version of Grafana Loki on-premises."
"I find the licensing structure quite reasonable, as the free license effectively meets my requirements."
"Since we are using the open-source version of Grafana Loki, we are not paying anything for the solution."
"Grafana Loki is a free, open-source solution."
"I use the open-source version of the product."
"We use a free version."
"The pricing structure varies based on the number of users; there might be specific taxes to pay for it."
"My company doesn't need to pay for the licensing cost of the solution."
"Splunk Enterprise Security incurs a significant cost because of the amount of data we send, but we are fine with the value we're getting for that price."
"Splunk should be able to integrate with other product using the free version."
"Truly evaluate the data you want to ingest and go slow. Pulling in data that can provide no use to your mission only wastes data against your license."
"Pricing can be a limiting factor. You have to continuously tune what you are bringing in and make sure what you bring in is of value."
"The tool's licensing is good and we haven't received any complaints from the team handling it."
"It would be nice if the pricing were cheaper. However, we did purchase it."
"I think we recently switched to the SVC pricing compared to the ingest pricing."
"The tool's pricing model is great. You can choose between workloads or volume."
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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
16%
Comms Service Provider
10%
Financial Services Firm
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
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business7
Midsize Enterprise8
Large Enterprise3
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business110
Midsize Enterprise50
Large Enterprise257
 

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: September 2025.
872,655 professionals have used our research since 2012.