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Graylog Enterprise vs Splunk Enterprise Security comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Mar 15, 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

Graylog Enterprise
Ranking in Log Management
8th
Average Rating
8.0
Reviews Sentiment
5.8
Number of Reviews
27
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
418
Ranking in other categories
Security Information and Event Management (SIEM) (1st), IT Operations Analytics (1st)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of August 2026, in the Log Management category, the mindshare of Graylog Enterprise is 2.5%, down from 6.4% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Splunk Enterprise Security is 7.0%, down from 7.4% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Log Management Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
Splunk Enterprise Security7.0%
Graylog Enterprise2.5%
Other90.5%
Log Management
 

Featured Reviews

Merit Ronald - PeerSpot reviewer
Senior Software Engineer at Absa Bank Uganda
Centralized log insights have reduced investigation time and improve security response
One improvement I want to see in Graylog Enterprise is artificial intelligence to help us automatically identify unusual patterns and suggest possible causes. I also want to see more ready-made dashboards and alert templates for common security use cases to help us gain value from the platform faster after deployment. Lastly, I want to see improvements in handling very large volumes of data, especially after searching, and a more user-friendly log management system, particularly in large environments. I give Graylog Enterprise a 9 out of 10 because it has a limitation of a steep learning curve for new users due to the many configuration options. It takes considerable time to become comfortable with creating searches, dashboards, and alerts. Additionally, in very large environments with large volumes of logs, it requires careful planning, and its data retention is quite limited.
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 most valuable feature is its new interface."
"The ability to write custom alerts is key to information security and compliance."
"This had increased productivity for the dev and support teams, because we are directly notifying them."
"What I like about Graylog is that it's real-time and you have access to the raw data. So, you ingest it, and you have access to every message and every data item you ingest. You can then build analytics on top of that. You can look at the raw data, and you can do some volumetric estimations, such as how big traffic you have, how many messages of data of a type you have, etc."
"It is used as a log manager/SIEM. It provides visibility into the infrastructure and security related events."
"I know that there are other similar tools available, but I enjoy using Graylog the most."
"The Graylog features that have proven to be most beneficial for our data analysis in particular are that we tend to use it as a big data store, so we have the correlation rules that, if something matches under certain conditions, it raises an alarm."
"It has data adapters and lookup tables that utilize HTTP calls to APIs."
"Splunk Enterprise Security comes with 300 pre-deployed use cases that can be easily customized to meet the specific needs of our organization, without the need to purchase additional tools."
"Splunk is quite flexible for our customers. Splunk does not filter from a specific lock, you can define it later."
"The alerts are very effective."
"Splunk's interface is user-friendly, and it has apps and add-ons for most applications. We can easily normalize the data to make it readable and understand the logs. We easily get all the field extractions and enrichment done by using the apps and add-ons. This helps us understand the application logs because the raw data is useless unless we extract some useful information from it. These add-ons make it so much easier."
"Splunk Enterprise Security has helped speed up our security investigations."
"Splunk Enterprise Security is a valuable tool that allows us to monitor data from the APS daily."
"What Splunk does, and really is why it is a choice platform, is that it speaks all of those languages, no matter what IT discipline you are in."
"What is nice about the solution is that it makes it easy to build the queries, search for the events and then do analysis."
 

Cons

"Graylog needs to improve their authentication. Also, the fact that Graylog displays logs from the top down is just ridiculous."
"I would like to see a default dashboard widget that shows the topology of the clusters defined for the graylog install."
"I would rate them as a two out of 10. You are on your own without an enterprise license."
"There are many other applications in the market that influenced my rating reduction."
"Its scalability gets complicated when we have to update or edit multiple nodes."
"The documentation for Graylog Enterprise can be improved, as this has been a pain point."
"If you have a whole team trying to fix the Graylog instance for two days, that's a bit too much."
"The area in Graylog that needs to be improved or enhanced would be the integrations."
"It will be helpful for customers if they can create some real-world cases, and we can find a case study to align with. I know that Splunk has tremendous potential. We only include a tiny piece of it. There is a lot of stuff that we need to learn. If Splunk can provide more real-time examples, that will be helpful for customers."
"While Splunk offers SOAR as a separate product, integrating it into the next version of Splunk Enterprise Security as a unified solution would be beneficial."
"Splunk does not build apps. They only go back and validate the apps that somebody has already built. They should have remote consulting support. They have a wonderful solution. They have 24/7 security. Nobody needs to depend on any third party and will therefore just buy Splunk on the cloud."
"Splunk solutions are much more expensive than others."
"Splunk ES could have more pre-built integrations and rules. The detection is fairly accurate, but it depends on the rules you create. Splunk's out-of-the-box configuration isn't that useful."
"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. It's just a rare occurrence that we open up the incident."
"Sometimes, the data does not match what we're looking for, or the tool contains incorrect data."
"We'd like to see a more seamless cloud-based integration."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"I am using a community edition. I have not looked at the enterprise offering from Graylog."
"Graylog is a free open-source solution. The free version has a capacity limitation of 2 GB daily, if you want to go above this you have to purchase a license."
"There is an open source version and an enterprise version. I wouldn't recommend the enterprise version, but as an open source solution, it is solid and works really well."
"It's an open-source solution that can be used free of charge."
"We're using the Community edition."
"​You get a lot out-of-the-box with the non-enterprise version, so give it a try first."
"It's open source and free. They have a paid version, but we never looked into that because we never needed the features of the paid version."
"If you want something that works and do not have the money for Splunk or QRadar, take Graylog.​​"
"My experience with the solution's setup cost, pricing, and licensing was really good."
"There is an annual license required to use this solution."
"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 is definitely not a cheap solution. It is an expensive product."
"Splunk has always been on the expensive side."
"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."
"It can be tough to determine if you are getting all of the value out of your investment at times."
"This product could use better pricing in general."
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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
12%
Comms Service Provider
11%
University
8%
Financial Services Firm
7%
Financial Services Firm
13%
Manufacturing Company
8%
Outsourcing Company
8%
Construction Company
7%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business10
Midsize Enterprise5
Large Enterprise11
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business129
Midsize Enterprise65
Large Enterprise285
 

Questions from the Community

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Graylog?
I am not sure about the pricing, setup cost, and licensing because that was dealt with by a different team that handled the licensing and procurement.
What needs improvement with Graylog?
Graylog Enterprise performs well overall; however, the UI could be improved because the SOC team creates multiple dashboards based on their use cases, and creating dashboards is complex. If there w...
What is your primary use case for Graylog?
Graylog Enterprise is used primarily for log management and to perform security analytics. It helps the organization collect logs from different sources and centralize them in one place. We can sea...
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...
 

Also Known As

Graylog2
No data available
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Blue Cross Blue Shield, eBay, Cisco, LinkedIn, SAP, King.com, Twilio, Deutsche Presse-Agentur
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 Graylog Enterprise vs. Splunk Enterprise Security and other solutions. Updated: June 2026.
908,800 professionals have used our research since 2012.