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Graylog vs Splunk Enterprise Security comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Apr 6, 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

Graylog
Ranking in Log Management
15th
Average Rating
8.0
Reviews Sentiment
7.2
Number of Reviews
21
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
318
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 Graylog is 6.5%, up from 5.9% 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

Ivan Kokalovic - PeerSpot reviewer
Facilitates backend service monitoring with efficient log retrieval and API flexibility
Graylog is valuable because it bridges technical knowledge to non-technical teams, presenting complex backend processes in a simple timeline. It boosts the knowledge of sales and customer support teams by allowing them to see the backend operations without needing to read the code. Its API is flexible for visualization, and its powerful search engine efficiently handles large volumes of log data. Moreover, its stability, fast search capabilities, and compatibility with languages like ANSI SQL enhance its utility in IT infrastructure.
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

"Storing logs in Elasticsearch means log retrieval is extremely fast, and full text search is available by default."
"The best feature of Graylog is the Elasticsearch integration. We can integrate and we can run filters, such as an event of interest, and those logs we can send to any SIEM tool or as an analytic. Additionally, there are clear and well-documented implementation instructions on their website to follow if needed."
"Allowing us to set up alerts and integrate with platforms we already use, such as Slack and OpsGenie to alert users of these errors proactively, is also a very useful feature."
"Graylog is very handy."
"We're using the Community edition, but I know that it has really good dashboarding and alerts."
"Graylog's search functionality, alerting functionality, user management, and dashboards are useful."
"Message forwarding through the in-built module."
"We have scaled from a single machine installation (a VM with a Graylog + ES + MongoDB) to (2 Graylog + 2 ES + 3 MongoDB). This was done smoothly with a minimal impact on logging."
"Splunk works based on parsing log files."
"I can create dashboards to collect and view information in a tabular, graphical format. This feature is important because it helps me understand time-series data over one or two hours."
"My customer was integrated with many third-party credentials and other threat sources as well. The integration part was seamless and easy. The rates for allocating valuable information and IOCs from different sources are also good."
"We can ingest and correlate data from virtually any type of system."
"Search language is easy to understand and teach to new users."
"You can run reports against multiple devices at the same time. You are able to troubleshoot a single application on a thousand servers. You can do this with a single query, since it is very easy to do."
"Scalability-wise, the tool is awesome since you can add or reduce your resources in an easy way."
"It provides a lot of analytics with the underlying AI engine, and it is a lot easier than other solutions. There are some products that do automated AI-based detection and drawing up charts, but for network monitoring and all of the monitoring aspects, it is quite a nice tool. It is very convenient for business users because they get more or less a lot of data readily available. If you're familiar with the Splunk query language, you can pretty much do whatever you want."
 

Cons

"It would be great if Graylog could provide a better Python package in order to make it easier to use for the Python community."
"I would like to see a date and time in the Graylog Grok patterns so that I can save time when searching for a log. I like how the streams and the search query work, but adding a date and time will allow me to pull out a log in a milli-second."
"The area in Graylog that needs to be improved or enhanced would be the integrations."
"The infrastructure cost is the main issue. I like the rest. If the infrastructure costs could be lower, it would be fantastic."
"Since container orchestration systems are popular and Graylog fits the niche well, perhaps they could officially support running in docker containers on Kubernetes as a StatefulSet as a use case. That way, the declarative nature of Kubernetes config files would document their best case deployment scenario-"
"I hope to see improvements in Graylog for more interactivity, user-friendliness, and creating alerts. The initial setup is complex."
"Its scalability gets complicated when we have to update or edit multiple nodes."
"When it comes to configuring the processing pipeline, writing the rules can be very tedious, especially since the documentation isn't extensive on how the functions provided for these rules work."
"Missing capability for audio/video and image processing."
"There are a lot of competitive products that are doing better than what Splunk is doing on the analytics side."
"The Web Application Firewall will send you too much information because it's more dedicated to security than a normal firewall."
"I'd say I am happy with the technical support, not elated. They provide great support, but sometimes they don't have the answers that I need."
"The default threat intel feeds create many false positives and noise, which is counterproductive."
"My company could benefit from doing more Splunk training with Splunk consultants teaching us how to use it."
"Splunk could be improved by reducing the cost. The cost is one of the biggest challenges for us in keeping to our production requirements."
"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."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"​You get a lot out-of-the-box with the non-enterprise version, so give it a try first."
"I am using a community edition. I have not looked at the enterprise offering from Graylog."
"Consider Enterprise support if you have atypical needs or setup requirements.​"
"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."
"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."
"I use the free version of 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."
"If you want something that works and do not have the money for Splunk or QRadar, take Graylog.​​"
"The price of Splunk is reasonable."
"It's a little bit expensive for a small to medium enterprise."
"Splunk is really expensive."
"It is not cheap."
"The price of Splunk is too high for our market."
"While some clients find the cost of Splunk Enterprise Security to be on the higher end, its pricing is comparable to other SIEM solutions."
"Further reductions would be fantastic, and I believe that more and more people would flock to it."
"Splunk Enterprise Security is not a cheap product, but I think it is worth every dollar that you pay."
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Comparison Review

VS
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
17%
Comms Service Provider
10%
Government
7%
University
7%
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 Graylog?
The product is scalable. The solution is stable.
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Graylog?
I am not familiar with the pricing details of Graylog, as I was not responsible for that aspect. It was determined that we didn't need an enterprise plan, which is more suited for clients with less...
What needs improvement with Graylog?
An improvement I would suggest is in Graylog's user interface, such as allowing for font size adjustments. A potential enhancement could be the integration with Ollama to run large language models ...
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 vs. Splunk Enterprise Security and other solutions. Updated: June 2025.
861,390 professionals have used our research since 2012.