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IBM Watson for Cyber Security 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

IBM Watson for Cyber Security
Ranking in Security Information and Event Management (SIEM)
57th
Average Rating
8.0
Number of Reviews
4
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
Splunk Enterprise Security
Ranking in Security Information and Event Management (SIEM)
1st
Average Rating
8.4
Reviews Sentiment
7.4
Number of Reviews
366
Ranking in other categories
Log Management (2nd), IT Operations Analytics (1st)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of September 2025, in the Security Information and Event Management (SIEM) category, the mindshare of IBM Watson for Cyber Security is 0.4%, up from 0.2% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Splunk Enterprise Security is 9.3%, down from 11.6% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Security Information and Event Management (SIEM) Market Share Distribution
ProductMarket Share (%)
Splunk Enterprise Security9.3%
IBM Watson for Cyber Security0.4%
Other90.3%
Security Information and Event Management (SIEM)
 

Featured Reviews

Elena Stefanovska - PeerSpot reviewer
Knowledgeable support, reliable, and useful compliance policies
IBM Watson for Cyber Security can be deployed on-premise or in the cloud and it is used as a SIEM solution The most valuable features of IBM Watson for Cyber Security are ease of use and out-of-the-box reports and compliance policies. Additionally, if there are aspects that are missing IBM add…
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

"IBM Watson for Cyber Security is very stable."
"The most valuable feature of this product is innovation, where the research and upgrading of technology never ends."
"The most valuable features of IBM Watson for Cyber Security are ease of use and out-of-the-box reports and compliance policies. Additionally, if there are aspects that are missing IBM add them in the next release."
"The customer support is very good."
"I evaluate customer service and technical support as excellent."
"I am enjoying our implementation of risk-based alerting. That has helped very much with cutting out a lot of the noise that we have. It has reduced our alert volume significantly. There is about an 80% reduction."
"Splunk has facilitated the correlation of information security logs to look for incidents which could cause damage to the company's infrastructure, as well as financial losses from leaks."
"From my experience, the visual aid that it provides is most valuable. There are charts and other means to provide information."
"The product has a good security posture."
"Correlating data across different systems via one interface will allow you to know your environment or identify incident data in ways you never imagined."
"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."
"Correlation search, in general, is valuable because it allows us to search multiple data sources easily."
 

Cons

"This is an expensive product, so making it more cost-effective would be an improvement."
"They need to continue to build the AI capabilities."
"The dashboard could improve in IBM Watson for Cyber Security."
"In the future, I would like to see threat intelligence included."
"While there aren't any major areas where the solution has to be improved, there are certain integrations that are still not available. I would specifically like to see legacy applications integrated."
"Both quality and speed are lacking. Quality-wise, tickets sometimes go in circles, with unnecessary complications and escalations requiring repeated explanations."
"I would like to get visibility into the data pipelines on heavy forwarders and indexers to see exactly their source and the cause of saturation when it occurs. This would help us learn even more about our high use applications."
"You do need a lot of training and certification with this product."
"The price of the solution could be cheaper."
"Regarding room for improvement, I expect Splunk to provide information about new features on a regular basis, such as notifications about enhancements that may improve security posture."
"Regarding customer service and technical support, their support is the worst I have ever run into in any industry."
"Due to its high licensing cost, Splunk is out of reach for many organizations."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The price of this solution should be lower, although I understand why IBM charges a premium price."
"IBM Watson for Cyber Security is very simple to license and is priced well."
"The pricing depends on the bandwidth of an organization and is good compared to some SIEM tools. IBM, for example, is quite costly. But Microsoft Sentinel is notably cheaper."
"The price is comparable."
"As a team, we prefer the old pricing model with a perpetual license. We are still evaluating the whole subscription-based model."
"The licensing model can be expensive, but the value it provides is significant."
"I would highly recommend anyone evaluating this option to download the free trial which allows for the ingestion of 500MB of data per day in order to get a feel for what Splunk does at its core. It will get pricey once your ingestion rates start to sky rocket, but I would consider it expensive given the amount of information that it allows you to analyze and react on straight out-of-the-box."
"It would be nice if the pricing were cheaper. However, we did purchase it."
"It can be expensive, especially the licensing costs. However, there is added value in what it can do, not just log aggregation."
"The Splunk Enterprise Security license is expensive."
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Comparison Review

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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
No data available
Computer Software Company
14%
Financial Services Firm
13%
Manufacturing Company
8%
Government
7%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
No data available
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business110
Midsize Enterprise48
Large Enterprise255
 

Questions from the Community

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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 IBM Watson for Cyber Security vs. Splunk Enterprise Security and other solutions. Updated: September 2025.
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