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Nagios Log Server 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

Nagios Log Server
Ranking in Log Management
34th
Average Rating
8.0
Reviews Sentiment
6.9
Number of Reviews
4
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
Splunk Enterprise Security
Ranking in Log Management
2nd
Average Rating
8.4
Reviews Sentiment
7.6
Number of Reviews
306
Ranking in other categories
Security Information and Event Management (SIEM) (1st), IT Operations Analytics (1st)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of May 2025, in the Log Management category, the mindshare of Nagios Log Server is 0.8%, down from 0.8% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Splunk Enterprise Security is 7.3%, down from 10.7% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Log Management
 

Featured Reviews

Syarul Idzuddin Adzmi - PeerSpot reviewer
A scalable and affordable tool for monitoring data centers
Five engineers are needed for the maintenance of the product. I would definitely recommend the solution to those planning to use it. To increase the rating for the product, Nagios should offer remote support and offer more customization in reporting while making it easy for the customers to use it. Overall, I rate the solution an eight out of ten.
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 initial setup of Nagios Log Server was easy and straightforward."
"The product is scalable."
"A great feature of the solution involves its internal portal."
"One of the most valuable features is the dashboard because the UI was effective and easy to use. The alert systems are good as well. We had no failovers and had high availability. We can search the queries fast as well in Nagios Log Server."
"Ease of correlation, creating correlation searches are easy and you can combine multiple sources with little effort"
"The security part is useful as it helps secure the entire environment."
"The speed of the search engine"
"Splunk Enterprise Security has helped speed up our security investigations."
"The reporting aspect is good and it does what I need it to do."
"The initial setup isn't overly complex."
"The most valuable features in Splunk are the search function and the ability to run selected session reports. The session reports are important because I can use them to see what is going on in our environment weekly. Additionally, we can use the graph to see how often that particular event is happening."
"We can extract the metrics we want on the dashboards. We are able to react to the incidents."
 

Cons

"The customization and dashboards have shortcomings and need to be improved to make the tool look more presentable."
"As we are talking about a product which is open to the public, the pricing makes it challenging for us to profit off of its marketing."
"The support could be better."
"The configurations during initial setup could be improved. If they could be agentless, as in the case of the Ansible product, it would be better. I would like to be able to analyze the network bandwidth."
"The user access control could be much more granular, so that the admins can control r/w/x access for specific features of the product like dashboards, etc."
". Having a trial version or more training on Splunk would be helpful."
"Its pricing is extremely high. There are other tools out in the market that are competitive. They do not necessarily have all the functionality, but they are competitive. The professional services we have used have been high as well in comparison to the market."
"The solution should also have more advanced capabilities in comparison with QRadar, which offers Watson."
"The threat management part is still lagging. There are some gaps in threat management. Other vendors have built-in threat management systems, but Splunk lacks the threat management component in its portal. The UEBA and everything else is perfect, but it lacks a unified threat intelligence and management part."
"The support and the pricing can be better"
"It'd be really nice if Splunk Enterprise Security had a better and solid configuration guide."
"When you get into large amounts of data, Splunk can get pretty slow. This is the same on-premise or AWS, it doesn't matter. The way that they handle large data sets could be improved."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"We found the pricing to be quite affordable."
"For a single instance, the price is around $4,000."
"On a scale of one to ten, where one is expensive, and ten is cheap, I rate the pricing an eight or nine."
"Splunk is not free."
"Splunk is really expensive."
"The price of Splunk Enterprise Security is high."
"It can be cost-prohibitive when you start to scale and have terabytes of data. Its cost model is based on how much data it processes a day. If they're able to create scaled-down niche or custom package offerings, it may help with the cost. Instead of the full-blown features, if they can narrow the scope where it can only be used for a specific purpose, it would kind of create that market for the product, and it may help with the costing. When you start using it as a central aggregator and you're pumping tons of logs at it, pretty soon, you'll start hitting your cap on what it can process a day. Once you've got that, you're kind of defeating the purpose because you're going to have to scale back."
"You will eat up whatever you purchase quickly. The level of insights that Splunk empowers is addictive."
"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."
"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."
"Free Splunk license for PoCs on personal machines and the ability to scale the PoC to an enterprise level app."
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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
14%
Financial Services Firm
10%
University
9%
Government
9%
Financial Services Firm
15%
Computer Software Company
14%
Manufacturing Company
8%
Government
8%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
No data available
 

Questions from the Community

What do you like most about Nagios Log Server?
The initial setup of Nagios Log Server was easy and straightforward.
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Nagios Log Server?
My company pays around 500 to 1,000 USD per year toward the licensing cost of the solution. For support, we need to pay extra to Nagios. The solution's price is low. On a scale of one to ten, where...
What needs improvement with Nagios Log Server?
The customization and dashboards have shortcomings and need to be improved to make the tool look more presentable. The reporting side of the product should allow users to have more customized reports.
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

IBM, impulse, wipro, comteco
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 Nagios Log Server vs. Splunk Enterprise Security and other solutions. Updated: April 2025.
849,686 professionals have used our research since 2012.