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PagerDuty Operations Cloud vs Splunk Security Essentials comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Jan 2, 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

PagerDuty Operations Cloud
Ranking in IT Alerting and Incident Management
1st
Average Rating
8.8
Reviews Sentiment
7.2
Number of Reviews
46
Ranking in other categories
Process Automation (6th), AIOps (7th), Critical Event Management (CEM) (1st)
Splunk Security Essentials
Ranking in IT Alerting and Incident Management
14th
Average Rating
8.6
Reviews Sentiment
5.9
Number of Reviews
4
Ranking in other categories
Data Visualization (16th), Security Incident Response (11th)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of January 2026, in the IT Alerting and Incident Management category, the mindshare of PagerDuty Operations Cloud is 14.8%, down from 23.5% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Splunk Security Essentials is 1.4%, up from 0.2% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
IT Alerting and Incident Management Market Share Distribution
ProductMarket Share (%)
PagerDuty Operations Cloud14.8%
Splunk Security Essentials1.4%
Other83.8%
IT Alerting and Incident Management
 

Featured Reviews

NS
Senior SRE at IBM
Automated incident workflows have transformed on-call operations and improved response times
Since I host our internal services, I want more customization relating to our specific use case. The needed improvements include the configuration process, as new team members face a steep learning curve to understand the platform. With many new members, they need training to set up runbook workflows, event orchestration, and manage complex on-call schedules across 23 services, making it a challenge for new users. Additionally, I feel the web interface requires improvements. I would rate PagerDuty Operations Cloud as eight out of ten because the cons include a complex configuration process and high costs for each add-on that I try to obtain, making subscriptions costly, along with limited customization in certain incident workflows. The primary reasons for rating it an eight include the complex configuration which makes it challenging for new users, as well as their difficulty in setting up advanced runbook workflows and managing complex on-call setups. The web user interface also requires improvement. Although I receive alerts via the mobile app, which is beneficial for handling schedule maintenance, the same features should be added to the web interface. Customization issues persist, such as the inability to clone entire schedules as part of the workflows, and I want to keep incidents open for a specified duration, neither of which I can currently customize. Thus, I raised a ticket with PagerDuty Operations Cloud to address these concerns. Furthermore, the cost is high, making it one of the more expensive incident management solutions.
BM
Information Security Architect at UMMS
Offers a wide range of advanced detection capabilities for identifying suspicious activities
We already talked about Enterprise Security on May 28th.I'm using Splunk Enterprise. We do use SOAR Mission Control, but not AppDynamics or Phantom. We have another freemium app for infrastructure monitoring called ITSI, IT Essentials Work. We also have the ITSI module for virtualization. I would have to rate Splunk Security Essentials a 10 out of 10 because it's free and there's tons of usable content.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"It reduces the amount of white noise. If something comes through, then it will alert somebody. However, if it's a bit of white noise that comes through at night, then it gets dealt with the next day. Everything is visible to everybody. It's not just a single person getting an SMS, then going, "Oh, I'm not going to worry about that." The visibility to everybody on the team is one of the great things about it because it reduces the white noise."
"The inbound integrations that PagerDuty provides with most of the DevOps tools are valuable."
"PagerDuty Operations Cloud has positively impacted our organization by allowing us to be immediately paged when a system or service is down, enabling us to quickly respond and provide updates to the organization on issues and their resolution."
"My advice to others looking into using PagerDuty Operations Cloud is that it is one of the best tools in the market for production support and SRE engineers."
"PagerDuty Operations Cloud has positively impacted my organization by helping in faster incident detection and resolution with less downtime."
"The SMS pages and the mobile application are pretty much the top two features."
"PagerDuty Operations Cloud positively impacts my organization by helping us win customer trust; when problems occur, the speed of our reaction and involvement with customers is crucial, and PagerDuty Operations Cloud facilitates quick responses to potential issues."
"The most valuable features of PagerDuty are customization, access, policies, and different rules regarding the path of escalation. Additionally, it's easy to use and create overrides. For example, if you all are on a call for one week each, but somebody wants to go on PTO, the team needs to swap shifts in PagerDuty. This is easy to do by creating overrides to switch up the set schedules. It's very user-friendly in that aspect. It works well for monitoring and alerting."
"The network monitoring feature is particularly valuable for gathering information about users, login times, and other statistics."
"They have a good catalog of plans to use to resist the attacks."
"We are focusing on security to ensure incidents are reported efficiently. In addition to that, for reporting purposes, we are utilizing our dashboards or creating new ones. We will be using free visualization tools for this purpose."
"I would have to rate Splunk Security Essentials a 10 out of 10 because it's free and there's tons of usable content."
 

Cons

"I would like the UI to be more intuitive. I would like to be able to group or color-code the discoveries. When you create a system, you have a listing of all the different configurations. You can list them by teams, but some additional color coding would be helpful. I would break it down by incident controls. In other words, it should be broken down it into response teams and engineering divisions."
"More analytics can be brought into PagerDuty Operations Cloud; while I know there are some, they still seem basic to me, and having options for user-customized charts would be really helpful, especially in this GenAI world where prompts can yield valuable data."
"I would like to see more content in the notification messages; although, that might be a configuration on our end."
"Because of the way you have to structure the rosters, if an engineer has to go on leave (or something), you can't just go in and reassign/take this person out of all of the different rosters that they're in. You have to go into each of the rosters and take them out. There might be a roster for business hours, after hours rotation, and monitoring deployments. Each time we need to take an engineer out of the pool, e.g., if they're sick or on leave, then we have to go and touch all of those rosters, updating and replacing them. Whereas, if we could just take the person out and have it automatically fill in the rostering, then that would make life a lot easier for managing it."
"They could include incident merging and alert grouping features in the product."
"Operations are somewhat limited by their integration package. For example, integrating with Jira was problematic until they updated to a better plug-in."
"This solution works best in conjunction with a proper logging system, which can be an additional cost to organizations."
"I would rate PagerDuty Operations Cloud as eight out of ten because the cons include a complex configuration process and high costs for each add-on that I try to obtain, making subscriptions costly, along with limited customization in certain incident workflows."
"The reporting feature needs to be more user-friendly."
"The price could be improved."
"They could add more AI content or AI and machine learning."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"PagerDuty has monthly and yearly licenses available, the costs of which can get quite high if you have a large number of users."
"If you add more people, then you have to pay more, which is always a thing with the SaaS solutions."
"The solution is paid on a monthly basis and represents about 1% of the platform's budget."
"The cost is based on the package you select."
"Licensing costs are around $700 a month, and the only additional costs, are phone costs in some instances."
"They're very good in pricing compared to the competitors in the area. I would rate them a five out of five in terms of pricing."
"If we wanted phone calls or additional SMSs, we would have to pitch up for those. They give us so many per month per user, then we have to pay extra if it goes over that."
"The price is very high."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Performing Arts
16%
Financial Services Firm
10%
Manufacturing Company
7%
Educational Organization
7%
No data available
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business15
Midsize Enterprise14
Large Enterprise26
No data available
 

Questions from the Community

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for PagerDuty?
There was no relationship between setup cost and other factors.
What needs improvement with PagerDuty?
The system is very smooth right now.
What is your primary use case for PagerDuty?
We receive a notification if there are any failed jobs or operations. We have some Bamboo agents working, so if one of the jobs fails on one of these servers, PagerDuty Operations Cloud creates an ...
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Splunk Security Essentials?
Our SecOps manager and CISO were more familiar with Splunk, and the price was right. That was probably the primary driver, and we did evaluation as well with strict criteria and Gartner ratings.
What needs improvement with Splunk Security Essentials?
I have not used Splunk Security Essentials' customizable dashboards. I have not taken advantage of the pre-built security use cases in Splunk.
What is your primary use case for Splunk Security Essentials?
We use Splunk Security Essentials. We have projects, though not many projects per year. The solution is used to resist cyber attacks. They have a good catalog of plans to use to resist the attacks.
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

40% of the Fortune 100 TrustPagerDuty. Customers include: Slack, Intuit, Zendesk, Panasonic, Pinterest, Airbnb, eHarmony, McKesson, Comcast
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