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Pandora FMS 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

Pandora FMS
Ranking in Log Management
57th
Average Rating
9.2
Reviews Sentiment
7.6
Number of Reviews
22
Ranking in other categories
Network Monitoring Software (74th), Server Monitoring (23rd), IT Infrastructure Monitoring (54th), Cloud Monitoring Software (40th)
Splunk Enterprise Security
Ranking in Log Management
2nd
Average Rating
8.4
Reviews Sentiment
7.3
Number of Reviews
369
Ranking in other categories
Security Information and Event Management (SIEM) (1st), IT Operations Analytics (1st)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of October 2025, in the Log Management category, the mindshare of Pandora FMS is 0.3%, up from 0.2% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Splunk Enterprise Security is 7.7%, down from 9.1% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Log Management Market Share Distribution
ProductMarket Share (%)
Splunk Enterprise Security7.7%
Pandora FMS0.3%
Other92.0%
Log Management
 

Featured Reviews

Gabriel Glusgold - PeerSpot reviewer
Personalized metrics; simplicity of data
My primary use case for Pandora is monitoring This solution has helped us improve our organization by allowing us to create a lot of metrics on several platforms, including Windows, Linux, and Unix. We then use these Pandora metrics to create an interface. We then pass the interface off to the…
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

"The monitoring system within this solution is very good. It is easy to use and navigate, and makes issue alarms easily viewable."
"The network monitoring and configuration within this solution is very good."
"This solution has screens that are easy to understand and provide a wealth of information."
"The most valuable feature is that it is an all-in-one monitoring system."
"You can configure several types of architecture for high availability or load balancing."
"It is easy to create your own custom modules if you just know a little bit of scripting. If you have unique requirements, you can just make your own modules. You can even grab checks from other vendors. There are open-source checks for various things such as SMTP, etc. There is a long list of different ones from Nagios. You can just use them, and within seconds, you get yourself a check that is monitoring whatever you need. It is really flexible. I guess that's why they call it Pandora Flexible Monitoring System (FMS). It is reliable. It does the job, and it alerts. It is also surprisingly feature-rich. Our network guy just recently asked about a particular protocol to monitor the bandwidth on the network, which is not a common protocol. When I looked it up, and I found that they cover it. It is very mature for a not-so-known product."
"The official forum is active enough to answer most of the high-end technical questions that you may have."
"The solution has good dashboards and graphics."
"It allows for transparency into IT metrics for insightful business analytics."
"It has the ability to correlate data, analyze and review it."
"The additional vendors we've brought on board, particularly the elastic, have been quite beneficial."
"I am satisfied with the support."
"Splunk Enterprise Security helped us with faster detection of threats."
"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."
"Good for log collection and log management."
"Deployment server for deploying changes in one go."
 

Cons

"Pandora could deliver better analytics out of the box. You can work around these limitations with the help of other tools like Grafana. The shortcomings are mostly on the graphical side. The built-in report generators are a bit limited in some areas."
"I find that this software is resource heavy, and demands a lot of processing capacity."
"In the future, we may have double the number of devices, and we do not want to have any issues with performance in the data display."
"A nice feature in the next release would be an automation module to run workflow actions."
"Pandora FMS is relatively new, and the interface with the older version crashes at times. We have several different operating systems, such as Linux and Windows, and Pandora does not run as well in these."
"This solution requires proper training to get 100% out of it."
"When it comes to the definition of local Software Agents for the first time in the open-source version, it can become very tedious."
"Pandora FMS is an overall great monitoring solution, but it does not have a community that is as large as Zabbix or Nagios."
"The main improvement needed in Splunk Enterprise Security is its system visibility after installation."
"Features related to content management must be improved."
"The use cases provided by Splunk are a good starting point, but could cover many additional topics to ensure that a smaller or less experienced shop might maximize the value of an ES deployment."
"I've never had too many issues with the stability. Years ago we had indexes crash but that was more on us. We didn't understand how to properly size Splunk."
"The integration with all our tool sets felt like we were reinventing the wheel, which was a pain point for us."
"We'd like Splunk to reduce false positives."
"Queries are not always as easy or straightforward as they might be, so it can be difficult to figure out what you need to look for."
"It's costly."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"Only one payment and it includes support, updates, new versions, and access to the complete library of plugins except for SAP and z/OS."
"In terms of money, the Enterprise version is the cheapest that I have found after a market study."
"Pandora FMS is easy to implement and the pricing of licenses is competitive."
"The open-source version offers 100% functionality and the hardware requirements for a solution like this one are very modest."
"My rule of thumb would be that if you need more than thirty agents, and you lack an automation tool such as Chef or Puppet, you will save a lot of time and money going to the Enterprise edition."
"The Open Source Community Edition is great to just explore the software, or use it on medium-sized infrastructures."
"They are very competitive on the pricing side. That's one reason why my manager keeps using it."
"Growing the solution or migrating to the Enterprise version is easy, and various plans are available."
"Splunk's costing is a little more difficult. The pricing method is complicated, and the way that costing is calculated in Splunk is a little more difficult."
"Splunk Enterprise Security is priced lower than competitors."
"It is economical than other solutions."
"Splunk Enterprise Security's pricing is competitive."
"Splunk Enterprise Security is a bit expensive overall, but it provides good value."
"It's a yearly subscription."
"The pricing seems good relative to the other vendors that we have had here. However, they need to find ways to be more flexible with the licensing and be able to deal with situations where we start generating more logs. Maybe having some controls in the Splunk interface to turn it off, so we don't have to change anything in our application."
"Setup cost is cheap: It is free, it is user-friendly, and it is fast."
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Comparison Review

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Feb 26, 2015
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Government
13%
Comms Service Provider
12%
Computer Software Company
8%
Media Company
8%
Computer Software Company
14%
Financial Services Firm
14%
Manufacturing Company
8%
Government
7%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business11
Midsize Enterprise4
Large Enterprise3
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business110
Midsize Enterprise50
Large Enterprise257
 

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

Rakuten, Prosegur, Repsol, Teléfonica, Allianz, Ottawa Hospital, Hughes
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 Pandora FMS vs. Splunk Enterprise Security and other solutions. Updated: September 2025.
869,566 professionals have used our research since 2012.