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Security Onion vs Stackify comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Oct 9, 2024

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

Security Onion
Ranking in Log Management
25th
Average Rating
7.2
Reviews Sentiment
7.1
Number of Reviews
4
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
Stackify
Ranking in Log Management
57th
Average Rating
7.8
Number of Reviews
6
Ranking in other categories
Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability (58th), IT Infrastructure Monitoring (67th)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of July 2026, in the Log Management category, the mindshare of Security Onion is 1.9%, down from 5.0% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Stackify is 0.8%, up from 0.2% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Log Management Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
Security Onion1.9%
Stackify0.8%
Other97.3%
Log Management
 

Featured Reviews

HJ
Manager at teshama
Centralized threat monitoring has improved visibility but demands complex setup and configuration
The best features Security Onion offers include acting as the intrusion detection system in my organization and helping me to address traffic, logs, and events happening within the organization. Since Security Onion is an open-source system that integrates with tools like Suricata and Zeek with the ELK stack, it enables threat detection and response capabilities, delivering high-level security measures at a cost, making it suitable for businesses of varying skill levels. These integrations with Suricata and Zeek have greatly impacted our workflow and our team's effectiveness by helping us address issues such as identifying intrusions, evaluating threats, and overseeing log files. This tool is very cost-effective, making it suitable for any size of organization wanting to use it.
IE
Senior Software Engineer at a tech services company with 1,001-5,000 employees
Has good filtering and rating features and helps with resource and load management
I've not used Stackify for a while, and I'm currently using a solution now that's not as good as Stackify. Among the solutions I've been using so far, Stackify has been one of the best for me, but there's always room for improvement. For example, I don't know if it's just me, but when I try to get the log from Stackify, sometimes it doesn't appear in real-time. It takes a few minutes before the logs appear. When I redeploy my solution and the application starts, I don't see the logs immediately, and it would take two to three minutes before I see the logs. I don't know if other customers have a similar experience. It's the wait time for the logs to appear that's a concern for me, could be improved, and is what the Stackify team should be looking into. In terms of any additional feature that I'd like added to the solution, I'm not sure if Stackify has a way to export logs out. I've been trying to do it. On the solution, you can click on a spiral-like icon and it shows you the entire error, and I'd prefer an export button that would let me download the error and save that into a text file, for example, so it'll be available on my local machine for me to reference it, especially because the log keeps going and as you're using the solution, the system keeps pushing messages on to Stackify, so if I'm looking at a particular error at 12:05 PM, for example, by the time I go back to my system and would like to revisit the error at 12:25 PM, on Stackify, the logs would have gone past that level and I won't see it again which makes it difficult. When you now go back to that timestamp, you don't tend to see it immediately, but if the solution had an export feature for me to save that particular error information on my local machine for reference at a later time, I won't have to go back to Stackify. I just go to that log, specifically to that particular export that I've received on my local machine. I can get it and review it, and it would be easier that way versus me going back to Stackify to find that particular error and request that particular information.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"The most valuable feature of Security Onion for security monitoring is its ability to find infected ports."
"Security Onion has positively impacted my organization by greatly improving our security posture, making alert triage easier to handle, simplifying the analysis of threats, and decreasing the cost of threat analysis and detection."
"Security Onion is the most mature solution in the market."
"We use Security Onion for internal vulnerability assessment."
"The performance dashboard and the accurate level of details are beneficial."
"What stood out to us were the metrics and granular details we received."
"Within few hours of install we've identify the source of issue we've been investigating for few days and couldn't pin point."
"The solution is stable and reliable."
"It is very simple and very easy to configure."
"We switched from New Relic and Loggly as it provides us more info at a lower price."
"My advice to anyone who wants to use Stackify is to go for it because my experience with it is good."
"The filter feature on Stackify is one of the features I found valuable. It's awesome. When I want to get the application logs, the solution gives me many filters. For example, if I want to get logs from my test environment, the option is there for me to select the environment from Stackify, and you can also select the particular application, and you'll see the information you need there. The filter feature alone and the fact that Stackify offers a lot of different filters is what I like the most about the solution because I've used other tools with the filter feature, but the filtering was very difficult, versus Stackify that has good filtering. On Stackify, you can filter the information by the last one hour, or the last four hours, and you can also select the date range and specify the timestamp, then the solution will give you the information based on the date range you specified. Another feature I found valuable on Stackify is its rating feature because it tells you how your application is faring. For example, a rating of A means excellent, while a rating of F means very bad, or that your application is not doing well at all. The ratings are from A to F. I also like that Stackify helps you in terms of load management because the solution gives you information on overutilized resources. These are the most valuable features of the solution."
 

Cons

"For Security Onion, setting up and configuring the system can be quite challenging for newcomers due to the need for a grasp of networking and security concepts."
"The product is not easy to learn."
"Security Onion's user interface could be improved."
"The initial setup of the solution is a little bit difficult."
"The search feature could be improved."
"I would like to be able to see metrics about individual running containers on the host machines."
"I've not used Stackify for a while, and I'm currently using a solution now that's not as good as Stackify. Among the solutions I've been using so far, Stackify has been one of the best for me, but there's always room for improvement. For example, I don't know if it's just me, but when I try to get the log from Stackify, sometimes it doesn't appear in real-time. It takes a few minutes before the logs appear. When I redeploy my solution and the application starts, I don't see the logs immediately, and it would take two to three minutes before I see the logs. I don't know if other customers have a similar experience. It's the wait time for the logs to appear that's a concern for me, could be improved, and is what the Stackify team should be looking into. In terms of any additional feature that I'd like added to the solution, I'm not sure if Stackify has a way to export logs out. I've been trying to do it. On the solution, you can click on a spiral-like icon and it shows you the entire error, and I'd prefer an export button that would let me download the error and save that into a text file, for example, so it'll be available on my local machine for me to reference it, especially because the log keeps going and as you're using the solution, the system keeps pushing messages on to Stackify, so if I'm looking at a particular error at 12:05 PM, for example, by the time I go back to my system and would like to revisit the error at 12:25 PM, on Stackify, the logs would have gone past that level and I won't see it again which makes it difficult. When you now go back to that timestamp, you don't tend to see it immediately, but if the solution had an export feature for me to save that particular error information on my local machine for reference at a later time, I won't have to go back to Stackify. I just go to that log, specifically to that particular export that I've received on my local machine. I can get it and review it, and it would be easier that way versus me going back to Stackify to find that particular error and request that particular information."
"Better mobile support."
"I'm looking to see more performance tools, but heard that they are going to release some."
"Another improvement would be the agent memory utilization, which led to our recent reevaluation."
"It should be easily scalable and configurable in different instances."
"One thing that happens as a new user on Stackify is when you install the agent it pulls everything and if you're not careful, your log allowance will just be exhausted as you are actually pulling too much data."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"Security Onion is a free solution."
"It is an open-source solution."
"Security Onion is an open-source solution."
"The price is variable. It depends on how much data we have received in that particular month. Usually, it goes up to $2,000, or, at times, $3,000 USD per month."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
University
12%
Comms Service Provider
11%
Government
10%
Computer Software Company
7%
Construction Company
21%
Comms Service Provider
13%
Media Company
9%
Outsourcing Company
7%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
No data available
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business3
Midsize Enterprise2
Large Enterprise2
 

Comparisons

 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Information Not Available
MyRacePass, ClearSale, Newitts, Carbonite, Boston Software, Children's International, Starkwood Media Group, Fewzion
Find out what your peers are saying about Security Onion vs. Stackify and other solutions. Updated: June 2026.
902,988 professionals have used our research since 2012.