SolarWinds Security Event Manager vs Splunk Enterprise Security comparison

SolarWinds Security Event Manager vs. Splunk Enterprise Security

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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

SolarWinds Security Event M...

Ranking in Security Information and Event Management (SIEM)

21st

Average Rating

7.8

Reviews Sentiment

6.7

Number of Reviews

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

7.6

Number of Reviews

306

Ranking in other categories

Log Management (2nd), IT Operations Analytics (1st)

Mindshare comparison

As of May 2025, in the Security Information and Event Management (SIEM) category, the mindshare of SolarWinds Security Event Manager is 0.6%, down from 0.7% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Splunk Enterprise Security is 9.5%, down from 12.6% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.

Security Information and Event Management (SIEM)

Featured Reviews

Alex Kinyanjui

Enterprise Cloud Infrastructure Engineer at Safaricom

A stable and scalable solution that provide 24/7 monitoring

We have to protect customer data, including any PII, accessed via the internet terminal. Additionally, we need to monitor events from network devices and servers that may raise suspicion, allowing us to analyze them and determine what is occurring. SolarWinds affected your overall security costs. Considering the nature of our traffic, it has been very effective. We have proactively identified and addressed issues before they escalate into incidents. I've noticed a reduced investment in handling event-related cases with SolarWinds Security Event Manager. This reduction includes reducing human resources and the time required for teams to provide 24/7 monitoring. Consequently, there has been a significant decrease in costs. Additionally, the platform enables us to address issues before they escalate into incidents, thus preventing revenue leakage. As a result, the organization experiences reduced costs and avoids revenue leakage. Since the SolarWinds Security Event Manager implementation, the total budget allocated to security has been reduced by close to five percent. Initially, there was a heavy investment in that aspect, but we have observed this reduction in the allocated budget for the security team. Since implementing SolarWinds Security Event Manager, the team members' pressure has been reduced. They can now concentrate on more critical tasks and development, promoting growth within their department rather than solely focusing on incident monitoring. I recommend the solution. Overall, I rate the solution an eight out of ten.

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ROBERT-CHRISTIAN

CTO at kyndryl

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.

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Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"We had to integrate with other teams, and the infrastructure deployment didn't take long. The integration involves learning with different teams, networking, and configuring various network devices and servers. Infrastructure deployment only took one or two days."

"The solution helps me to go back in time and search for different events. For example, if you wanted to know who activated an account; you could go back in time and find out."

"Some of the rules are most valuable because you can be notified about various things, such as spyware or things that are going on in the internal network."

"We did previously use a different solution, but SolarWinds is much better. It's easy to interact with SolarWinds. It's easy to operate, easy to configure and is generally easier compared to what we were working with before."

"The out of the box reports and dashboard. It was easy to trim down these windows to something we could quickly use."

"SolarWinds' stability is fine. I don't think we've had any software issues."

"It's extremely easy to deploy."

"The most valuable feature of this solution is the visibility into both attempted and failed logins."

More SolarWinds Security Event Manager pros

"Splunk's strength lies in its single-page view."

"It provides a risk score for each object, device, or user. We can then take action if they are at a higher risk."

"Splunk UBA is useful for fraud detection and for detection of APTs, advanced persistent threats."

"The product has a good security posture."

"Overall, I would rate it a nine out of ten."

"The breadth of the data sources that Splunk can ingest data from is broad and deep and it does an exemplary job at handling structured data."

"The connections to the database are very good and updating the data files is simple to do. The dashboards are useful and user-friendly."

"You can check up on security from the dashboards."

More Splunk Enterprise Security pros

Cons

"We have automated threat detection in the Alliance Security, Antoinette. However, if these features could be further enhanced, it would simplify my work, potentially allowing me to allocate more time to address complex issues."

"SolarWinds should improve its correlation capabilities. The correlation does not automatically detect and reduce the events fast enough. You have to manually do a correlation report, which means the tool is not scalable in many ways."

"One of the drawbacks of being so flexible is that it is also a fairly complicated software application to install, configure, and maintain."

"It is a very technical program. They can simplify it so that it isn't so hard to deal with."

"The solution's technical support is okay, but we don't have an SLA, and sometimes the response times are very slow."

"We'd like more customization capabilities."

"I don't think SolarWinds is scalable enough. It is somewhat limited when I need to deploy it across multiple environments in a distributed architecture."

"The company had to use a third party for the implementation of the solution."

More SolarWinds Security Event Manager cons

"Its pricing model and integration with third-party services can be improved. We had faced an issue with integration. The alerting feature is currently not available with Splunk, but it is definitely available with Datadog and PagerDuty. They should include this feature. A few dashboards in Splunk look quite old and are not that modern. They aren't bad, but improving these dashboards will definitely make Splunk more attractive and usable. I read in a few blog posts that there were a few security incidents related to Splunk agents. So, it can be made more secure."

"It's costly."

"Delays in responses from the technical team can pose challenges for both vendors and clients, especially considering that Splunk applications and machine solutions are critical assets."

"Licensing costs can be a barrier for those with limited budgets."

"The UI could be better. This is applicable to Splunk in general. I know that a lot of people who get their hands on Splunk are hesitant to use it just because they find it overwhelming. There are a lot of options."

"One issue is that we are getting a lot of false positives. We are trying to reduce them by customizing the default rules, changing thresholds, and using white-listing and black-listing. It's getting better and better as a result. But they need to build components that would reduce the false positives."

"It is a hugely complicated product."

"DMC should be a little more intuitive with better dashboarding. Seeing the cause of data flow can be tough to track down."

More Splunk Enterprise Security cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The tool is available at a good price for customers compared to other solutions in the market. I rate the product's price as an eight out of ten."

"Licenses can only be purchased in blocks of fifty at a time."

"Licensing is on devices, so if you have many, then this may be high."

"The pricing model would benefit from having package deals with other SolarWinds products."

"We do a yearly license renewal. For a year, the solution costs roughly $500,000 USD. There are no costs beyond this yearly fee."

"It is in the appropriate mid-range. It is not as expensive as some of the other solutions. It is also not cheap."

"The price of SolarWinds Security Event Manager is reasonable."

"Splunk Enterprise Security is an expensive solution."

"Splunk is not a cheap solution and the license is billed annually."

"Splunk is really expensive compared to all the other tools on the market, including Microsoft Sentinel."

"The pricing model is based on the number of gigabytes that you ingest into the Splunk system. So it can be an expensive solution."

"From what I have seen so far, Splunk has multiple cost models. The one that we are using is pretty good when it comes to ingesting data into the environment. It has worked out pretty well."

"The pricing is very complicated, and it is very pricey. You do require a lot of different licenses in order to get a comprehensive solution that is not just the SIEM solution."

"The pricing and licensing of the product are quite high."

"As a team, we prefer the old pricing model with a perpetual license. We are still evaluating the whole subscription-based model."

More Splunk Enterprise Security pricing and cost advice

See which vendors are best for you

Use our free recommendation engine to learn which Security Information and Event Management (SIEM) solutions are best for your needs.

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Comparison Review

Vinod Shankar

Manager, Enterprise Risk Consulting at Deloitte & Touche

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…

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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Educational Organization

74%

Computer Software Company

Financial Services Firm

University

Financial Services Firm

15%

Computer Software Company

14%

Manufacturing Company

Government

Company Size

By reviewers

Large Enterprise

Midsize Enterprise

Small Business

Questions from the Community

What do you like most about SolarWinds Security Event Manager ?

The solution helps you monitor database instances, application instances, other customer application things, Linux servers, IBM servers, and Oracle servers.

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for SolarWinds Security Event Manager ?

The tool is available at a good price for customers compared to other solutions in the market. I rate the product's price as an eight out of ten.

What needs improvement with SolarWinds Security Event Manager ?

I think the customization area in the tool can be considered as an area of concern where improvements are required In the future, I want to see the tool have better customization abilities with som...

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...

Wazuh vs SolarWinds Security Event Manager

Comparisons

Compared 34% of the time

IBM Security QRadar vs SolarWinds Security Event Manager

Compared 11% of the time

Microsoft Sentinel vs SolarWinds Security Event Manager

Compared 9% of the time

LogRhythm SIEM vs SolarWinds Security Event Manager

Compared 8% of the time

ManageEngine Log360 vs SolarWinds Security Event Manager

Compared 8% of the time

More SolarWinds Security Event Manager Competitors

Wazuh vs Splunk Enterprise Security

Compared 9% of the time

IBM Security QRadar vs Splunk Enterprise Security

Compared 8% of the time

Dynatrace vs Splunk Enterprise Security

Compared 8% of the time

Datadog vs Splunk Enterprise Security

Compared 5% of the time

Security Onion vs Splunk Enterprise Security

Compared 4% of the time

More Splunk Enterprise Security Competitors

Product Reports

SolarWinds Security Event Manager

Download SolarWinds Security Event Manager product report

SolarWinds Security Event Manager report

Splunk Enterprise Security

Download Splunk Enterprise Security product report

Also Known As

SolarWinds LEM, Solarwinds SIEM, TriGeo, Log and Event Manager

No data available

Overview

When TriGeo was acquired by SolarWinds, TriGeo SIM became known as SolarWinds Log & Event Manager. This product is a leading Security Information and Event Management (SIEM) product and log management solution, which provides log collection, analysis, and real-time correlation.

SolarWinds

Splunk Enterprise Security is widely used for security operations, including threat detection, incident response, and log monitoring. It centralizes log management, offers security analytics, and ensures compliance, enhancing the overall security posture of organizations.

Companies leverage Splunk Enterprise Security to monitor endpoints, networks, and users, detecting anomalies, brute force attacks, and unauthorized access. They use it for fraud detection, machine learning, and real-time alerts within their SOCs. The platform enhances visibility and correlates data from multiple sources to identify security threats efficiently. Key features include comprehensive dashboards, excellent reporting capabilities, robust log aggregation, and flexible data ingestion. Users appreciate its SIEM capabilities, threat intelligence, risk-based alerting, and correlation searches. Highly scalable and stable, it suits multi-cloud environments, reducing alert volumes and speeding up investigations.

What are the key features?

Comprehensive Dashboards: Provide a holistic view of security operations.
Flexible Data Ingestion: Supports various data sources for better analysis.
Robust Log Aggregation: Centralizes log management for easier monitoring.
Machine Learning Toolkit: Enhances threat detection and prediction capabilities.
SIEM Capabilities: Integrates security information and event management.
Threat Intelligence: Utilizes external information to improve security measures.
Risk-Based Alerting: Prioritizes alerts based on the risk they pose.
Correlation Searches: Identifies and correlates security events effectively.

What benefits or ROI should users look for?

Enhanced Visibility: Improves monitoring across endpoints, networks, and users.
Faster Incident Response: Speeds up identification and resolution of security issues.
Reduced Alert Volumes: Lowers false positives and enhances signal-to-noise ratio.
Scalability: Adapts to growing and changing security needs.
Improved Security Operations: Integrates multiple security facets into one platform.

Splunk Enterprise Security is implemented across industries like finance, healthcare, and retail. Financial institutions use it for fraud detection and compliance, while healthcare organizations leverage its capabilities to safeguard patient data. Retailers deploy it to protect customer information and ensure secure transactions.

Splunk

Sample Customers

NetSuite, EasyStreet, Legacy Texas Bank, and Energy Federal Credit Union, to name a few.

Splunk has more than 7,000 customers spread across over 90 countries. These customers include Telenor, UniCredit, ideeli, McKenney's, Tesco, and SurveyMonkey.

SolarWinds Security Event Manager vs. Splunk Enterprise Security