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Splunk Cloud Platform vs Splunk Security Essentials comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Jan 1, 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

Splunk Cloud Platform
Ranking in Data Visualization
3rd
Ranking in IT Alerting and Incident Management
2nd
Average Rating
8.2
Reviews Sentiment
6.0
Number of Reviews
58
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
Splunk Security Essentials
Ranking in Data Visualization
16th
Ranking in IT Alerting and Incident Management
14th
Average Rating
8.6
Reviews Sentiment
5.9
Number of Reviews
4
Ranking in other categories
Security Incident Response (11th)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of January 2026, in the Data Visualization category, the mindshare of Splunk Cloud Platform is 1.0%, up from 0.4% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Splunk Security Essentials is 0.8%, up from 0.1% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Data Visualization Market Share Distribution
ProductMarket Share (%)
Splunk Cloud Platform1.0%
Splunk Security Essentials0.8%
Other98.2%
Data Visualization
 

Featured Reviews

JA
Sr Manager at Continued
Needs better cybersecurity features but offers robust log ingestion
Splunk Cloud Platform needs improvement in its security offerings, specifically in cybersecurity. It has not kept pace with competitors over recent years, and integration with the Cisco ecosystem after Cisco's acquisition of Splunk has also been slow. The product should incorporate more readily available features, especially in security monitoring. The federated search feature is costly. Extracting meaningful insights beyond essential log data proves challenging due to the product's reliance on manual processes. Users must manually configure detections, develop logic for insights, and manage dashboards. While the product boasts numerous out-of-the-box capabilities, these often require extensive modification to align with specific user needs, limiting their practical applicability. Splunk Cloud Platform doesn't inherently provide visibility as a standalone product. It's a platform for building custom visibility solutions. We need to feed it data and then write logic to define what insights we want to extract. While pre-built solutions might be available in the marketplace, Splunk doesn't offer out-of-the-box visibility. If we know our requirements, we can utilize code and research to create custom dashboards, but it requires effort and expertise. The pre-built reports in Splunk Cloud Platform are generic and require manual adjustments to extract specific, granular information, which requires the user to be knowledgeable.
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 is a stable product."
"Splunk Cloud has helped us to be able to focus on getting more information out of our data."
"The most valuable feature of Splunk Cloud Platform is the ability to correlate events together and combine the data into one event."
"The ability to correlate data and then present it in a meaningful and valuable way is crucial."
"It has definitely improved our organization by virtue of reducing the amount of overhead we would have had for those environments. Having to implement, maintain, or even update the existing stuff would have been extremely time-consuming. Splunk Cloud handles all of that for us. So it's definitely been helpful from that perspective. It's allowed them to maintain upgrades for far further than they are. Some of the hosts of that environment were still on version 7 so they could get upgraded feature parity."
"We use Splunk Cloud primarily as a troubleshooting tool, so the most valuable features are the analysis and visualization."
"Its interconnectivity with the cloud platforms, such as Azure and AWS, was valuable."
"Everything is maintained by the Splunk support team. Users do not have to maintain any physical servers. They do not have to maintain indexes and searches. It reduces a lot of work on the user side."
"I would have to rate Splunk Security Essentials a 10 out of 10 because it's free and there's tons of usable content."
"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."
"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."
 

Cons

"Support could be improved."
"Support is the bigger issue when we have a problem. When we need their help, it takes weeks or months to actually get resolved."
"I would love to be able to manage my own apps."
"The only thing I would say is an issue is the cost. It matches other products. The costs can be justified for the value that we gain. The entire threat analysis stack should come in a bundle. If the cost was matchable with other products I think Splunk would pick up in the market."
"They need to provide more training options."
"There are a lot of functionalities that are missing for Splunk Cloud hosted on GCP but they are available on AWS. Adding more IPs to allow lists and many other functionalities are not supported on Splunk Cloud hosted on GCP. One good example is the ingest action which is not there in Splunk Cloud hosted on GCP. I wish they would add these missing features to the GCP platform."
"The expensive nature of the product is an area of concern that needs to be considered for improvement."
"The security connection should have a seamless integration. Other than that, the way we are using it, so far, it seems quite good."
"The reporting feature needs to be more user-friendly."
"They could add more AI content or AI and machine learning."
"The price could be improved."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"It is not that expensive."
"Splunk Cloud Platform's pricing is a little on the higher end."
"The price for Splunk Cloud Platform is the same as our maintenance costs for Splunk Enterprise on-premises."
"Splunk is a bit more expensive than some solutions, but customers can derive more value from it due to the features it has."
"The cost of using Splunk Cloud Platform is high, but the value it provides is worth the investment."
"It was a good model."
"The licensing is based on the amount of data that we send to the cloud on a daily basis."
"Splunk Cloud Platform is more expensive than some of its competitors, but it offers a wider range of features."
Information not available
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Computer Software Company
18%
Financial Services Firm
12%
Manufacturing Company
9%
Comms Service Provider
5%
No data available
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business11
Midsize Enterprise6
Large Enterprise42
No data available
 

Questions from the Community

What do you like most about Splunk Cloud Platform?
Splunk has sped up our response and reduced the time we spend manually monitoring any logs for ticketing tools or servers. It saves us around two hours daily.
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Splunk Cloud Platform?
If I were to rate the price for the product from 1 to 10, I would rate it nine.
What needs improvement with Splunk Cloud Platform?
The disadvantage of Splunk Cloud Platform is that its integration process should be improved. The challenges I have encountered while integrating Splunk Cloud Platform include that integration is a...
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

Mindtouch
Information Not Available
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