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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
2nd
Ranking in IT Alerting and Incident Management
3rd
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
19th
Ranking in IT Alerting and Incident Management
15th
Average Rating
8.6
Reviews Sentiment
8.3
Number of Reviews
3
Ranking in other categories
Security Incident Response (11th)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of June 2025, in the Data Visualization category, the mindshare of Splunk Cloud Platform is 0.9%, up from 0.4% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Splunk Security Essentials is 0.1%, up from 0.1% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Data Visualization
 

Featured Reviews

Ian Gatundu - PeerSpot reviewer
It improves our visibility and decision-making while helping us meet compliance standards
The Cloud Platform interface is cleaner than Splunk Enterprise's monitoring console. You can easily understand what's happening with your indexes. It's more refined than Splunk Enterprise's console, but they have the same feel and function. It's easy to monitor multiple cloud environments because you can create custom dashboards for any use case you may have. It offers good visibility because it integrates with the ITSI app, providing a clear overview of your environment. Integrating Splunk with other components on the cloud and network resources is effortless because it can collect data from various sources, including stored data from long-term storage. Splunk's reporting offers a good visualization of your data. You can visualize the statistics based on your searches. It produces some helpful graphs that enable you to easily compare what's happening in your search. It's very comprehensive.
Srinivas Prudhivi Reddy - PeerSpot reviewer
Enables us to examine the parameters of the events found and take appropriate actions as necessary
Once we've configured our logs, for example, if we need to monitor processes and IP addresses, we ensure these logs are being ingested into our Splunk instance. The logs gathered from various endpoints are then consolidated into our Splunk platform. Once the data is collected, we can create searches and dashboards to analyze it. With these searches and dashboards, we gain insights into events and can make informed decisions based on them. We'll examine the parameters of these events and take appropriate actions as necessary.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"Not having to maintain any infrastructure is valuable. That frees up a lot of time as well."
"The cloud is very fast."
"Its monitoring is completely automated."
"The most valuable feature of Splunk Cloud Platform is its robustness and ability to ingest logs."
"I have done health checks several times now, and those have been very valuable in getting more information about what is going on in my platform. There are also recommendations on what is going on in my environment."
"Splunk Cloud has helped us to be able to focus on getting more information out of our data."
"The product's deployment phase was easy."
"Splunk Cloud Platform's most valuable features are enterprise security and ticketing integration."
"I would have to rate Splunk Security Essentials a 10 out of 10 because it's free and there's tons of usable content."
"The network monitoring feature is particularly valuable for gathering information about users, login times, and other statistics."
"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."
 

Cons

"First-time users may struggle with the user interface. When I first used Splunk, I entered my username and password. After that, we get a dashboard on the left side with apps. At the top, you can click the gear icon to view the settings. Within those settings, there's a distributed console option with several settings. It's a bit overwhelming for a beginner. The user knows what they want and can search for it in the search bar. If I see several apps, my first instinct is to scroll down to find the app, or perhaps you will find that search and report. That bugged me when I was learning."
"I want to have the ability to process the ingestion before it is sent to the back end and Splunk just announced that the feature is coming, so now it just needs to be released."
"The Splunk interface is on-premises, so we have limited access to Splunk Cloud. Splunk support is not so good on Splunk Cloud. The Splunk side of the Splunk Cloud should also be more customizable. Integrating Splunk UBA, Splunk Phantom, and Splunk Cloud is also a bit difficult."
"When it comes to the integrations with the other platforms, there is a little bit of a lag in the observability part, making it an area where improvements are required."
"Every time they launch new versions, we experience a few bugs. The most recent version had a couple of bugs in the databases. We contacted the vendor and got assistance solving these bugs, so the environment is more stable."
"Splunk Cloud Platform needs to be made more user-friendly because it's not user-friendly."
"The only thing that is missing from Splunk Cloud is the command-line interface."
"The expensive nature of the product is an area of concern that needs to be considered for improvement."
"The price could be improved."
"The reporting feature needs to be more user-friendly."
"They could add more AI content or AI and machine learning."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"Splunk Cloud Platform is more expensive than some of its competitors, but it offers a wider range of features."
"We were on ingest. We were on-prem, and when we switched to the cloud, we went to an SVC model, and that has been a huge help. We are now able to ingest more data than before."
"The pricing was negotiated through Trustwave and for our first contract in three years, we got a good deal."
"The pricing model makes this an expensive solution."
"Splunk Cloud Platform fell within our budget so we pulled the trigger and implemented it."
"Splunk Cloud Platform is an expensive solution."
"It is a touchy subject because we are locked into it. That goes back to the rehydrating data. We cannot have the retention that we want to store for legal and compliance purposes because that is seven years' worth of data for some of the indexes, so we ship them off into S3 buckets and install them there, at which point they are invisible to Splunk, so we have to rehydrate them, but we cannot rehydrate those pockets into Splunk Cloud. We have to rehydrate them into a self-hosted version of Splunk, which can take days to set up and get going. I would not call Splunk's licensing and pricing predatory, but they have made it very difficult to maintain the independence of your own data."
"I would rate the cost an eight out of ten, with ten being the most costly."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Computer Software Company
30%
Financial Services Firm
11%
Manufacturing Company
5%
University
5%
No data available
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
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 cannot say there is any room for improvement because it is free.They could add more AI content or AI and machine learning.
What is your primary use case for Splunk Security Essentials?
We use Splunk Security Essentials ( /products/splunk-security-essentials-reviews ) to create new Splunk searches, as it has many pre-canned searches for security detection.The advanced detection co...
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Mindtouch
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Find out what your peers are saying about Splunk Cloud Platform vs. Splunk Security Essentials and other solutions. Updated: May 2025.
859,129 professionals have used our research since 2012.