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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

"The real-time search capability of this product enhances operational decision-making, and it's very convincing."
"Index manager is most valuable because we do not have to bother about internal storage. It is all managed by the Splunk team."
"Not having to maintain any infrastructure is valuable. That frees up a lot of time as well."
"The most valuable feature of Splunk Cloud Platform is its robustness and ability to ingest logs."
"he cloud performance is good."
"Splunk Cloud's most valuable features are log aggregations, dashboarding, business management, reporting, and business controls. Additionally, it has awesome indexing and the solution is always improving"
"The most valuable feature is we don't have to deal with any back-end server maintenance because the solution is cloud-based."
"It is a stable product."
"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."
"I would have to rate Splunk Security Essentials a 10 out of 10 because it's free and there's tons of usable content."
"They have a good catalog of plans to use to resist the attacks."
 

Cons

"Some of the implementation is challenging. They're not very proxy-aware."
"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."
"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."
"Although there is documentation available, it is really hard for me to find relevant topics on what it is that I'm searching for."
"The only disadvantage of Splunk Cloud compared to Splunk Enterprise Security is that you only have two options for long-term storage: AWS S3 Buckets and GCP."
"The pricing model makes the product costly."
"Its stability and performance can be better. Very rarely does a day go by when we do not see an error in the console, such as a health check error. Because it is cloud-hosted, we do not have access to the backend to figure it out ourselves. We are reliant on their support to figure it out, and a couple of days later, the error comes back or it is a different error. It is a never-ending cycle of support tickets. Their support is also not great."
"Splunk currently manages the components, which restricts our ability to access them directly."
"They could add more AI content or AI and machine learning."
"The price could be improved."
"The reporting feature needs to be more user-friendly."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"Splunk Cloud Platform is more expensive than some of its competitors, but it offers a wider range of features."
"It is not that expensive."
"Splunk Cloud Platform's pricing is a little on the higher end."
"There are additional features that you would need to purchase depending on your use case."
"Currently, we have the ingest-based license. They are offering SVC-based licenses as well, but I am not a fan of SVC-based licensing. At the end of the day, I want to predict my budget and how much I am going to pay to the vendor so that I can plan my yearly budget."
"The price is something that people complain about."
"The pricing was negotiated through Trustwave and for our first contract in three years, we got a good deal."
"I do not have much idea. We previously used 1 GB at the cost of $600. Both on-prem and cloud licenses have the same price. There is no difference. It did not impact the cost because the costs of the on-prem license and the cloud license are the same. We did not have any issues with that. Overall, its price is reasonable."
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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