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Splunk Security Essentials vs VMware Carbon Black Endpoint comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Jan 2, 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 Security Essentials
Ranking in Security Incident Response
10th
Average Rating
8.6
Reviews Sentiment
4.8
Number of Reviews
6
Ranking in other categories
Data Visualization (14th), IT Alerting and Incident Management (14th)
VMware Carbon Black Endpoint
Ranking in Security Incident Response
3rd
Average Rating
7.8
Reviews Sentiment
6.6
Number of Reviews
65
Ranking in other categories
Endpoint Protection Platform (EPP) (30th), Endpoint Detection and Response (EDR) (30th), Ransomware Protection (8th)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of August 2026, in the Security Incident Response category, the mindshare of Splunk Security Essentials is 2.7%, up from 2.0% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of VMware Carbon Black Endpoint is 6.8%, down from 7.6% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Security Incident Response Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
VMware Carbon Black Endpoint6.8%
Splunk Security Essentials2.7%
Other90.5%
Security Incident Response
 

Featured Reviews

reviewer2836941 - PeerSpot reviewer
Assistant Manager at a tech services company with 1-10 employees
Centralized monitoring has given our SOC real-time visibility into security and application activity
When I first implemented Splunk Security Essentials in this environment, it took a week for each log source to onboard and to create use cases and implement the data model, CIM, etc., for production readiness. Training is mandatory, and we need at least the Splunk Security Essentials User certification because it is a very critical resource in the organization, as we are handling security logs. In my organization, Splunk Security Essentials is used not only by the SOC but also for monitoring logs across different teams, as it is important for handling both security and application logs, given its capability to manage unstructured logs. Splunk Security Essentials has dramatically impacted my organization, as without it, we were blind to what is happening from both a security and application perspective, and it provides vital visibility into the organization's operations.
PM
CTO at Microsoft
Improved incident investigation has supported response while core protection still needs progress
VMware Carbon Black Endpoint does not have easy integration, as there are many complexities with the Ribitava API, which is very deep. I rate this solution overall as a five or six on a scale from one to ten. I have integrated VMware Carbon Black Endpoint with other tools that are helpful. I think this solution should be targeted at small clients, because adoption will grow more with small businesses tomorrow.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"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."
"The network monitoring feature is particularly valuable for gathering information about users, login times, and other statistics."
"Splunk Security Essentials has dramatically impacted my organization, as without it, we were blind to what is happening from both a security and application perspective, and it provides vital visibility into the organization's operations."
"Splunk Security Essentials has impacted my organization in that we have been getting the results that we wanted."
"The threat analysis functionality is good."
"The product is very smooth and pretty simple."
"The visibility provided has been great."
"VMware Carbon Black Endpoint is a highly stable solution."
"Some of the valuable features I have found are the online documentation of the solution is well organized and thorough. I like the simplicity of bypass and the visualization of the active components."
"What I like the most about it is the dynamic grouping, where you get to group endpoints based on setup criteria. That's pretty cool. I like the simplified policy management and simplified white-listing process."
"It has improved our protection to have less false-positives, we have a greater ability to find malware notifications, and it has improved between 30-35% more than prior to our use of the solution."
"The solution allows you to override it and manually install an application if you need it to, and it's very good at alerting you to malicious content or unauthorized software."
 

Cons

"The biggest friction points I have with Splunk Security Essentials are the high license costs and user behavior that causes performance issues due to inappropriate wildcard searches."
"The price could be improved."
"If I could change one thing about Splunk Security Essentials, it would be pricing. I believe they are still very costly as compared to the competition."
"They could add more AI content or AI and machine learning."
"It takes a lot of time to install Splunk Security Essentials. It's not very difficult, but it requires time."
"The reporting feature needs to be more user-friendly."
"Carbon Black has limited capability to integrate with Rapid7."
"A search bar in the investigation page and some AI-related tasks like outgoing alerts, or recent tactics that are being used in the market, must be embedded in the tool so that it's easier to find alerts."
"The product's stability could be improved."
"Stability is one thing that's not robust. Other products are faster, but as far as the CB Defense, it's slow."
"I haven't run into anything that needs improvement. The website interface can be a little bit better, but it's still good as compared to most others."
"What was rolled out to my company are mixed versions of Carbon Black CB Defense, so what I'd like to see in the next release is more synchronization, where it can detect the endpoint that's running an old version and suggest updates."
"The local technical support is very poor, but the support from headquarters is very nice."
"We did have a bug that was persistent for it's now going on two months and it hasn't been fixed."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

Information not available
"In terms of licensing costs, Carbon Black CB Defense was all associated with CROW and the services my company is using with them, so it came all-inclusive."
"The solution has almost the same price as other different kinds of infrastructures, but it offers a lot of different features."
"It's reasonable in price"
"The product is expensive. There are some additional costs apart from the standard licensing charges attached to the solution."
"Carbon Black might be a touch more expensive than Symantec. They tend to get a premium for their capabilities. They're sort of an industry leader in a lot of areas with the functionality that they provide."
"The product is quite reasonable."
"This is a really expensive product and we pay licensing fees on a yearly basis."
"CB Defense is available on a yearly subscription and is priced by the number of endpoints."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Construction Company
18%
Comms Service Provider
11%
Financial Services Firm
11%
Healthcare Company
8%
Financial Services Firm
9%
Construction Company
9%
Manufacturing Company
7%
Comms Service Provider
7%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
No data available
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business31
Midsize Enterprise9
Large Enterprise33
 

Questions from the Community

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?
The biggest friction points I have with Splunk Security Essentials are the high license costs and user behavior that causes performance issues due to inappropriate wildcard searches. Additionally, ...
What is your primary use case for Splunk Security Essentials?
My main use case for Splunk Security Essentials is for Enterprise Security, specifically the ES app. Splunk Security Essentials is my primary tool for threat detection and monitoring because as a S...
What to choose: an endpoint antivirus, an EDR solution or both?
I can recommend Carbon Black, an award-winning next-gen anti-virus (NGAV) and endpoint detection and response (EDR) security solution. The CB Predictive Security Cloud platform combines multiple hi...
What's the difference between Carbon Black CB Response and Carbon Black CB Defense?
Carbon Black offers two different levels of Endpoint Detection and Response. One is the VM Carbon Black Cloud Endpoint Standard (CB Defense), and the other is the Carbon Black Endpoint Detection an...
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Carbon Black CB Defense?
My rating for the pricing of VMware Carbon Black Endpoint is that it is not cheap, but it is also not as inexpensive as I would prefer.
 

Also Known As

No data available
Carbon Black CB Defense, Bit9, Confer
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Information Not Available
Netflix, Progress Residential, Indeed, Hologic, Gentle Giant, Samsung Research America
Find out what your peers are saying about Splunk Security Essentials vs. VMware Carbon Black Endpoint and other solutions. Updated: August 2026.
909,725 professionals have used our research since 2012.