Software Alternatives, Accelerators & Startups

Splunk VS Elastic Stack

Compare Splunk VS Elastic Stack and see what are their differences

Splunk logo Splunk

Splunk's operational intelligence platform helps unearth intelligent insights from machine data.

Elastic Stack logo Elastic Stack

Meet the search platform that helps you search, solve, and succeed
  • Splunk Landing page
    Landing page //
    2023-10-20
  • Elastic Stack Landing page
    Landing page //
    2024-04-20

Splunk features and specs

  • Powerful Data Analysis
    Splunk provides robust data indexing and search capabilities, allowing users to analyze large volumes of log data with high flexibility and efficiency.
  • Real-Time Processing
    Splunk enables real-time monitoring and analysis of data, which helps in immediate detection of anomalies and operational issues.
  • Scalability
    Splunk can efficiently scale to handle large amounts of data from various sources, making it suitable for both small businesses and large enterprises.
  • Wide Range of Integrations
    Splunk offers extensive integration options with numerous third-party applications and services, enhancing its functionalities and utility.
  • User-Friendly Interface
    Splunk comes with a highly intuitive and user-friendly interface, which makes it easier for users to navigate and leverage its features without extensive training.
  • Advanced Security Features
    Splunk includes comprehensive security features such as access controls, data encryption, and auditing capabilities to ensure data protection and compliance.

Possible disadvantages of Splunk

  • High Cost
    Splunk is considered expensive compared to other data analytics tools, which can be a significant constraint for smaller organizations or those with limited budgets.
  • Complex Licensing
    The licensing model for Splunk can be complex and confusing, often leading to issues in predicting costs and understanding the full extent of required licensing.
  • Steep Learning Curve
    Despite its user-friendly interface, there is a steep learning curve associated with mastering Splunk’s advanced features and query language, which can be challenging for new users.
  • Resource Intensive
    Splunk can be resource-intensive, requiring substantial computational power and storage, which might necessitate additional hardware investments.
  • Custom App Development
    Building custom apps and dashboards in Splunk may require specialized knowledge of its proprietary language, which can limit customization for users without technical expertise.

Elastic Stack features and specs

  • Scalability
    Elastic Stack is designed to scale horizontally, enabling you to add more nodes to handle increased loads and data sizes seamlessly.
  • Real-Time Data Processing
    Provides capabilities for real-time data ingestion and processing, making it suitable for use cases like monitoring and logging where timely insights are critical.
  • Powerful Search and Analytics
    Offers powerful full-text search capabilities through Elasticsearch, along with data visualization tools via Kibana for insightful analytics.
  • Flexible Data Ingestion
    Supports various data ingestion methods and sources including Logstash, Beats, and direct API calls, allowing for flexible data integrations.
  • Open Source and Mature Ecosystem
    Being open-source, Elastic Stack benefits from a large community, robust documentation, and a mature ecosystem of plugins and integrations.

Possible disadvantages of Elastic Stack

  • Complexity in Setup and Management
    Setting up and managing an Elastic Stack cluster can be complex and may require significant expertise, especially with larger deployments.
  • Resource Intensive
    Elastic Stack can be resource-intensive in terms of CPU, memory, and storage, which may necessitate substantial infrastructure investments.
  • Security Considerations
    While Elastic Stack includes security features, properly securing a deployment involves additional configuration and possibly extra licensing costs.
  • Cost for Paid Features
    Certain advanced features, such as machine learning, are part of the paid Elastic subscriptions, which can add to costs for enterprise users.
  • Steep Learning Curve
    Mastering the Elastic Stack's wide range of functionalities and configurations can be challenging, especially for new users without prior experience.

Splunk videos

"Splunk Product Overview"

More videos:

  • Tutorial - Splunk in 60 Minutes | Splunk Tutorial For Beginners | Splunk Training | Splunk Tutorial | Edureka
  • Demo - Splunk Incident Review Demo

Elastic Stack videos

No Elastic Stack videos yet. You could help us improve this page by suggesting one.

Add video

Category Popularity

0-100% (relative to Splunk and Elastic Stack)
Monitoring Tools
96 96%
4% 4
Office & Productivity
0 0%
100% 100
Log Management
100 100%
0% 0
File Management
0 0%
100% 100

User comments

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Reviews

These are some of the external sources and on-site user reviews we've used to compare Splunk and Elastic Stack

Splunk Reviews

The 10 Best Nagios Alternatives in 2024 (Paid and Open-source)
What sets Splunk apart, likely contributing to its premium price, is its expansive network. With over 2,200 partners spanning various industries, Splunk ensures users can fully leverage the platform. Additionally, boasting a community of over 18,000 active members and 1,800 Splunk experts, users have access to support for problem-solving, architecture, deployment, and...
Source: betterstack.com
Top 10 Grafana Alternatives in 2024
Splunk’s security and data monitoring features make it a potent alternative to Grafana. The platform helps collect and store extensive data from multiple platforms like databases, messaging systems, and network devices.
Source: middleware.io
Top 11 Grafana Alternatives & Competitors [2024]
Splunk's strengths lie in its adeptness at handling large-scale data ingestion and robust analytics capabilities. This makes it invaluable for organizations with complex data monitoring needs, particularly in enterprise security and observability.
Source: signoz.io
10 Best Grafana Alternatives [2023 Comparison]
Splunk is a well-known log management solution that’s been around forever. It offers a variety of observability solutions, making it an ideal Grafana alternative in terms of functionality. Splunk offers users Log Management, Synthetic monitoring, Infrastructure Monitoring, APM, Security Monitoring, and more.
Source: sematext.com
Top 11 Best SIEM Tools in 2022 For Real-Time Incident Response and Security
Splunk provides improved security operations like customizable dashboards, asset investigator, statistical analysis, and incident review, classification, and investigation. It has features of alerts management, risk scores, etc. It provides security services to the public sectors, financial services, and healthcare.

Elastic Stack Reviews

10 Best Grafana Alternatives [2023 Comparison]
The appeal to Elastic Stack is that it doesn’t cost anything to download and use. Of course, like any open-source solution, there will be additional management costs. That being said, once it’s installed, you will gain instant access to all the tools listed above. Using these tools, you can ship data from multiple sources, process it, and then subsequently store it in a...
Source: sematext.com
10 Best Linux Monitoring Tools and Software to Improve Server Performance [2022 Comparison]
Lastly, the Elastic Stack (ELK Stack) is a well-known tool for Linux performance monitoring. It’s composed of Elasticsearch (full-text search), Logstash (a log aggregator), Kibana (visualization via graphs and charts), and Beats (lightweight metrics collectors and shippers).
Source: sematext.com

Social recommendations and mentions

Based on our record, Splunk seems to be more popular. It has been mentiond 19 times since March 2021. We are tracking product recommendations and mentions on various public social media platforms and blogs. They can help you identify which product is more popular and what people think of it.

Splunk mentions (19)

  • Ask HN: Who is hiring? (April 2025)
    Splunk (A Cisco Company) [https://splunk.com] | Principal Software Engineer, Backend | Remote (Vancouver / Toronto, Canada) Splunk is here to build a safer and more resilient digital world. The world's leading enterprises use our unified security and observability platform to keep their digital systems secure and reliable. The role I'm hiring for is to lead the effort for a new API that will power Splunk's new... - Source: Hacker News / about 1 month ago
  • Can I install apps on Free 60 day Enterprise?
    I'm using the free 60day Enterprise license and tried to install different apps from the "Browse more apps" menu in Splunk Enterprise, but it doesn't accept my credentials when I try to log in. I tried my username and password from splunk.com(which I'm sure it works, because I tried it straight away on the official website). Also I tried using my username and password with which I'm accessing Splunk Enterprise,... Source: over 1 year ago
  • Can someone explain this before I go a little crazy? xD
    I'm noticing a questionable trend in Splunk question/answer structure for these free courses on splunk.com So I go to an exam dump to try and compare to something I have studied thus far. (Prepping for entry level 1002). Source: over 1 year ago
  • Where exactly can I start to learn?
    With your splunk.com username, you can login to Splunk trainings portals as well https://www.splunk.com/en_us/training.html .. There are lots of free trainings available. Enroll yourself, complete them, you will gain more confidence. Source: almost 2 years ago
  • VAST 3.0 released. Open-Source Security Data Pipelines with Kusto-like syntax
    VAST is an open-source SecDataOps project for working with data from open-source security tools. Version 3.0 adds a pipeline syntax similar to splunk, Kusto, PRQL, and Zed. Source: about 2 years ago
View more

Elastic Stack mentions (0)

We have not tracked any mentions of Elastic Stack yet. Tracking of Elastic Stack recommendations started around Apr 2024.

What are some alternatives?

When comparing Splunk and Elastic Stack, you can also consider the following products

Datadog - See metrics from all of your apps, tools & services in one place with Datadog's cloud monitoring as a service solution. Try it for free.

ElasticHQ - Tool for ElasticSearch management and monitoring.

NewRelic - New Relic is a Software Analytics company that makes sense of billions of metrics across millions of apps. We help the people who build modern software understand the stories their data is trying to tell them.

LogFusion - Log fusion is a software that helps you to display and monitor your log files in real-time by relying on this lightweight application that features a massive range of useful function.

Grafana - Data visualization & Monitoring with support for Graphite, InfluxDB, Prometheus, Elasticsearch and many more databases

Xapian - Xapian is an open source probabilistic information retrieval library, released under the GNU...