If you’re in the market for a security information and event management (SIEM) solution, both LogRhythm and Splunk have a lot to offer, with strong support from customers and industry analysts.
Both solutions appear in eSecurity Planet’s list of top SIEM products, and SIEM buyers often compare the two. What follows is a closer look at key features of each product, with an examination of their strengths and weaknesses.
Before we get into the details, here are a few key takeaways:
- Splunk has an advantage in cloud use cases and ease of use and deployment
- LogRhythm has the edge in security, on-premises use cases, and service and support
LogRhythm vs Splunk at a Glance
Here’s how LogRhythm and Splunk SIEM compare at a glance:
| Pricing | LogRhythm |
| Ease of Deployment | Splunk |
| Ease of Use | Splunk |
| Security | LogRhythm |
| Service and Support | LogRhythm |
| On-Premises Use Cases | LogRhythm |
| Best for Small Businesses | LogRhythm |
| Best for Cloud Use Cases | Splunk |
| Breadth of SIEM Features | LogRhythm |
Best for Pricing: LogRhythm
SIEM products are typically pricey, and that’s also true for LogRhythm and Splunk.
LogRhythm pricing typically starts around $30,000 to $40,000, with a variety of pricing options available such as perpetual or subscription software licenses, an unlimited data plan, and a high-performance plan. Users appreciate a general lack of add-on costs, but report that enterprise pricing can climb considerably.
Splunk offers a number of security options: Splunk Enterprise Security, SOAR, Security Essentials, and Mission Control. The company no longer publishes pricing, although AWS can provide some pricing data.
Splunk offers legacy ingest pricing in addition to entity pricing and workload pricing. Workload pricing is being positioned as the more value-oriented plan. Enterprise ingest rates had started at $150 a month for 1GB of data a day, with discounts per GB as volume increases; users have reported that the cost can rise quickly.
LogRhythm’s customer base is more weighted toward small and midsize businesses, while Splunk has a much greater enterprise business, so smaller companies could find LogRhythm more to their liking. LogRhythm users typically have a higher perception of value despite large upfront costs, but Splunk’s efforts to address cost complaints make them worth a close look.
Best for Deployment and Ease of Use: Splunk
Ease of use and deployment aren’t typically terms you’ll hear in reference to SIEM solutions, and both Splunk and LogRhythm have their challenges here.
SIEM user ratings tend to be lower than other security product areas because of the sheer complexity of the solutions. In Gartner Peer Insights reviews, both Splunk and LogRhythm are among the higher rated solutions. While they may boast similar general ratings — both have been scored at 4.4 by users over the last year — they each have their areas of strength. Splunk wins on application monitoring, analytics, log management, and reporting, whereas LogRhythm wins on real-time monitoring and threat intelligence.
Users like LogRhythm’s ability as an on-premises solution that heightens the perception of what is going on with security and potential threats.
Splunk gets high marks for its extensibility, cloud capabilities and customization options. Typical comments from Splunk reviewers mention the ability to view a wide range of logs and drill down into specific times or data sources, decreased troubleshooting time, scalability, instant access to log events, and solving problems across multiple platforms. Others, however, dislike the cost of training and certification as well as the pricing for logging a lot of application events.
Due to the size and complexity of Splunk, it isn’t for beginners. It requires a high level of skilled internal resources as well as vendor support to deploy and operate. Those very familiar with the platform will find it easy. Everyone else has a steep learning curve.
LogRhythm users frequently talk about correlating logs throughout different log sources, the excellence of the support team, being a good fit for small to medium-sized companies, and good network visibility. Problems that come up from users include difficulty in deployment and configuration as well as limited cloud options.
Splunk wins overall on deployment and ease of use, thanks in part to its cloud implementation. LogRhythm users note that good support can help with challenges, and they’re generally happy with the direction and evolution of the product.
Best for Security: LogRhythm
Both vendors offer strong security. LogRhythm’s SIEM solution combines enterprise log management, security analytics, user entity and behavioral analytics (UEBA), network traffic and behavioral analytics (NTBA), and security automation and orchestration.
The product is built on a machine analytics/data lake technology foundation that’s designed to scale easily, with an open platform that allows for integration with enterprise security and IT infrastructure. That integrated approach can make for efficient security operations, from threat detection to incident response.
Embedded modules, dashboards, and rules deliver threat monitoring, threat hunting, threat investigation, and incident response. Users can swiftly search across organizational data for answers, identify IT and security incidents, and troubleshoot issues. The LogRhythm platform uses machine learning to avoid endless alerts and to accurately detect malicious activity through security and compliance use case content and prioritization of threats. The goal is to spot anomalous user behavior before data is corrupted or exfiltrated and to detect and respond to threats faster.
LogRhythm has been steadily releasing expanded capabilities and integrations for its security operations solutions. Following the October 2022 launch of the LogRhythm Axon cloud-native security operations platform, the company has introduced new visualizations and analytics that offer greater visibility into potential security risks. Designed to streamline the experience of security analysts, Axon and these updates make it easier for teams to detect, investigate, and report on potential threats.
Other recent upgrades: LogRhythm Axon provides custom and out-of-the box analytics rules, including rules for MITRE ATT&CK detections; LogRhythm SIEM now comes with improved administrative workflow for collection, shorter time to configure, deploy, and manage log sources that require Open Collector, enhanced audit logging, and an expanded library of supported log sources; LogRhythm UEBA has new detection models for Windows systems; and LogRhythm NDR offers improved blind spot detection and endpoint visibility through integration with Microsoft EDR.
The Splunk platform is also broad. It encompasses searching, monitoring, and analyzing a vast amount of IT data to identify data patterns, provide metrics, diagnose problems, and aid in business and IT decision making.
To give an idea of the scope of Splunk, it takes in SIEM as well as application performance monitoring (APM), log management, compliance, automation, orchestration, forensics, and even IT service management (ITSM) and IT operations management (ITOM). Splunk’s wide range of products and features are aggregated within the overall Splunk platform, which has two elements that can be deployed separately—Enterprise Security (which includes SIEM) and Observability.
Splunk Enterprise Security can be used to analyze, ingest, and store data for later use as well as detect issues impacting customers and conduct real-time visualization and analysis. It provides a clear visual picture of an organization’s security posture, with the ability to customize views and drill down to raw events as needed. It’s useful for ongoing monitoring as well as for troubleshooting security incidents, helping to streamline the detection and investigation processes.
Splunk offers a dashboard, prebuilt reports, custom visualizations, and an adaptive response capability that leverages machine learning to determine whether the solution can handle a particular incident on its own or if it needs human assistance. About 2,500 apps and add-ons are available through the Splunkbase app store.
This one is close, but LogRhythm gets the nod, in part for its real-time monitoring and threat intelligence capabilities.
Best for Cloud Use Cases: Splunk
Splunk does not offer on-premises appliances. It does provide software for on-site deployment, but that requires integration with whatever hardware or appliances are preferred. In any case, most users deploy it in the cloud. It can be installed directly through the cloud onto a public, private, or hybrid cloud setting. Additionally, it does not come cheap. As more modules are added, pricing rises accordingly.
LogRhythm is primarily designed for on-premises deployments, although there are cloud options, and the company has been adding them steadily over time. LogRhythm’s SIEM can be purchased as an appliance or as software, and deployment can be done in on-premises, cloud, or hybrid environments. Third-party providers offer fully hosted and managed solutions as well. According to some users, deployment can sometimes require the assistance of consultants and calls to tech support.
Splunk wins in the cloud category due to its cloud origins and deployment options. It is available as a software that can be run on-premises, in infrastructure as a service (IaaS), and as a hybrid model as well as via the Splunk-hosted software-as-a-service (SaaS) solution Splunk Cloud. Initial deployment can be accomplished easily via the cloud.
While Splunk may win for cloud use cases, LogRhythm wins for on-premises deployments.
Top Splunk and LogRhythm SIEM Alternatives
Splunk and LogRhythm SIEM tools may not be for everyone, particularly the price-conscious. Exabeam, Trellix, Sumo Logic, and Securonix are worth looking at for ease of use and value, while IBM QRadar, NetWitness, Fortinet, and ArcSight are worthy competitors for security capabilities.
See our complete list of the Top SIEM Tools & Software
How We Evaluated Splunk and LogRhythm SIEM
For our analysis, we evaluated SIEM feature sets, product breadth, performance and security test data, vendor specs, pricing data from resellers, use cases, user reviews, analyst ratings, and overall vendor strength and vision. Real-world performance can, of course, differ from product and lab specs.
The Bottom Line: Splunk vs LogRhythm SIEM
Splunk and LogRhythm both offer very good SIEM solutions that can give any organization good centralized security management.
Their strengths differ, however. LogRhythm is a good choice for small and mid-sized companies in need of good on-premises, host and network monitoring capabilities, while the product’s breadth of features could find favor with larger organizations too.
Splunk wins for cloud use cases and ease of use and deployment — with the caveat that any SIEM system will require a learning curve.
In its most recent SIEM Magic Quadrant, Gartner noted that LogRhythm’s customer base indicates that it suits midsize enterprises and smaller organizations more than large organizations. The company boasts a strong team of resellers in every region as well as plenty of managed service providers. Gartner also gave LogRhythm high marks for “mature and refined investigation and case management capabilities that assemble context and enable users to create an evidence base for case disposition.”
Another plus is the LogRhythm Labs team, which analyzes emerging threats from all corners of the web and builds rules, dashboards, reports, and compliance modules to give your organization the upper hand.
Splunk offers a full suite of security event management solutions that allow users to grow into the platform over time. Splunk’s app store leverages the company’s massive partner ecosystem to provide a wide range of integration and Splunk-specific content. A big strength of Splunk and a key differentiator is its ability to integrate data streams from a huge number of sources. Some users ingest several petabytes (PB) per day. It supports a wide range of data formats like.xml, .csv and .json file.
Splunk does a fine job of analyzing the huge number of log files generated by enterprise systems. It eliminates the need for IT to spend hours trawling through all of the logs looking for that security or performance needle in the IT haystack. It also makes use of search processing language to find terms present in log files. A wealth of real-time visualization and analysis features are available.
Overall, either would make a fine SIEM platform for any organization. But as the scoring above shows, the choice depends on the organizational footprint, application mix, preference for cloud vs. on-premises, and other factors.
