We compared Splunk Enterprise Security and ArcSight ESM across several parameters based on our users' reviews. After reading the collected data, you can find our conclusion below:
Features: Splunk Enterprise Security stands out for its efficiency, extensive integration options, and powerful search functionality. Users say Splunk is a highly scalable and customizable solution. ArcSight ESM is praised for its well-designed dashboard, real-time reporting, and threat intelligence capabilities that leverage AI and correlation tools.
Room for Improvement: Splunk users recommended improvements in AI capabilities, user-friendliness, and analytics. ArcSight ESM users have recommended improvements in training, speed, and data administration.
Service and Support: While some users found Splunk support to be responsive and helpful, others reported slow response times and a lack of expertise. Some ArcSight ESM users have found the support to be responsive and helpful, while others have faced issues with slow response times and a lack of expertise.
Ease of Deployment: Some users thought Splunk Enterprise Security was easy to deploy, while others found it challenging and needed assistance from Splunk engineers or third-party integrators. Some said that ArcSight ESM is straightforward to set up, while others noted that integration with other systems can be challenging and requires specialized knowledge.
Pricing: Some users consider Splunk Enterprise Security to be expensive, but others said the price is reasonable. A few users expressed concerns about the cost of scaling up the solution and managing large volumes of data. Users consider the pricing of ArcSight ESM to be reasonable and affordable.
ROI: Users said that it’s challenging to calculate an ROI for Splunk Enterprise Security, and the return varies depending on individual circumstances. While some users have observed a substantial ROI, others have not actively explored or been engaged in ROI conversations. Splunk Enterprise Security offers varying ROI outcomes based on different situations, with certain users achieving significant returns. ArcSight ESM delivers an ROI by helping clients achieve compliance objectives and prevent incidents.
Comparison Results: Splunk is highly regarded for its efficient data processing and powerful search features, but users suggested improvements to its AI capabilities and analytics. ArcSight ESM offers robust threat intelligence and real-time reporting but falls short in terms of data administration and speed.
"Log aggregation and data connectors are the most valuable features."
"There are a lot of things you can explore as a user. You can even go and actively hunt for threats. You can go on the offensive rather than on the defensive."
"Sentinel is a SIEM and SOAR tool, so its automation is the best feature; we can reduce human interaction, freeing up our human resources."
"Sentinel has an intuitive, user-friendly way to visualize the data properly. It gives me a solid overview of all the logs. We get a more detailed view that I can't get from the other SIEM tools. It has some IP and URL-specific allow listing"
"The Log analytics are useful."
"The automation rules and playbooks are the most useful that I've seen. A number of other places segregate the automation and playbook as separate tools, whereas Microsoft is a SIEM and SOAR tool in one."
"The ability of all these solutions to work together natively is essential. We have an Azure subscription, including Log Analytics. This feature automatically acts as one of the security baselines and detects recommendations because it also integrates with Defender. We can pull the sysadmin logs from Azure. It's all seamless and native."
"The most valuable feature is the onboarding of the workloads. You can see all that has been onboarded in your account on the dashboards."
"The product is quite mature. It's been around for a long time."
"Very good real-time reporting with a good dashboard."
"The most important feature is ArcSight's event correlation capabilities. It's powerful and easy. I also like the flex connector capability. It's easy to develop a new connector that isn't fully supported out of the box. For example, say you created a solution internally that's completely different, and it's not unsupported by the solution. You can write your own connector using the flex connector."
"The most useful features are directories, price, and live reporting."
"The tool sends an automated mail to all the operators, which makes it easy to share the information and reporting."
"It gives better overall visibility. Before, we didn't have a unified system for managing security alerts. ArcSight introduced various alerts, giving us a better visibility of potential problems."
"Once the rules are defined, it becomes easy to detect changes and generate automated logs."
"The feature that I have found the most useful is that it can be deployed to the cloud."
"The most useful feature for me is the ability to create different kinds of alerts and set a different kind of denominator that will capture the real event. That is helpful for a power user like me."
"Splunk Enterprise Security comes with 300 pre-deployed use cases that can be easily customized to meet the specific needs of our organization, without the need to purchase additional tools."
"The most valuable feature of Splunk is the management and built-in workflows."
"This solution helps us increase our productivity."
"We can ingest and correlate data from virtually any type of system."
"Splunk UBA is useful for fraud detection and for detection of APTs, advanced persistent threats."
"The completeness of the solution is what we like the most."
"The correlation searches (properly configured) populate the Incident Management dashboard and provide me a quick birds-eye view of my most important concerns."
"Sentinel should be improved with more connectors. At the moment, it only covers a few vendors. If I remember correctly, only 100 products are supported natively in Sentinel, although you can connect them with syslog. But Microsoft should increase the number of native connectors to get logs into Sentinel."
"Multi-tenancy, in my opinion, needs to be improved. I believe it can do better as a managed service provider."
"In terms of features I would like to see in future releases, I'm interested in a few more use cases around automation. I do believe a lot of automation is available, and more is in progress, but that would be my area of interest."
"It would be good to have some connectors for third-party SIEM solutions. Many customers are struggling with the integration of Azure Sentinel with their on-premise SIEM. Microsoft is changing the log structure many times a year, which can corrupt a custom integration. It would be good to have some connectors developed by Microsoft or supply vendors, but they are not providing such functionality or tools."
"Currently, the watchlist feature is being utilized, and although there have been improvements, it is still not fully optimized."
"Sentinel still has some anomalies. For example, sometimes when we write a query for log analysis with KQL, it doesn't give us the data in a proper way... Also, the fields or columns could be improved. Sometimes, it is not giving the desired results and there is a blank field."
"We'd like to see more connectors."
"The dashboards can be improved. Creating dashboards is very easy, but the visualizations are not as good as Microsoft Power BI. People who are using Microsoft Power BI do not like Sentinel's dashboards."
"The dashboard looks a bit cumbersome."
"The product should include a lot more predefined scenarios so the adopted company will have knowledge and a broader skill set in security and network."
"The weakness in this system comes about because, with so many different logs, it is possible that the security analyst will lose information."
"The first limitation is with the ArcSight Data Storage Manager (ADSM). ArcSight's total capacity is currently capped at 12 TB. This becomes an issue if a customer needs a longer real-time data retention period, such as exceeding 90 days or reaching a year or even ten months. Increasing the disk space beyond 12 TB is not currently possible."
"The stability isn't quite perfect. We occasionally run into problems."
"The onboarding process for this solution could be better. It also needs a better GUI."
"ArcSight ESM needs to improve performance, user interface, and automation."
"Customer service and support is our biggest challenge."
"The tool itself is very difficult to configure. It's great for its number of inputs, for the different types of systems devices, and things that it could collect information from. To actually make good use of it, you need a fairly dedicated team of people that have some reasonably good programming or modeling skills to be able to do the things that you need to do with it. Whereas a lot of the other tools are better packaged for that, and so require a lot less training and a lot less dedication."
"Some of the search functions can be better. There has been a lot of talk at the conference about the update of SPL before each iteration. That will be a lot of help."
"Its interface and usability can always be improved."
"Splunk is very expensive. The license is based on the volume of the logs ingested. I was responsible for managing the contract with our service integrator. I don't know the precise details of the competing solution, but I have heard that Splunk is more expensive than others. I don't know what the going rate is on the market, but I think there are at least two competitors that are less expensive. We have experienced a few issues with our service providers in terms of log filtering and ingestion, so we continue to pay a bit more per day for our logs."
"The only improvement I am expecting is the cost of the licensing. Clients are going to other solutions just because of the cost."
"We were inundated with the amount of alerts and alarms that we could get out of it. It is also a resource hog and we didn't have the resources to support it on-prem so we're taking it offline now."
"When you get into large amounts of data, Splunk can get pretty slow. This is the same on-premise or AWS, it doesn't matter. The way that they handle large data sets could be improved."
"The integration could be a bit better. They charge for certain integrations."
More ArcSight Enterprise Security Manager (ESM) Pricing and Cost Advice →
ArcSight Enterprise Security Manager (ESM) is ranked 12th in Security Information and Event Management (SIEM) with 93 reviews while Splunk Enterprise Security is ranked 2nd in Security Information and Event Management (SIEM) with 227 reviews. ArcSight Enterprise Security Manager (ESM) is rated 7.8, while Splunk Enterprise Security is rated 8.4. The top reviewer of ArcSight Enterprise Security Manager (ESM) writes "Allows for monitoring logs according to industry standards within ESM but has a total capacity capped at 12 TB, limiting real-time data retention periods". On the other hand, the top reviewer of Splunk Enterprise Security writes "It has a drag-and-drop interface, so you don't need to know SQL or Java to construct a query ". ArcSight Enterprise Security Manager (ESM) is most compared with ArcSight Intelligence, Trellix ESM, IBM Security QRadar, AWS Security Hub and LogRhythm SIEM, whereas Splunk Enterprise Security is most compared with Wazuh, Dynatrace, IBM Security QRadar, Elastic Security and Azure Monitor. See our ArcSight Enterprise Security Manager (ESM) vs. Splunk Enterprise Security report.
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