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.
"The log analysis is excellent; it can predict what can or will happen regarding use patterns and vulnerabilities."
"We’ve got process improvement that's happened across multiple different fronts within the organization, within our IT organization based on this tool being in place."
"The solution has features that helped improve the security posture of our clients. It provides the ability to correlate a large variety of log sources very cost-effectively, especially for Microsoft sources."
"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 scalability is great. You can put unlimited logs in, as long as you can pay for it. There are commitment tiers, up to six terabytes per day, which is nowhere close to what any one of our customers is running."
"It has basic out-of-the-box integrations with multiple log sources."
"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 features that stand out are the detection engine and its integration with multiple data sources."
"The most useful features are directories, price, and live reporting."
"The solution has gone beyond signature-based monitoring and analysis and is AI-powered. It is good enough to cover the full range of cybersecurity services."
"ArcSight Enterprise Security Manager (ESM) works perfectly. It's a stable and scalable product."
"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."
"This process has helped to improve our organization because we have centralized the intra-group security equipment logs."
"Once the rules are defined, it becomes easy to detect changes and generate automated logs."
"The tool is good for correlation and aggregation. We use it as a collection platform."
"The most valuable features of ArcSight ESM are the dashboards, ease of management for anyone, and simple for teams to provide reports related to cyber security. There are a lot of good features that are provided."
"You can use it to gather syslog messages from anything."
"The most valuable feature is the incident dashboard, and the extensive use of correlation searches, which isn't available with a standard Splunk search package. This feature is important to me because it enables SOC analysts to do their job more efficiently and be able to investigate or mediate incidents at a faster pace."
"Positive features include replication capabilities, software development kits, and the architecture."
"The dashboard and reporting are very good... It provides very good visibility in a hybrid cloud environment, and you can build custom utilization APIs using Splunk."
"In the past we used the different application to collect logs. We used SurfWatch and VMware to do so. But, we found that the Splunk has more capacity to do more in less time. They provide a aster speed to index all the events , and this is a huge asset."
"It is easy to use in any environment."
"It has a big user base, so the community is useful."
"Out-of-the-box, it seems very powerful."
"Documentation is the main thing that could be improved. In terms of product usage, the documentation is pretty good, but I'd like a lot more documentation on Kusto Query Language."
"The performance could be improved. If I create 15 to 20 lines for a single-use case in KQL, sometimes it takes more time to execute. If I create use cases within a certain timeline, the result will show in .01 seconds. A complex query takes more time to get results."
"We have been working with multiple customers, and every time we onboard a customer, we are missing an essential feature that surprisingly doesn't exist in Sentinel. We searched the forums and knowledge bases but couldn't find a solution. When you onboard new customers, you need to enable the data connectors. That part is easy, but you must create rules from scratch for every associated connector. You click "next," "next," "next," and it requires five clicks for each analytical rule. Imagine we have a customer with 150 rules."
"They should integrate it with many other software-as-a-service providers and make connectors available so that you don't have to do any sort of log normalization."
"The interface could be more user-friendly. It''s a small improvement that they could make if they wanted to."
"Sentinel could improve its ticketing and management. A few customers I have worked with liked to take the data created in Sentinel. You can make some basic efforts around that, but the customers wanted to push it to a third-party system so they could set up a proper ticketing management system, like ServiceNow, Jira, etc."
"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."
"While I appreciate the UI itself and the vast amount of information available on the platform, I'm finding the overall user experience to be frustrating due to frequent disconnections and the requirement to repeatedly re-authenticate."
"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."
"I am having issues with report generation with older versions. I don't know if this is because of compatibility issues, but report generation has been a little bit difficult in older versions. It is not similar to the newer and current versions. We are looking at moving to the cloud. It would be good if ArcSight ESM can move to the cloud. They already seem to be working on this. It would also be very helpful and great if we can integrate external threat intelligence, machine learning, and AI into this solution. It has good dashboards, but they can always be better. Its stability can also be improved."
"HPE ArcSight has a quite steep learning curve."
"In certain cases, this product does have false positives, which the company should work on."
"Currently lacks SOAR feature."
"The UI interface is somewhat complex and needs to be simplified."
"The customer experience could be improved."
"In other products, I have found that they use some kind of GUI that is drag and drop. While in ArcSight they use still scripting. They should keep scripting because some people prefer scripting but they should have the option for those who prefer using drag and drop."
"We are waiting for Dashboard Studio to mature a little bit more. There are some things that we are using with Classic Dashboards which have not yet made it to Dashboard Studio. We are waiting for that."
"The historical data extraction needs improvement. I would like the capability of taking data and having it trend longer."
"I would like to get visibility into the data pipelines on heavy forwarders and indexers to see exactly their source and the cause of saturation when it occurs. This would help us learn even more about our high use applications."
"The documentation is in definite need of improvement."
"The configuration had a bit of a learning curve."
"The biggest problem is data compression. Splunk is an outstanding product, but it is a resource hog. There should be better data compression for being able to maintain our data repositories. We end up having to buy lots of additional storage just to house our Splunk data. This is my only complaint about it."
"Professional support is great, but too expensive."
"The upgrading process could be smoother."
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 228 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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