We performed a comparison between Splunk and Zabbix based on our users’ reviews in four categories. After reading all of the collected data, you can find our conclusion below.
Comparison Results: In this comparison, Zabbix comes out on top. When compared to Splunk, it is easier to deploy and is open-source.
"We are able to deploy within half an hour and we only require one person to complete the implementation."
"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."
"We didn't have anything similar. So, it really provides value from the incidents and automation point of view. The overview of the security fabric is most valuable."
"Microsoft Sentinel provides the capability to integrate different log sources. On top of having several data connectors in place, you can also do integration with a threat intelligence platform to enhance and enrich the data that's available. You can collect as many logs and build all the use cases."
"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 native integration of the Microsoft security solution has been essential because it helps reduce some false positives, especially with some of the impossible travel rules that may be configured in Microsoft 365. For some organizations, that might be benign because they're using VPNs, etc."
"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."
"Sentinel has features that have helped improve our security poster. It helped us in going ahead and identifying the gaps via analysis and focusing on the key elements."
"The initial setup is simple, not very complex. Initial deployment takes around 10 to 15 minutes to set up the entire base for Splunk including all three tiers."
"The ability to quickly search logs, performance data, and other inputs has helped tremendously with troubleshooting."
"It helps streamline troubleshooting and log analysis."
"Splunk has significantly reduced the time in performing the task of aggregating logs, reviewing as well as time spent during investigations."
"UBA, User Behavior Analytics, is a key feature."
"I like the search feature and the indexing. It's very fast and comprehensive."
"We can automatically suspend or terminate suspicious sessions."
"The most valuable feature is the custom dashboard feature."
"It meets my organizational needs. It's pretty easy to use."
"The level of discovery-based configuration that lets us auto-configure the monitoring for various systems is a valuable feature."
"The most valuable feature is monitoring."
"There are lots of great features and functionality within the solution."
"The initial setup was not complex."
"We like the user-interface for this solution, which makes it an easy to use tool."
"Zabbix can use old data to current data to set the threshold. We can use previous data to set the threshold."
"The most valuable feature is that it provides network segregation for server monitoring."
"The data connectors for third-party tools could be improved, as some aren't available in Sentinel. They need to be available in the data connector panel."
"They need to work with other security vendors. For example, we replaced our email gateway with Symantec, but we couldn't collect these logs with Azure Sentinel. Instead of collecting these logs with Azure Sentinel, we are collecting them on Qradar. We couldn't do it with Sentinel, which is a problem for us."
"Multi-tenancy, in my opinion, needs to be improved. I believe it can do better as a managed service provider."
"The following would be a challenge for any product in the market, but we have some in-house apps in our environment... our apps were built with different parameters and the APIs for them are not present in Sentinel. We are working with Microsoft to build those custom APIs that we require. That is currently in progress."
"When we pass KPIs to the governance department, there's no option to provide rights to the data or dashboard to colleagues. We can use Power BI for this, but it isn't easy or convenient. They should just come up with a way to provide limited role-based access to auditing personnel"
"When it comes to ingesting Azure native log sources, some of the log sources are specific to the subscription, and it is not always very clear."
"The solution could be more user-friendly; some query languages are required to operate it."
"We do see continuous improvement all the time, however, I haven't got a specific feature that is lacking or not well designed."
"If you have to do your own stuff, such as customized charts, it is a little bit more work, but once you're familiar with the Splunk query language, you can pretty much do whatever you want. In terms of features, it should probably have the features that other competitors provide."
"I'd like to see more integration with more antivirus systems."
"Previously, they developed custom connectors or add-ons for a lot of applications. But that number can be upgraded still. There are a lot of applications in the world that are not supported."
"Its pricing model and integration with third-party services can be improved. We had faced an issue with integration. The alerting feature is currently not available with Splunk, but it is definitely available with Datadog and PagerDuty. They should include this feature. A few dashboards in Splunk look quite old and are not that modern. They aren't bad, but improving these dashboards will definitely make Splunk more attractive and usable. I read in a few blog posts that there were a few security incidents related to Splunk agents. So, it can be made more secure."
"While Splunk offers SOAR as a separate product, integrating it into the next version of Splunk Enterprise Security as a unified solution would be beneficial."
"It could be more user friendly, in terms of the end-user experience."
"This is not really a monitoring solution."
"I would like additional features in different programming models with the support for writing queries in SQL or other languages, such as C#, Java, or some other type of query definitions."
"I had problems using Zabbix when working with SUSE Enterprise; many companies use SUSE."
"The integration of the product is not so easy, especially when it comes to the application database."
"Zabbix does not draw automatic mapping of the network, this is something they should add in the future. There is a lot of effort that is involved in tailoring some of the settings which could be made easier."
"Zabbix is not easy to configure, and upgrading is also an issue."
"The performance reporting could be improved."
"Zabbix technical support is sold separately."
"The GUI could be more intuitive. Also, we'd like streaming telemetry. Zabbix might have this feature, but I haven't seen it yet. It took us a long time to get started because the documentation isn't very descriptive. We had to go through various sources like YouTube and forums to get this solution working."
"We would like to monitor other touchpoints such as ATM machines. It would be great if it can provide monitoring of ATM machines. Compatibility with other products would also be great."
Splunk Enterprise Security is ranked 1st in Security Information and Event Management (SIEM) with 240 reviews while Zabbix is ranked 1st in Network Monitoring Software with 101 reviews. Splunk Enterprise Security is rated 8.4, while Zabbix is rated 8.2. 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 ". On the other hand, the top reviewer of Zabbix writes "Allows any number of customizations but lacks functionality for finding root causes". Splunk Enterprise Security is most compared with Wazuh, Dynatrace, IBM Security QRadar, Elastic Security and ArcSight Logger, whereas Zabbix is most compared with Centreon, Checkmk, SolarWinds NPM, Nagios Core and ManageEngine OpManager.
We monitor all Security Information and Event Management (SIEM) reviews to prevent fraudulent reviews and keep review quality high. We do not post reviews by company employees or direct competitors. We validate each review for authenticity via cross-reference with LinkedIn, and personal follow-up with the reviewer when necessary.