Grafana vs. Splunk Enterprise

Overview
ProductRatingMost Used ByProduct SummaryStarting Price
Grafana
Score 8.7 out of 10
N/A
Grafana is a data visualization tool developed by Grafana Labs in New York. It is available open source, managed (Grafana Cloud), or via an enterprise edition with enhanced features. Grafana has pluggable data source model and comes bundled with support for popular time series databases like Graphite. It also has built-in support for cloud monitoring vendors like Amazon Cloudwatch, Microsoft Azure and SQL databases like MySQL. Grafana can combine data from many places into a single dashboard.
$0
Splunk Enterprise
Score 8.5 out of 10
N/A
Splunk is software for searching, monitoring, and analyzing machine-generated big data, via a web-style interface. It captures, indexes and correlates real-time data in a searchable repository from which it can generate graphs, reports, alerts, dashboards and visualizations.N/A
Pricing
GrafanaSplunk Enterprise
Editions & Modules
Grafana Cloud - Pro
$8
per month up to 1 active user
Grafana Cloud - Free
Free
10k metrics + 50GB logs + 50GB traces up to 3 active users
Grafana Cloud - Advanced
Volume Discounts
custom data usage custom active users
Grafana - Enterprise Stack
Custom Pricing
No answers on this topic
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
GrafanaSplunk Enterprise
Free Trial
YesYes
Free/Freemium Version
YesYes
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
NoNo
Entry-level Setup FeeNo setup feeNo setup fee
Additional Details
More Pricing Information
Community Pulse
GrafanaSplunk Enterprise
Considered Both Products
Grafana
Chose Grafana
Grafana is more flexible, readily adopts other tools frameworks instead of forcing you to use their agent, doesn't force you into Vendor lock-in, and embraces open source, self-hosted, and Enterprise. Similar companies would like you to use their specific tooling and don't …
Splunk Enterprise
Chose Splunk Enterprise
Splunk features of storing data and ingestion of logs , indexing of data , data analytics make is superior to other tools.
Definately there is more improvement requirement in terms of visualisation of data but one stop for all features make splunk better than various other …
Chose Splunk Enterprise
Splunk Enterprise was already chosen by our organization to be used across teams. However, the reasoning I know behind is the ability to share events/messages across different message brokers and making onboarding easier to legacy teams by just simple configuration.
Chose Splunk Enterprise
Splunk was better in terms of analyzing unstructured data. Also Splunk has had a very good and strong community and is also has a more tried and tested performance. I personally found the dash boarding capability of Splunk better than Datadog.

We also analyzed using Kibana. …
Chose Splunk Enterprise
Splunk is easy to use , the User interface is quite easy and the components or functionality speak for themselves. The ease with you can search and from there fine tune your search functionality. Also the admin console is quite simple to use, you can find the functionality at …
Features
GrafanaSplunk Enterprise
BI Standard Reporting
Comparison of BI Standard Reporting features of Product A and Product B
Grafana
8.2
7 Ratings
1% above category average
Splunk Enterprise
-
Ratings
Pixel Perfect reports7.77 Ratings00 Ratings
Customizable dashboards8.67 Ratings00 Ratings
Report Formatting Templates8.37 Ratings00 Ratings
Ad-hoc Reporting
Comparison of Ad-hoc Reporting features of Product A and Product B
Grafana
7.9
6 Ratings
1% above category average
Splunk Enterprise
-
Ratings
Drill-down analysis7.86 Ratings00 Ratings
Formatting capabilities8.36 Ratings00 Ratings
Integration with R or other statistical packages7.56 Ratings00 Ratings
Report sharing and collaboration8.05 Ratings00 Ratings
Report Output and Scheduling
Comparison of Report Output and Scheduling features of Product A and Product B
Grafana
8.4
6 Ratings
2% above category average
Splunk Enterprise
-
Ratings
Publish to Web8.16 Ratings00 Ratings
Publish to PDF8.76 Ratings00 Ratings
Report Versioning8.36 Ratings00 Ratings
Report Delivery Scheduling8.46 Ratings00 Ratings
Delivery to Remote Servers8.76 Ratings00 Ratings
Data Discovery and Visualization
Comparison of Data Discovery and Visualization features of Product A and Product B
Grafana
8.5
6 Ratings
9% above category average
Splunk Enterprise
-
Ratings
Pre-built visualization formats (heatmaps, scatter plots etc.)8.66 Ratings00 Ratings
Location Analytics / Geographic Visualization9.06 Ratings00 Ratings
Predictive Analytics8.46 Ratings00 Ratings
Pattern Recognition and Data Mining8.14 Ratings00 Ratings
Security Information and Event Management (SIEM)
Comparison of Security Information and Event Management (SIEM) features of Product A and Product B
Grafana
-
Ratings
Splunk Enterprise
7.9
67 Ratings
0% below category average
Centralized event and log data collection00 Ratings8.964 Ratings
Correlation00 Ratings8.265 Ratings
Event and log normalization/management00 Ratings8.966 Ratings
Deployment flexibility00 Ratings7.960 Ratings
Integration with Identity and Access Management Tools00 Ratings7.760 Ratings
Custom dashboards and workspaces00 Ratings7.966 Ratings
Host and network-based intrusion detection00 Ratings7.448 Ratings
Data integration/API management00 Ratings7.616 Ratings
Behavioral analytics and baselining00 Ratings7.314 Ratings
Rules-based and algorithmic detection thresholds00 Ratings8.014 Ratings
Response orchestration and automation00 Ratings7.414 Ratings
Reporting and compliance management00 Ratings7.916 Ratings
Incident indexing/searching00 Ratings8.117 Ratings
Best Alternatives
GrafanaSplunk Enterprise
Small Businesses
Supermetrics
Supermetrics
Score 9.9 out of 10
LevelBlue USM Anywhere
LevelBlue USM Anywhere
Score 7.0 out of 10
Medium-sized Companies
Supermetrics
Supermetrics
Score 9.9 out of 10
Sumo Logic
Sumo Logic
Score 9.3 out of 10
Enterprises
IBM Analytics Engine
IBM Analytics Engine
Score 8.5 out of 10
Sumo Logic
Sumo Logic
Score 9.3 out of 10
All AlternativesView all alternativesView all alternatives
User Ratings
GrafanaSplunk Enterprise
Likelihood to Recommend
9.4
(7 ratings)
8.2
(86 ratings)
Likelihood to Renew
-
(0 ratings)
7.0
(18 ratings)
Usability
9.6
(3 ratings)
7.9
(19 ratings)
Availability
-
(0 ratings)
10.0
(1 ratings)
Support Rating
-
(0 ratings)
8.0
(18 ratings)
Online Training
-
(0 ratings)
8.0
(1 ratings)
Implementation Rating
-
(0 ratings)
7.0
(3 ratings)
Product Scalability
-
(0 ratings)
9.1
(1 ratings)
User Testimonials
GrafanaSplunk Enterprise
Likelihood to Recommend
Grafana Labs
Just about any organization with more than one server and more than one cluster as it scales very well. Configuration of the application takes time and finesse to fine tune to where the balance of load time and getting data quickly meets. The plugins add load time but fine tuning for the application to meet demand needs nailed down at implementation
Read full review
Cisco
It's well suited for what I do, which is network security operations. And that's for anything from troubleshooting incidents, troubleshooting performance, troubleshooting for the purpose of a compliance and auditing. It's not best suited for users who are new in terms of they're new to the product and they have expectations that probably Splunk cannot meet.
Read full review
Pros
Grafana Labs
  • Alerting through many different medium as Slack, Email, Webhook etc
  • Beautiful and unlimited number of dashboards to view your metrics and tweak them as you please
  • Log aggregation and powerful Logql to filter and view your logs
  • Microservices monitoring
  • Large number of plugins and data sources to collect your metrics from almost anywhere
Read full review
Cisco
  • It is very useful in creating custom rules for analyzing system logs and display relevant information. The query language is very easy to learn.
  • We can create custom UI to visualize the output of our data. The interface is very flexible. It also allows the sharing of rules among users.
  • There is an open online community to help others. Stackoverflow also has a splunk community. These resources make it more convenient to learn.
Read full review
Cons
Grafana Labs
  • There are some settings which we can't configure from UI (Web Console).
  • We've open[ed] up configuration files in command line text editors and manually do the settings e.g. LDAP/SSO configuration.
  • In terms of visualization, it's best, but it doesn't support log analysis otherwise it could destroy business of all other visualization tools.
Read full review
Cisco
  • Splunk light limits number of users to 5. Wish there was a flexible license, where one could add more users.
  • Splunk light does not let you add > few realtime alerts. Wish there was a flexible license, where one could add as many realtime alerts as wanted.
  • Better insight into daily ingestion values
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Likelihood to Renew
Grafana Labs
No answers on this topic
Cisco
We are using Splunk extensively in our projects and we have recently upgraded to Splunk version 6.0 which is quite efficient and giving expected results. We keep track of updates and new features Splunk introduces periodically and try to introduce those features in our day to day activities for improvement in our reporting system and other tasks.
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Usability
Grafana Labs
It is infinitely flexible. If you can imagine it, Grafana can almost certainly do it. Usability may be in the eye of the beholder however, as there is time needed to curate the experience and get the dashboards customized to how it makes sense to you. I know one thing they are working on are more templates, based on data sources
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Cisco
You can literally throw in a single word into Splunk and it will pull back all instances of that word across all of your logs for the time span you select (provided you have permission to see that data). We have several users who have taken a few of the free courses from Splunk that are able to pull data out of it everyday with little help at all.
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Reliability and Availability
Grafana Labs
No answers on this topic
Cisco
When properly setup and configured, Splunk is extremely reliable.
Read full review
Support Rating
Grafana Labs
No answers on this topic
Cisco
Splunk maintains a well resourced support system that has been consistent since we purchased the product. They help out in a timely manner and provide expert level information as needed. We typically open cases online and communicate when possible via e-mail and are able to resolve most issues with that method.
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Online Training
Grafana Labs
No answers on this topic
Cisco
The online course was simple clear and described the main capabilities of the solution. There is also an initial module that can be done for free so anyone can familiarize themselves with the functionality of this solution. On the other hand, however, there could be more free online courses. Maybe even with a certificate, this would broaden the group of people who are familiar with the platform while increasing familiarity with the solution itself.
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Implementation Rating
Grafana Labs
No answers on this topic
Cisco
Smooth without too many major issues.
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Alternatives Considered
Grafana Labs
Grafana blows Nagios out of the water when it comes to customization. The ability to feed almost any data source makes it very versatile and the cost is great.
Read full review
Cisco
I didn't get to fully evaluate Logstash as our corporation was already using Logstash, but both seemed like viable solutions to the problem that we were having. I wanted to evaluate Logstash some more, both did seem like they would work for the business needs that we had, we went with splunk as many teams were already using it.
Read full review
Scalability
Grafana Labs
No answers on this topic
Cisco
Splunk can scale in to the petabyte per day range which of course is awesome
Read full review
Return on Investment
Grafana Labs
  • Grafana has replaced many higher priced tools
  • The integrations are seemless with multiple backends
  • Combining graphs and dashboards from multiple data sources is a game changer
Read full review
Cisco
  • I don't have any numbers to share but Splunk has positively served as a 24/7 monitoring tool that has saved hours of work by self-detecting, saving statistics and alerting problems in the system or from external interfaces as soon as they happen.
  • Splunk dashboards does a solid job in collecting, analyzing data and creating reports that contain an entire day's activity and then automatically sent out to the business.
  • Splunk is very easy to learn and very useful to any program or business application.
Read full review
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