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Splunk VS Kibana

Compare Splunk VS Kibana and see what are their differences

Splunk logo Splunk

Splunk's operational intelligence platform helps unearth intelligent insights from machine data.

Kibana logo Kibana

Easily visualize data pushed into Elasticsearch from Logstash, es-hadoop or 3rd party technologies...
  • Splunk Landing page
    Landing page //
    2023-10-20
  • Kibana Landing page
    Landing page //
    2023-10-21

Splunk features and specs

  • Powerful Data Analysis
    Splunk provides robust data indexing and search capabilities, allowing users to analyze large volumes of log data with high flexibility and efficiency.
  • Real-Time Processing
    Splunk enables real-time monitoring and analysis of data, which helps in immediate detection of anomalies and operational issues.
  • Scalability
    Splunk can efficiently scale to handle large amounts of data from various sources, making it suitable for both small businesses and large enterprises.
  • Wide Range of Integrations
    Splunk offers extensive integration options with numerous third-party applications and services, enhancing its functionalities and utility.
  • User-Friendly Interface
    Splunk comes with a highly intuitive and user-friendly interface, which makes it easier for users to navigate and leverage its features without extensive training.
  • Advanced Security Features
    Splunk includes comprehensive security features such as access controls, data encryption, and auditing capabilities to ensure data protection and compliance.

Possible disadvantages of Splunk

  • High Cost
    Splunk is considered expensive compared to other data analytics tools, which can be a significant constraint for smaller organizations or those with limited budgets.
  • Complex Licensing
    The licensing model for Splunk can be complex and confusing, often leading to issues in predicting costs and understanding the full extent of required licensing.
  • Steep Learning Curve
    Despite its user-friendly interface, there is a steep learning curve associated with mastering Splunk’s advanced features and query language, which can be challenging for new users.
  • Resource Intensive
    Splunk can be resource-intensive, requiring substantial computational power and storage, which might necessitate additional hardware investments.
  • Custom App Development
    Building custom apps and dashboards in Splunk may require specialized knowledge of its proprietary language, which can limit customization for users without technical expertise.

Kibana features and specs

  • User-Friendly Interface
    Kibana features an intuitive and visually appealing interface, making it easier for users to explore and visualize data without requiring in-depth technical knowledge.
  • Powerful Visualizations
    Offers a wide variety of visualizations including bar charts, line graphs, pie charts, and heat maps, enabling comprehensive data analysis and insights.
  • Real-Time Data Analysis
    Allows for the real-time monitoring and analysis of data, providing immediate insights and helping in quick decision-making processes.
  • Integration with Elastic Stack
    Seamlessly integrates with Elasticsearch and other components of the Elastic Stack, ensuring smooth data ingestion, storage, and retrieval.
  • Custom Dashboards
    Provides the ability to create and customize dashboards, allowing users to tailor visualizations to meet specific business needs and preferences.
  • Timelion Plugin
    The Timelion plugin offers advanced time-series analysis capabilities, enabling users to perform more complex data manipulations and visualizations.
  • Extensible Platform
    Highly extensible through plugins and APIs, allowing users to add new features and integrate with other tools and services.
  • Alerting and Reporting
    Includes built-in alerting and reporting features which help in proactively managing systems and sharing insights with stakeholders.

Possible disadvantages of Kibana

  • Steeper Learning Curve
    While user-friendly, getting the most out of Kibana can require a significant learning curve, especially for users unfamiliar with data visualization or Elasticsearch.
  • Performance Issues with Large Datasets
    Kibana can experience performance degradation when handling very large datasets, which may affect the responsiveness and usability of the platform.
  • Limited Advanced Data Analysis
    Although it offers robust visualization capabilities, Kibana lacks some advanced analytical features available in specialized data analysis tools.
  • Complex Setup and Maintenance
    Setting up and maintaining Kibana, especially in a production environment, can be complex and time-consuming, often requiring dedicated resources.
  • Cost
    While the basic version of Kibana is free, advanced features available in the paid (premium) versions can be quite costly, which might be a limitation for small businesses.
  • Limited Customization
    Although quite flexible, Kibana has some limitations in terms of customization options for specific visualizations and user interfaces.
  • Dependency on Elasticsearch
    Kibana relies heavily on Elasticsearch for data retrieval and storage, meaning any issues with Elasticsearch can directly impact Kibana's performance and functionality.

Splunk videos

"Splunk Product Overview"

More videos:

  • Tutorial - Splunk in 60 Minutes | Splunk Tutorial For Beginners | Splunk Training | Splunk Tutorial | Edureka
  • Demo - Splunk Incident Review Demo

Kibana videos

Analyzing Server Logs with Kibana

More videos:

  • Review - Grafana vs Kibana | Beautiful data graphs and log analysis systems

Category Popularity

0-100% (relative to Splunk and Kibana)
Monitoring Tools
75 75%
25% 25
Log Management
78 78%
22% 22
Performance Monitoring
100 100%
0% 0
Data Dashboard
0 0%
100% 100

User comments

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Reviews

These are some of the external sources and on-site user reviews we've used to compare Splunk and Kibana

Splunk Reviews

The 10 Best Nagios Alternatives in 2024 (Paid and Open-source)
What sets Splunk apart, likely contributing to its premium price, is its expansive network. With over 2,200 partners spanning various industries, Splunk ensures users can fully leverage the platform. Additionally, boasting a community of over 18,000 active members and 1,800 Splunk experts, users have access to support for problem-solving, architecture, deployment, and...
Source: betterstack.com
Top 10 Grafana Alternatives in 2024
Splunk’s security and data monitoring features make it a potent alternative to Grafana. The platform helps collect and store extensive data from multiple platforms like databases, messaging systems, and network devices.
Source: middleware.io
Top 11 Grafana Alternatives & Competitors [2024]
Splunk's strengths lie in its adeptness at handling large-scale data ingestion and robust analytics capabilities. This makes it invaluable for organizations with complex data monitoring needs, particularly in enterprise security and observability.
Source: signoz.io
10 Best Grafana Alternatives [2023 Comparison]
Splunk is a well-known log management solution that’s been around forever. It offers a variety of observability solutions, making it an ideal Grafana alternative in terms of functionality. Splunk offers users Log Management, Synthetic monitoring, Infrastructure Monitoring, APM, Security Monitoring, and more.
Source: sematext.com
Top 11 Best SIEM Tools in 2022 For Real-Time Incident Response and Security
Splunk provides improved security operations like customizable dashboards, asset investigator, statistical analysis, and incident review, classification, and investigation. It has features of alerts management, risk scores, etc. It provides security services to the public sectors, financial services, and healthcare.

Kibana Reviews

Top 10 Grafana Alternatives in 2024
Assess how well the Grafana alternative integrates with your existing tools stack. For instance, Kibana is best suited for Elasticsearch environments, while Middleware is the most advanced solution to operate and monitor in Kubernetes environments.
Source: middleware.io
Top 11 Grafana Alternatives & Competitors [2024]
Kibana is an integral component within the Elastic Stack (ELK), offering advanced visualization and analysis capabilities. Beats, which is also a part of the ELK Stack, is responsible for collecting and forwarding log data to Logstash for initial processing. Logstash, in turn, applies various data transformations and subsequently stores the processed data in Elasticsearch....
Source: signoz.io
10 Best Linux Monitoring Tools and Software to Improve Server Performance [2022 Comparison]
Lastly, the Elastic Stack (ELK Stack) is a well-known tool for Linux performance monitoring. It’s composed of Elasticsearch (full-text search), Logstash (a log aggregator), Kibana (visualization via graphs and charts), and Beats (lightweight metrics collectors and shippers).
Source: sematext.com
4 Best Open Source Dashboard Monitoring Tools In 2019
Kibana is part of Elastic’s product suite and is often used in what we call an ELK stack : ElasticSearch + Logstash + Kibana.

Social recommendations and mentions

Based on our record, Splunk seems to be more popular. It has been mentiond 19 times since March 2021. We are tracking product recommendations and mentions on various public social media platforms and blogs. They can help you identify which product is more popular and what people think of it.

Splunk mentions (19)

  • Ask HN: Who is hiring? (April 2025)
    Splunk (A Cisco Company) [https://splunk.com] | Principal Software Engineer, Backend | Remote (Vancouver / Toronto, Canada) Splunk is here to build a safer and more resilient digital world. The world's leading enterprises use our unified security and observability platform to keep their digital systems secure and reliable. The role I'm hiring for is to lead the effort for a new API that will power Splunk's new... - Source: Hacker News / about 2 months ago
  • Can I install apps on Free 60 day Enterprise?
    I'm using the free 60day Enterprise license and tried to install different apps from the "Browse more apps" menu in Splunk Enterprise, but it doesn't accept my credentials when I try to log in. I tried my username and password from splunk.com(which I'm sure it works, because I tried it straight away on the official website). Also I tried using my username and password with which I'm accessing Splunk Enterprise,... Source: over 1 year ago
  • Can someone explain this before I go a little crazy? xD
    I'm noticing a questionable trend in Splunk question/answer structure for these free courses on splunk.com So I go to an exam dump to try and compare to something I have studied thus far. (Prepping for entry level 1002). Source: over 1 year ago
  • Where exactly can I start to learn?
    With your splunk.com username, you can login to Splunk trainings portals as well https://www.splunk.com/en_us/training.html .. There are lots of free trainings available. Enroll yourself, complete them, you will gain more confidence. Source: almost 2 years ago
  • VAST 3.0 released. Open-Source Security Data Pipelines with Kusto-like syntax
    VAST is an open-source SecDataOps project for working with data from open-source security tools. Version 3.0 adds a pipeline syntax similar to splunk, Kusto, PRQL, and Zed. Source: about 2 years ago
View more

Kibana mentions (0)

We have not tracked any mentions of Kibana yet. Tracking of Kibana recommendations started around Mar 2021.

What are some alternatives?

When comparing Splunk and Kibana, you can also consider the following products

Datadog - See metrics from all of your apps, tools & services in one place with Datadog's cloud monitoring as a service solution. Try it for free.

Grafana - Data visualization & Monitoring with support for Graphite, InfluxDB, Prometheus, Elasticsearch and many more databases

NewRelic - New Relic is a Software Analytics company that makes sense of billions of metrics across millions of apps. We help the people who build modern software understand the stories their data is trying to tell them.

Prometheus - An open-source systems monitoring and alerting toolkit.

Graylog - Graylog is an open source log management platform for collecting, indexing, and analyzing both structured and unstructured data.

Tableau - Tableau can help anyone see and understand their data. Connect to almost any database, drag and drop to create visualizations, and share with a click.