LevelBlue USM Anywhere vs. Splunk Enterprise

Overview
ProductRatingMost Used ByProduct SummaryStarting Price
LevelBlue USM Anywhere
Score 3.8 out of 10
N/A
The LevelBlue USM Anywhere XDR platform (replacing the former AlienVault USM) delivers threat detection, incident response, and compliance management.
$1,075
per month
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
LevelBlue USM AnywhereSplunk Enterprise
Editions & Modules
Essentials
$1,075
per month
Standard
$1,695
per month
Premium
$2,595
per month
No answers on this topic
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
LevelBlue USM AnywhereSplunk Enterprise
Free Trial
YesYes
Free/Freemium Version
YesYes
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
NoNo
Entry-level Setup FeeOptionalNo setup fee
Additional Details
More Pricing Information
Community Pulse
LevelBlue USM AnywhereSplunk Enterprise
Considered Both Products
LevelBlue USM Anywhere
Chose LevelBlue USM Anywhere
AlienVault USM offers a user-friendly interface and comprehensive features at a lower cost compared to QRadar, making it our preferred choice for effective threat detection and response.
Chose LevelBlue USM Anywhere
Easy to deploy and ease of use, good training by ATT
Chose LevelBlue USM Anywhere
I have used Splunk and QRadar which are quite manual and resource-intensive to get set up. On the other hand, AlienVault USM seems to have everything you need out of the box to get set up.
Chose LevelBlue USM Anywhere
QRadar is one of the top SIEMs on the market. AlienVault USM is more suitable for companies or clients having a smaller budget, as AlienVault USM is cheaper than QRadar. Regarding features, QRadar trumps AlienVault USM, as it is a product with a vast array of features.
Chose LevelBlue USM Anywhere
The cost of AlienVault is what sold us on AlienVault. However, considering the amount of time and effort that has gone into getting it set up and realizing that views and reports cannot be shared across groups makes it not worth the savings.
Chose LevelBlue USM Anywhere
There are other products like IBM QRadare and HP ArcSight, but they are much expensive than AlienVault USM which provides similar functionality.
Chose LevelBlue USM Anywhere
AlienVault was recommended by our PCI consultants.
Chose LevelBlue USM Anywhere
I evaluated Crowd Strike. It didn't provide any insight into my network equipment, only Mac and Windows clients. I wanted a complete SIEM and log manager.
Chose LevelBlue USM Anywhere
The only other product I've used similar to AlienVault is SolarWinds SIEM (formerly TriGeo). It too could be difficult to implement and maintain, but it's user interface was much worse. While AlienVault USM Anywhere charges for the amount of data being processed, SolarWinds was …
Chose LevelBlue USM Anywhere
Darktrace - While also a fantastic product, its use case is slightly different from a SIEM, and we found that AlienVault's broad SIEM capabilities complemented Darkrace's focussed use case well.
CyberShark - Cloud SIEM solutions do not often allow full control of or access to …
Chose LevelBlue USM Anywhere
I've only used AlienVault and no other products of this nature.
Chose LevelBlue USM Anywhere
AlienVault USM Anywhere provided the right gamut of features at the right price, with not a great deal of time or effort required to fully implement. As an added bonus, we can tick many checkboxes for various compliance standards, all from one solution. Complexity is an enemy …
Chose LevelBlue USM Anywhere
We already had familiarity with the platform but we needed cloud support so we upgraded to USM. We reviewed a few other options but decided USM was the best fit our requirements and price point.
Chose LevelBlue USM Anywhere
IBM Security Network Intrusion Prevention System, Nessus and Splunk Cloud
Chose LevelBlue USM Anywhere
The tools reviewed were quite sophisticated. The reason for choosing AlienVault USM was mainly inclusiveness (multiple services integrated) of the solution as well as the cost-benefit ratio. Integrating the solution into our current infrastructure also appeared relatively …
Chose LevelBlue USM Anywhere
Installation of AlienVault USM is much easier and customization is open to all kinds of improvements.
Chose LevelBlue USM Anywhere
AlienVault USM is considerably more user-friendly, but it does fall short with the search functionality that a query language offers when looking for specific logs/statistics/data.
Chose LevelBlue USM Anywhere
USM anywhere is easy to deploy and has sufficient documentation to guide administrators throughout the process of configuration and log creation. It also verifies threats against the Open Threat Exchange platform. USM gives remediation advice and insights to all threats …
Chose LevelBlue USM Anywhere
I chose AlienVault to try it in the lab environment and assess its strengths and weaknesses.
Chose LevelBlue USM Anywhere
The price and the ease-of-use, and the support from AlienVault are better. I had a lot of trouble starting out, but they guided me very well. The training provided by AlienVault was fantastic, because I could play without the fear of breaking anything.
Chose LevelBlue USM Anywhere
In terms of user-friendliness and overall navigation, I think AlienVault USM has the advantage. Also, AlienVault USM provides its own threat intelligence and then integrates it into its SEIM, which is a very helpful feature.
Chose LevelBlue USM Anywhere
AlienVault was given to us, even though we already had Secureworks. Both SecureWorks and Fireye are more of a managed solution. It's fine to say we'll use AlienVault but it requires a lot of expertise to get it running and alerting correctly. And even then, if no one is …
Chose LevelBlue USM Anywhere
We had used Splunk, which is not even close to its pricing not at all budget-friendly. Splunk implementation requires more man-power and is a time-consuming process because no default directives are present and in implementation, each and every case needs to be checked. …
Chose LevelBlue USM Anywhere
I didn't select either product but I have used both. I suspect IBM Qradar is more expensive, however, it is also more responsive, includes support for e-streamer, does parse the "blocked" field in source fire logs, and includes UEBA.
Splunk Enterprise
Chose Splunk Enterprise
Omnibus was a Linux based tool. Not very easy to sue. End user needs to know Linux commands. Splunk Enterprise is more flexible and ease to use. Splunk Enterprise can generate reports, graphs, data visualization, data validation and much more. Use friendly query language and …
Chose Splunk Enterprise
A lot of products have natively inside their own dashboards and or their own logging repositories. And each one is difficult to learn or they're too complex or they're not verbose in the sense that they're not easy to mine the data that you're looking for. So that could be …
Chose Splunk Enterprise
Elastic and it's a little bit more cumbersome and a little bit more time consuming. Using Splunk is much easier flow and quicker to utilize to get to the root of a problem.
Chose Splunk Enterprise
Splunk AppDynamics and Elastic Observability
Chose Splunk Enterprise
Cost was major factor which made us choose Splunk Enterprisek.
Splunk Enterprise is versatile tool which further helped us to make our decision.
Apart from that Managment wish to use something robust hence Splunk Enterprise became there first choice.
Chose Splunk Enterprise
Splunk Enterprise is honestly the first tool we used and we cant realistically switch. We have not done any in depth studies or comparisons. We know there are alternatives and we would probably switch if one of them was much more economically viable, but right now we are happy …
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 …
Chose Splunk Enterprise
We used this first but are considering moving away due to log space limitations because of cost.
Chose Splunk Enterprise
Data remains On-Prem and doesn't need encryption as in case of Cloud
Chose Splunk Enterprise
I have not evaluated other products
Chose Splunk Enterprise
We had an old version of QRadar before Splunk. It was difficult to customize and difficult to pull in our data sources. It wound up being neglected and not providing value for us as an institution. We have also looked into other things like AlienVault but in general, the …
Chose Splunk Enterprise
LogRhythm is a great SIEM Tool. But Splunk Enterprise is so much more than that. [It's] a Security Analytics Tool with no limitation. It depends on [organization's] size, budget[,] and also what exactly they are looking for.
Chose Splunk Enterprise
We reviewed a number of different platforms and found Splunk to be the more mature product across the board. Splunk is the market leader and the rest of the industry chances them. We needed a platform from a company with the resources to continue development and meet new …
Chose Splunk Enterprise
Splunk is a better solution for log analyzing based on the complexity of data it can collect, analyze and store. Dynatrace is just in the beginning stage of collecting logs but this tool is good for user application monitoring. So they are different products and it may not be …
Chose Splunk Enterprise
We originally used Kiwi Syslog but this was not able to keep up with the level of logs that were being sent to it. Also Kiwi does not allow you to search through logs, create alerts, etc. or any of the other features Splunk has. It is purely just a web GUI for syslog.
Chose Splunk Enterprise
All the logs from those security devices or systems are pumping to the Splunk Enterprise and being correlated by the Enterprise Security. However, there are some difficulties in tuning the Data Model, which results in a lot of false positive. This could occur due to the lack of …
Chose Splunk Enterprise
The Solarwinds SIEM solutions are much more bare-bones and don't offer as many features as Splunk Enterprise. Still, they are also infinitely more affordable and provide precisely what's required for small to medium environments. Implementation is straight forward even for …
Chose Splunk Enterprise
Splunk Light is lighter and less flexible compared to Splunk Cloud and Splunk Enterprise. However, it is also the most effective option for new or small organizations with a tight budget. Both Splunk Light and Splunk Enterprise are deployed on-premise while Splunk Cloud, as the …
Chose Splunk Enterprise
Splunk is easier to setup compare to ELK. It has better support, well-documented information plus the Splunk database which has an addon that built by them or the other users to help to improve the experience with Splunk. However, ELK is open-source and it is free. At the end …
Chose Splunk Enterprise
Splunk is a very useful, lightweight and simple tool to analyze logs. As a computer science student who loves coding, it is much more convenient to use. I can build custom queries for myself or a subset of the users. The language is much simpler than SQL and is much faster as …
Chose Splunk Enterprise
Splunk Enterprise stores and captures more detailed customer logs. Also, we can build search including back-end information.
Chose Splunk Enterprise
Splunk is the most intelligent tool I have ever worked on. It gives you hands-on experience on how logs actually look like. You can go through entire organization data at once using this tool. Also, by the use of data models, it's become so easy to use and work on.
Chose Splunk Enterprise
More features and easy to manage once configured and setup correctly. Stronger correlation engine compared to other products. Easily integrates with ServiceNow for ticket creation, automation, and building workflows. Helps in AiOPS more, as compared to other tools. Provides …
Chose Splunk Enterprise
We selected Splunk Light because people in our company had previous experience with it, the solution appeared to check all of our boxes, and the support structure gave Splunk a significant edge over open source solutions like the ELK stack.
Features
LevelBlue USM AnywhereSplunk Enterprise
Security Information and Event Management (SIEM)
Comparison of Security Information and Event Management (SIEM) features of Product A and Product B
LevelBlue USM Anywhere
-
Ratings
Splunk Enterprise
7.1
Ratings
9% below category average
Centralized event and log data collection00 Ratings9.00 Ratings
Correlation00 Ratings9.00 Ratings
Event and log normalization/management00 Ratings9.40 Ratings
Deployment flexibility00 Ratings7.00 Ratings
Integration with Identity and Access Management Tools00 Ratings6.00 Ratings
Custom dashboards and workspaces00 Ratings5.90 Ratings
Host and network-based intrusion detection00 Ratings4.90 Ratings
Data integration/API management00 Ratings8.00 Ratings
Behavioral analytics and baselining00 Ratings5.90 Ratings
Rules-based and algorithmic detection thresholds00 Ratings7.50 Ratings
Response orchestration and automation00 Ratings7.00 Ratings
Reporting and compliance management00 Ratings6.50 Ratings
Incident indexing/searching00 Ratings6.50 Ratings
Best Alternatives
LevelBlue USM AnywhereSplunk Enterprise
Small Businesses
Bitdefender GravityZone
Bitdefender GravityZone
Score 9.1 out of 10
LevelBlue USM Anywhere
LevelBlue USM Anywhere
Score 3.8 out of 10
Medium-sized Companies
CrowdStrike Falcon
CrowdStrike Falcon
Score 9.0 out of 10
Sumo Logic
Sumo Logic
Score 9.4 out of 10
Enterprises
CrowdStrike Falcon
CrowdStrike Falcon
Score 9.0 out of 10
Sumo Logic
Sumo Logic
Score 9.4 out of 10
All AlternativesView all alternativesView all alternatives
User Ratings
LevelBlue USM AnywhereSplunk Enterprise
Likelihood to Recommend
9.8
(0 ratings)
7.8
(0 ratings)
Likelihood to Renew
7.2
(0 ratings)
10.0
(0 ratings)
Usability
6.7
(0 ratings)
8.3
(0 ratings)
Availability
6.4
(0 ratings)
10.0
(0 ratings)
Performance
7.3
(0 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Support Rating
7.3
(0 ratings)
8.4
(0 ratings)
In-Person Training
4.5
(0 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Online Training
8.3
(0 ratings)
8.0
(0 ratings)
Implementation Rating
6.4
(0 ratings)
9.0
(0 ratings)
Configurability
8.0
(0 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Ease of integration
7.3
(0 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Product Scalability
6.3
(0 ratings)
9.1
(0 ratings)
Vendor post-sale
7.6
(0 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Vendor pre-sale
8.2
(0 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
User Testimonials
LevelBlue USM AnywhereSplunk Enterprise
Likelihood to Recommend
AlienVault Unified Security Management (USM) Anywhere is a cloud-based security information and event management solution that provides effective and affordable threat detection, incident response, and compliance management capabilities. USM Anywhere is well suited to mid-size enterprise environments operating in the cloud. USM Anywhere is also well suited to enterprises whose operations teams require easy deployment and management. Last, USM Anywhere is considered a highly affordable option compared to competitors. USM Anywhere lags competitors in several areas, such as application monitoring, database monitoring, and integrations with third-party solutions such as cloud access security brokers (CASB), DAM, DAP, and DLP.
Read full review
Pros: Splunk is very well suited if you have multiple log sources of related data. All of them can be correlated and tasks can be automated based on the requirement. Other than alerts, Splunk can also run a specific script of your choice, based on some defined conditions. Cons: If you have a few logs but a large number of log sources, Splunk can be very expensive.
Read full review
Pros
  • The USM platform provides the essential security capabilities that work together for a fast and cost-effective way for organizations to have complete visibility into the security of their environment.
  • With the information gathered during asset discovery, USM will correlated that information with known vulnerabilities for continuous vulnerability awareness. In addition, USM contains an active scanner capable of scanning for over 30,000 known vulnerabilities.
  • To give better visibility into your network, and possibly detect intrusions that don’t follow behavioral patterns, we offer Netflow information, bandwidth monitoring, and traffic capture, all part of our behavioral monitoring capabilities built into USM.
Read full review
  • Real-time + Scheduled alerts - i-e you can set up alerts which are actively monitoring your logs
  • Pretty good response time for search results. With our key/value logging, Splunk makes it blazing fast to query the data.
  • Dashboards provide insights into historical data
  • Love how Splunk indexes all of the data and provides keys to search on
Read full review
Cons
  • USM Anywhere doesn't allow you to multi-home sensors. So if you have non-routable networks, you'll need to investigate the on-premise solution too.
  • You have to be on top of tuning else a constant stream of alerts will cause your SOC staff to begin ignoring alarms.
  • You have to be on top of tuning else you'll eat your allotment of storage for that month. It is really easy to exceed your storage quota if you don't proactively monitor log sources. USM could do a better job letting you know if a log source is too chatty.
Read full review
  • Even though there is a search tool as a help function, you still have to read through many documentation to find the answers you're looking for and sometimes you don't find it. The help function in Splunk could be improved to be more intuitive or have a built-in help per report, panel or dashboard.
  • Creating a Splunk dashboard is rather straightforward however, customization is not. Splunk could be improved to provide more tools or features for customization such as adding colors and font options for text and graphs or graphics.
  • My dashboard has a lot of useful information and I want the important panels and reports at the top but there is no easy way to do this. Perhaps Splunk could be improved to allow features such as adding URL links to other dashboards or some other clever way to emphasize the important data in my dashboard without compromising space.
Read full review
Likelihood to Renew
The centralized logging and retention for PCI compliance was our main driver, and it is meeting that need. Otherwise there has been enough frustration with the lack of documentation and the need to customize through the CLI that I would be open to alternatives.
Read full review
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.
Read full review
Usability
Once you are able to navigate the different panels, finding what you need is quite easily. Before getting used it it can be a bit of challenge . Each panel is quite well laid out and the filtering search capabilities are quite strong.
Read full review
Splunk Enterprise has plenty of storage space for security logs and can search and correlate suspicious activities up to 30+ days back. Splunk Enterprise can integrate with a ticketing system to track threats and correlate with IoC between security events. Splunk Enterprise can provide reports of account lockouts. Splunk Enterprise can consolidate multiple security alerts into one entry with a number showing how many events occurred.
Read full review
Reliability and Availability
We do have issues with maintenance on the AlienVault USM as the disk fills up from time to time with other data sources. Sources for scanning logs and net flow data isn't calculated in regular disk maintenance and can easily fill up our disk if we do not keep an eye on it with some custom Nagios plugins. The system does properly trim logging data from logging sources properly.
Read full review
When properly setup and configured, Splunk is extremely reliable.
Read full review
Performance
With the latest release of AlienVault USM overall performance has not been an issue. We have noticed single source events per second does not scale well with the overall system. 2,000eps on a vmware system with a single source produces delays of up to an hour for us. Pages, reporting and even raw log searches are rather quick though.
Read full review
No answers on this topic
Support Rating
Support is friendly but response time has been spotty. Also initially when we signed up there was a lot of pointing us at the documentation, which has been spotty and ad-hoc for what is supposed to be a commercial product. Overall the feel of AlienVault and the support has been of a very new and startup company that is trying to grow up out of it's open source roots, and I'm not sure if they've totally been able to make the transition to being able to meet the expectations of the enterprise customers.
Read full review
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.
Read full review
In-Person Training
I did not have any experience with "in person" training directly. The free online classes offered for a half a day are based on the actual training offered. These little teasers are very good and well worth your time to learn a few quick and dirty ways of getting more information from your SIEM
Read full review
No answers on this topic
Online Training
The instructor gave detailed overview and went through the labs before allowing us to attempt using them. I enjoyed the balance of time and level of instruction received. The content went deeper that usual and the lab environment was easy to use and all results were consistent. I came away from the course knowing more than i did if I had just read the course notes.
Read full review
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.
Read full review
Implementation Rating
AlienVault USM was a very simple to implement and get up and running. We started with a trial version and had that up and going within an hour of receiving email instructions from the sales engineer. We never had to contact support to get the system up and going. It was extremely easy to convert over to a full license once we started with a paid version.
Read full review
Smooth without too many major issues.
Read full review
Alternatives Considered
The cost of AlienVault is what sold us on AlienVault. However, considering the amount of time and effort that has gone into getting it set up and realizing that views and reports cannot be shared across groups makes it not worth the savings.
Read full review
A lot of products have natively inside their own dashboards and or their own logging repositories. And each one is difficult to learn or they're too complex or they're not verbose in the sense that they're not easy to mine the data that you're looking for. So that could be anything from the native logging that you find in other Cisco products. It's easier to use Splunk to draw the data that you're looking for as opposed to going to the individual's products themselves to get the logs that you're looking for.
Read full review
Scalability
The AlienVault USM is not very scalable. Some scalability can be achieved by installing additional sensors, but this only offers 500eps per sensor and is still overall limited by the installation type of VM or physical. We have also noticed the EPS (events per second) is rated overall and not towards a single source. A single source on a very healthy VMware partition tops out at 2,000eps for us, no matter how we configure it. Maybe this is a problem of the 5.2 release?
Read full review
Splunk can scale in to the petabyte per day range which of course is awesome
Read full review
Return on Investment
  • Once you hit the 150 asset mark, you have to jump to their unlimited license. There is no middle ground. We were only 10 or so assets above the 150 so we had to chose to either not monitor those assets or pay the price of the upgrade.
  • AlienVault brings all the information to one place which makes it much quicker to track down problems.
Read full review
  • Splunk has allowed developers to diagnose production issues when access of control was taken away from them to be allowed to view items in production environments and I believe that is invaluable.
  • At times some developers weren't super happy about using it, but it was more of the fact that they were used to having production access and not creating their splunk queries to get information.
  • Going one place to view logs was very beneficial to have.
Read full review
ScreenShots