Learn the best Splunk alternative for modern-day stacks, what to look for in alternative solutions, and other factors like logging features, speed, ease of use, deployment, scalability, and cost.

What Does Splunk Do?

Since its first release in 2007, Splunk quickly became one of the leading log management solutions. Its focus on enterprise-grade log analysis and security incident and event management (SIEM) made it the de facto choice for organizations generating large volumes of log files and machine data. But over the past decade, the log management landscape has changed drastically. Modern distributed architectures such as microservices, containers, and hybrid clouds are the new norm, and organizations have new options that are more affordable, faster, and better optimized for managing their log data.

Splunk Advantages

Splunk is more than just a logging platform. It's costly because it's feature-rich for enterprise-level organizations. The Splunk tool ingests, parses, and indexes all kinds of machine data, including event logs, server logs, files, and network events. You can use this data to monitor activity and issues in your infrastructure, look for trends in operational performance, trigger alerts after detecting unusual behavior, and correlating events. In addition to logging, Splunk is a big data analytics platform and SIEM solution.

Splunk Disadvantages

Despite being a feature-rich platform, using Splunk has many drawbacks that make them a terrible option for big and small companies. In addition to cost (up to $4,500+ per GB) and their unfavorable payment model, developers often complain about the slow search speed, inability to handle large amounts of data, the complexity of its setup process, outdated user interface, and the need for onboarding and special training. The good thing is that with many more log management tools available, plenty of alternatives are available. To ensure that we're comparing apples to apples, we made a list of features and requirements to look for in your new logging system.

8 Logging Features to Look For in the Right Alternative

• Ingest data in several different formats from different sources
• Parse and index log data into fields, allowing for searching and filtering
• Real-time (or near real-time) log monitoring with the ability to set alerts
• Visualizations using search screens, dashboards, graphs, and charts
• Capable of running at enterprise scale without sacrificing speed or usability
• Cheaper than Splunk - if you can't collect or store all the log data you need within budget, the logging solution won't work for you.
• A solution that's easy to set up, configure, and maintain without requiring extra headcount or support costs
• Bonus feature - the ability to deploy anywhere - cloud, self-hosted, on-premises, or multi-cloud

Based on these features, here's our list of Splunk competitors to help you choose the absolute best alternative in the log management and analysis space for your business.

5 Best Splunk Alternatives

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Mezmo

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The creators of Mezmo sought to solve many of the key challenges present in other log management solutions. With powerful logging and deployment models available for cloud-based, on-premise, private cloud, and hybrid/multi-cloud, Mezmo offers a significant degree of flexibility for organizations ranging from small businesses to enterprises. Log collection is straightforward. You can collect logs from hosts using an installed agent or send logs directly from applications or platforms such as AWS, Docker, Kubernetes, Heroku, and Syslog. Mezmo prioritizes speed and accessibility. Built on a super-optimized Elasticsearch, Mezmo lets you index, filter, and tail logs instantaneously. The web-based UI is straightforward and intuitive, allowing you to filter by key fields and group logs by source quickly. In addition to supporting custom views and graphs, the Mezmo web UI enables you to create custom dashboards or provide user-specific event logs to customers. Unlike many log management solutions, Mezmo prices by usage with no data caps. You only pay for what you use. Mezmo offers three pricing tiers- Community, Professional, and Enterprise. The Community tier is free and doesn’t include retention or custom parsing. The Professional tier includes unlimited ingestion and up to 30 days of retention starting at $0.80 per GB per month for three days of retention. Enterprise plan users have up to 30 days of retention (and significantly longer for HIPAA compliance) and the ability to customize their logging experience. Mezmo offers a fully-featured free 14-day trial to get started.
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Elastic Stack

The Elastic Stack (previously the ELK stack) has the distinction of being an open-source log management solution. It consists of four separate projects:

• Elasticsearch: a search and analytics engine
• Logstash: a log ingestion and processing pipeline
• Kibana: a data visualization tool for Elasticsearch
• Beats: a set of agents that collect and send data to Logstash

The base installation provides all of the tools needed to ship, ingest, and view log data using a web-based UI. Because it's open-source, users can download and run the Elastic Stack for free, meaning that Elastic Stack benefits from an active developer community, hundreds of plugins, and support for a diverse array of input formats and sources. However, running the Elastic Stack is not as straightforward as other solutions. The Elastic Stack needs extensive setup and configuration before working as an enterprise-scale log management solution as a primarily self-hosted solution. Although Elastic—the company that maintains the Elastic Stack—offers cloud-hosted Elasticsearch as a service, hosted Logstash and hosted Kibana services are only available through third-party providers such as AWS and Azure. In addition, the free version of the Elastic Stack is limited in its functionality. Features common to other log management solutions such as access controls, alerting, reporting, and graphing are only available through a subscription. The Elastic Stack is also expensive to host, costing nearly $2,000,000 to run at an enterprise scale over just three years.
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Fluentd

Fluentd is a tool for ingesting structured, unstructured, and semi-structured data sets. It acts as an intermediary between data sources and outputs, converting and routing data for various platforms, services, applications, and programming languages. Fluentd sees use as a data aggregation service for services such as the Microsoft Operations Management Suite as an open-source tool. Fluentd is a data collection and routing service, which doesn't include log shipping or management services. Instead, it integrates with other solutions through plugins, which add support for different inputs and outputs. For example, support for ingesting logs via Amazon CloudFront can come from using the CloudFront-log plugin, while logs can be routed to Elasticsearch using the elasticsearch plugin. However, this does mean having to build your log management solution essentially from scratch, with Fluentd providing only ingestion and routing services. Fluentd is now a popular replacement for Logstash, turning ELK into EFK. Fluentd itself is free, but much like the Elastic Stack, it can become expensive over time. Fluentd has a small memory and CPU footprint, but it relies on several other components to create a complete log management solution. Combined with a lengthy setup and customization process, this makes it significantly harder to set up and maintain than other solutions.

Sumo Logic

Sumo Logic is a software-as-a-service (SaaS) logging platform that received attention for marketing itself as a cloud-based competitor to Splunk. Sumo Logic automatically scales to your log volume as a hosted service, claiming to support multiple terabytes of ingested data per day. Sumo Logic also collects metrics from host machines and cloud platforms, letting you track the health of your systems alongside your log data. Sumo Logic uses agents (called Installed Collectors) to collect and transfer data from host systems. Like Splunk, users can add new functionality to Splunk through add-ons (called apps). Despite Sumo Logic's marketplace not being as extensive as Splunk's, the available apps cover many popular services and platforms, including AWS, Azure, Google Cloud, Docker, and Kubernetes. Sumo Logic is a strictly cloud-based service, meaning there is no option for on-premise installation. Monthly plans start at $108 per GB per month, with a minimum of 3GB of ingestion, including 30GB of log data retention. Sumo Logic also offers a free 30 day trial with up to 500 MB of ingestion and 4 GB of retention.
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Loggly

Loggly is a cloud-based log management solution that offers an agentless ingestion service, allowing you to transmit logs directly over HTTP/HTTPS or Syslog. Loggly automatically parses various formats and sources, including Docker, AWS, Syslog, Heroku, Windows, and Linux logs. Loggly also offers the ability to create custom parsing rules for unsupported formats. Loggly's most defining feature is its field explorer, which lets you search, filter, and summarize logs on a single screen. You can quickly view the frequency of events, select fields and values to filter on, and apply custom search parameters without typing in a query. Loggly can also convert the searches into alerts for real-time updates and notifications. Because Loggly is agentless, each log-generating component in your infrastructure must already have the configuration to forward logs to Loggly. Logging Kubernetes and other distributed platforms often mean using third-party solutions and complex workarounds, making Loggly better suited for smaller deployments or shipping logs directly from applications. Loggly also does not offer an on-premise solution. Enterprise plans start at $349/month. Standard plans start much lower at $79 per month but only offer up to 30 GB/month of ingestion, 30 days of retention, and fewer features.

How to Choose the Best Log Management Solution

While most log management solutions offer the same base functionality, each of the tools in this list has its unique advantages and specialties. The "best" solution depends on what your requirements are, as well as what insights you wish to gain from analyzing your logs. Read this post on How to Choose the Best Log Management System for more guidance. Before you settle on a solution, set up a free trial run, send your logs, and let your team root out cause production issues with the log management interface of choice to see the impact it has on your operations. Read our Log Management Buyers Guide to learn more about what else you should look for when looking for a log management solution. Don't hesitate to contact us with any questions in your evaluation process.

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