Is Splunk Pricing / Cost Justified?

Is Splunk Pricing / Cost Justified?

This article focuses on the Splunk pricing and cost. If we see the Splunk pricing, you will come to know how expensive Splunk is? Is the cost and high pricing of Splunk justified? Lets try to find out the answer.

No doubt, Splunk is the magnificient log management and analysis tool in the world. No competitor is even near to Splunk if we compare the features of Splunk to other log management tools. Splunk is expert in its field. Spending money on Splunk is the investment.

The cost of Splunk depends on the volume that you're indexing daily and the version of Splunk i,e free or enterprise. The free version of Splunk lets you index up to 500MB/day. For the first 60 days, you'll get to use the enterprise version for free, after which you can continue with the free version or switch to an enterprise license. The enterprise license starts at $6,000 for a 500MB/day perpetual license or $2,000/year for a term license. 

You can get a fair idea about Splunk pricing from here. 

You will get excited by observing the excellent features of Splunk but step behind by seeing the cost of Splunk. Splunk justifies its cost by claiming that no other log management tool can compete it and the dollars you are spending on purchasing their licenses is far less than the befefits Splunk provides. See Splunk's ROI page. 

But my suggestion is that If you really don't require all the extreme features that Splunk provides, you can try many alternatives of Splunk software. You can get many commercial as well as free / open source log management products which are also very competetive.

If you don't want to spend a huge money on Splunk license, you can also get cheaper on from the market. Many commerical log analysis tools like Log Parser (Microsoft Tool), LogRhythm, TIBCO LogLogic and open-source log management tools like Scribe, Logstash, Octopussy, Awstats, nxlog, Graylog2, Fluentd, Meniscus, lucene-log4j, Chainsaw, Logsandra, Clarity, Webalizer, Zenoss, OtrosLogViewer, Kafka, Kibana, Pylogdb, Epylog, Indihiang are the best alternatives and competitors of Splunk. For more detials you can see this and this.