Wazuh vs Splunk: Honest Comparison for SOC Teams (2026)

Splunk and Wazuh both land in shortlists for SIEM, but they solve the problem from opposite ends. Splunk is a general-purpose machine-data platform with a mature security app on top. Wazuh is a security-first XDR/SIEM with the agent, manager, indexer and dashboard included out of the box. This guide compares them honestly, with no vendor bias.

Licensing and cost

• Wazuh: free, open-source (GPLv2). No per-agent or per-GB fees, you pay only for infrastructure and (optionally) Wazuh Cloud or partner support.
• Splunk: priced by daily ingest (GB/day) or workload pricing. Enterprise Security is an add-on SKU.
• At 200 GB/day Wazuh infrastructure typically runs 5--10x cheaper than equivalent Splunk licensing.

Detection content

Splunk ships with the Common Information Model (CIM), Enterprise Security correlation searches, and a large official content library. Wazuh ships with 4,000+ out-of-the-box rules, MITRE ATT&CK mapping, FIM, SCA, vulnerability detection and active response built in.

Endpoint coverage

• Wazuh agent is free and runs on Linux, Windows, macOS, AIX, Solaris, HP-UX and containers.
• Splunk Universal Forwarder ships logs but does not do FIM, SCA, rootcheck or active response natively, you bolt those on with extra apps.

Scaling and operations

Splunk SmartStore and indexer clustering scale very large environments cleanly but require licensed tiers. Wazuh scales horizontally through indexer (OpenSearch) and manager clusters; sizing and tuning fall on your team unless you engage a partner.

When to pick which

• Pick Wazuh if licensing cost is a constraint, you want unified XDR + SIEM, or you have engineering capacity to operate open-source.
• Pick Splunk if you need a mature general-purpose data platform across many non-security teams, or your stakeholders mandate it.
• Many teams run both: Wazuh as the security data plane and Splunk as the business analytics plane.

We migrate Splunk ES use cases into Wazuh and keep detection coverage intact, talk to our team for a scoping call.