Coralogix vs Splunk: Support, Pricing and More

Splunk has become one of several players in the observability industry, offering a set of features and a specific focus on legacy and security use cases. That being said, how does Splunk compare to Coralogix as a complete full-stack observability solution?

Let’s dive into the key differences between Coralogix vs Splunk, including customer support, pricing, cost optimization, and more.

Logs, Metrics, Traces and Alerting

Coralogix and Splunk support ingesting logs, metrics, and traces. While these three data types are common across most SaaS observability platforms, Coralogix uses a unique data streaming analytics pipeline called Streama to analyze data in real-time and provide long-term trend analysis without indexing. Streama opens the door for cost-optimization that is simply impossible on other architectures. 

The Bottom Line – The Difference in Cost

Splunk prices are difficult to find without booking a meeting and receiving a quote, however they do publish prices on AWS marketplace for their logs, which is what we’ve used as a comparison. Splunk comes in at almost 4x the cost of Coralogix.

This means Coralogix represents a 66% – 76% cost saving, for 100GB of Logs per day. This is powered by Coralogix’s revolutionary TCO Optimizer and the Streama© architecture.

Data Correlation and Usability 

Coralogix and Splunk ingest logs, metrics, and traces from many different sources, but Coralogix excels at bringing all this data together in a single, cohesive journey, which lets users to sail between data types seamlessly. 

Coralogix Flow Alerts

Coralogix alerting has unique features like Coralogix Flow Alerts, allowing users to orchestrate their logs, metrics, traces, and security data into a single alert that tracks multiple events over time. Using Flow Alerts, customers can track the change in their system.

Archiving and Archive Query

Both Splunk and Coralogix offer users the ability to archive their data into an S3 bucket. Doing so has a huge cost impact because S3 offers very low retention costs and opens the door for long-term retention of data, for historical analysis or compliance purposes.

However, only Coralogix enables customers to still query their remote archive, without reindexing for no additional cost. Splunk requires users to reindex their data into high performance storage, before it can be analyzed. Therefore, so-called cost savings made through archiving in Splunk are potentially delayed costs, rather than true savings. 

Cost Optimizations

1. Coralogix

Coralogix users start by indexing the majority of their data, but over time, they tend to transfer more data to the archive. This is because it can be queried in seconds, at no additional cost.

This functionality means customers can store the majority of their data in S3, and pay at most $0.023 / GB for storage. Coupled with the Compliance ingest costs in Coralogix, $0.17 / GB, the GB cost for ingest and storage is $0.193 / GB for the first month and $0.023/GB every month after that. Customers can cut costs by between 40% and 70%.

Compared to Splunk, Coralogix cost optimization rests entirely with the customer. Cost optimization with a Splunk deployment requires a complex analysis of different pricing plans, data ingestion approaches, risky archiving and reindexing decisions, which could incur huge costs in the future.

2. Splunk

For Splunk customers, there are multiple pricing plans based on ingestion volume, compute, license length and more. All of this makes for unclear, unpredictable costs that are difficult to optimize.

Coralogix doesn’t charge by cloud resources, rather by ingestion volume. More than that, Coralogix allows customers to assign use cases to traces and logs, helping drive instant cost savings via the TCO Optimizer. These decisions are flexible and reversible, and entirely risk free. 

Customer Support 

Splunk does not offer global 24/7 support, even to Premium customers. Only for the most severe incidents (P1 & P2) is 24/7 support guaranteed. Otherwise, customer care is only presented during office hours.

The problem with this model is simple. Incidents are often miscategorised initially. If an incident is first identified as P3 when in fact it grows into a P1, this has the potential for bureaucratic time wasting while an incident costs you money. 

Coralogix offers all customers a median 30-second response time, an SLA measured in minutes, and 24/7 support. Coralogix also offers a median resolution time of 43 minutes. Even with the most complete support that Splunk can offer, they only work through issues 10 minutes faster than Coralogix does at resolving them. 

Out-of-the-box Dashboards

Splunk offers some great infrastructure monitoring tools, but it is lacking in dashboards focused on specific technologies. There are no prebuilt dashboards that help to solve the biggest issues in Kubernetes or Serverless architectures. Instead, they rely on more flexible, generic dashboards. 

Coralogix has built dashboards for Kubernetes Monitoring, Serverless monitoring and more, while also supporting open source dashboarding solutions like Grafana. Coralogix also provides a custom dashboarding solution for Coralogix users.

The platform’s reuse of open source dashboards, like JSON definitions, and the time-to-value of premade dashboards makes its offerings the best of both worlds. In addition, tools like DataMap give customers the power of total visualization flexibility.