Switching From Splunk? Why SolarWinds Is the Smarter Choice

SolarWinds Observability provides a more comprehensive solution, combining over 25 years of deep infrastructure monitoring expertise with modern AI capabilities. Our AI is built to understand your entire infrastructure stack, including applications, network topology, and legacy systems that many enterprises still depend on, which Splunk's cloud-first heritage can't match.

SolarWinds offers unparalleled flexibility with hybrid monitoring, allowing you to deploy the platform on-premises, in a public or private cloud, or as a cloud-native SaaS solution. This is a fundamental difference from Splunk's Observability Cloud, which is a SaaS-only, cloud-native solution. Our flexible deployment options ensure complete customer control and data sovereignty, a benefit missing from Splunk's model.

While Splunk's core platform (Splunk Enterprise) can be deployed on-premises and in hybrid environments, its Observability Cloud product is a cloud-native, SaaS-only offering. This means Splunk is expanding its network monitoring features for observability via recent Cisco integration to move from a cloud-first posture to a more comprehensive hybrid-cloud offering. In contrast, SolarWinds has a deep heritage in network infrastructure monitoring built for complex hybrid environments.

Yes, SolarWinds Observability can support various third-party integrations and open-source standards. The SolarWinds^® platform supports OpenTelemetry as a native standard for collecting telemetry data from distributed applications. Additionally, our SaaS offering provides out-of-the-box integrations with various tools and services, including cloud infrastructures, notification services, and languages.

While Splunk is a key contributor to the OpenTelemetry project and has built its platform on it, the strength of SolarWinds lies in its ability to support your entire infrastructure, not only modern, cloud-native applications. This includes comprehensive monitoring across traditional and modern infrastructure, giving you complete visibility and the ability to integrate with the legacy systems most enterprises still depend on.

SolarWinds Observability offers flexible, transparent pricing. In contrast, Splunk's pricing models can be more complex and are typically based on ingestion volume, hosts, or activity, which can lead to unpredictable costs. Our clear pricing and proven results—with 60% of our customers achieving a 30% improvement in mean time to resolution (MTTR)—ensure you get more value for your investment.