- Splunk gathers log files from every server, firewall and app into one search box.
- A free trial lasts 60 days before switching over to a free plan.
- The free plan caps out at 500 megabytes of new data a day.
- Full pricing needs a call to Splunk's sales team to get a quote.
- Free tools like Elasticsearch and Grafana Loki cover similar ground for less money.
Splunk collects log files that servers, firewalls and apps write, usually scattered across different machines. It puts them all in one system you can search from one place.
Splunk gives new users a free 60 day trial of Splunk Enterprise with no credit card required, according to Splunk's download page. Once the trial ends, you can switch to a free license that keeps running instead of paying. Splunk says the trial lets you search, analyze and visualize your data on dashboards.
Splunk Enterprise free trial page
The free license has real limits, according to Splunk's own documentation. It caps you at 500 megabytes of new data a day, and blocks searching after three violations in 30 days. It also turns off alerts and logins, so anyone who opens it is signed in as an administrator automatically.
Splunk doesn't publish a price for its main log platform, so bigger customers have to contact its sales team for a quote. Some of its other products do list prices. Its Observability Cloud starts at $15 a month for each machine it watches. Its On-Call scheduling tool starts at $5 a month per person, for up to 10 people.
Splunk isn't an independent company anymore. Cisco finished buying it in 2024. The deal paid $157 a share and was worth about $28 billion.
Elasticsearch and Grafana Loki are free tools that do a similar job. Elasticsearch is an open source search engine that Elastic put back under a fully open license called AGPL. Grafana Loki only indexes labels like which app a log came from, not the full text, and keeps the rest in cheap storage. Grafana's hosted version, Grafana Cloud, gives up to 50 gigabytes of logs for free.
Datadog and Sumo Logic sell hosted versions of the same idea, and both cost money from the start. Datadog charges $0.10 for every gigabyte of log data it takes in each month. It also charges $1.70 for every million log entries it keeps searchable for 15 days. Sumo Logic instead sells a pool of credits you spend across its tools, with unlimited users on every plan.
