OpenObserve vs Splunk Enterprise
OpenObserve and Splunk Enterprise are both log management software. OpenObserve is open source under AGPL-3.0, with 23k GitHub stars. Splunk Enterprise is a commercial product from Cisco.
Which to pick
- Pick OpenObserve when
- You want a cheaper self-hosted alternative to Elasticsearch, Splunk or Datadog for logs and traces.
- Pick Splunk Enterprise when
- A large organisation needs one platform for security and operations data at high volume and has staff who can write SPL and run the deployment.
Side by side
An observability platform for logs, metrics, traces, real user monitoring and session replay, storing data on object storage in a single binary.
Indexes and searches machine data such as logs, metrics and events, with its own query language (SPL), dashboards, alerting and a security (SIEM) layer on top.
AGPL license, and SSO and some enterprise features require a paid license.
Licensing is priced on data volume or compute and gets expensive quickly, and running it on your own servers takes dedicated administrators.
Production-ready (both)
Self-hosted server and cloud service (both)
Rust, TypeScript and Vue
Not published
Open source, AGPL-3.0 (network copyleft)
Closed source, sold by Cisco
Use inside your business is unrestricted. If you change it and let customers use it over the internet, you must publish your changes.
Closed source: you use it under the maker's terms and cannot change or resell the code.
23k GitHub stars
No Wikipedia article of its own
Established: started 3 years ago, latest release v1.1.2.
Not known
Other comparisons
More log management tools
Both sides were judged on 2026-11-03 from makers' descriptions, Wikipedia, READMEs and GitHub data. License, age and popularity lines are worked out directly.