RunReveal vs Splunk: A Modern SIEM Alternative for Security Teams

RunReveal is a modern, AI-native SIEM platform and a direct alternative to Splunk. Unlike Splunk, which prices on data ingestion volume and requires third-party tools like Cribl for pipeline management, RunReveal bundles detection, pipelines, and AI investigations into a single platform with storage-based pricing.

If your security team is fed up with Splunk's unpredictable pricing, steep learning curve, and increasingly complex licensing, you're not alone. A growing number of teams are looking for something better, and RunReveal was built to be exactly that.

This guide breaks down the key differences between RunReveal and Splunk across pricing, AI-native features, pipelines, detection capabilities, deployment, and more.

Why security teams are rethinking Splunk

Splunk has been a dominant force in security information and event management (SIEM) for over a decade. But the security landscape has changed dramatically (and so have the expectations of the teams doing the work).

Today's security teams are often cloud-native, fast-moving, and cost-conscious. They need tools that can ingest massive volumes of data without sending the finance team into a spiral, and that analysts can actually use without a multi-week training program. Splunk was built for a different era, and many organizations are finding that maintaining and scaling it is consuming resources that would be better spent on actual security work.

The complaints are consistent: unpredictable bills that scale with data volume, a proprietary query language (SPL) that requires dedicated training, slow deployment cycles, and a growing reliance on expensive professional services or highly-trained internal team members to get anything done.

RunReveal was designed from the ground up as an AI-native SIEM that makes security data fast, affordable, and approachable, all without the baggage.

RunReveal vs Splunk: At a glance

Here's a high-level comparison across the dimensions that matter most to security teams evaluating their options:

Pricing & Total cost of ownership (TCO)

Let's start with the issue that drives most Splunk-to-any-other-SIEM migration conversations: cost.

Splunk's pricing model is notoriously complex. At its core, it charges based on the volume of data you ingest, typically measured in GB per day. This sounds straightforward until your infrastructure starts generating more logs — which it inevitably does as your organization grows. You add a new cloud environment, roll out a new product, or respond to a surge in traffic, and suddenly your Splunk bill has ballooned by 40%. It's a model that punishes you for growth.

On top of per-GB ingestion costs, many organizations layer in infrastructure costs, professional services fees for implementation and maintenance, and licensing for premium features. Getting a true total cost of ownership number out of Splunk often requires a spreadsheet, a procurement call, and a few rounds of negotiation.

RunReveal takes a different approach. With RunReveal, pricing is based on the data you store, not ingest. This is particularly powerful since most security teams don’t need (or want) to keep all logs. When Sentry made the switch to RunReveal, they immediately started saving $40,000/year by filtering out unnecessary GCP logs.

The downstream effect on total cost of ownership is significant. When you factor in reduced licensing complexity, faster onboarding (meaning less professional services spend), and the time savings from a more intuitive platform, many teams find that RunReveal is substantially less expensive to operate even if the sticker price looks similar.

Data ingestion & scalability

A SIEM is only as good as its ability to handle data at scale. Security environments generate enormous volumes of logs (think: cloud infrastructure, applications, endpoints, identity providers) and your SIEM needs to ingest, index, and make that data queryable without falling over.

RunReveal is built on ClickHouse, a columnar database designed for high-performance analytical queries on large datasets. This is a meaningful technical differentiator. ClickHouse is used by some of the world's most data-intensive companies (including RunReveal customers like ClickHouse itself!) precisely because it handles massive volumes of data with speed and efficiency that traditional relational or proprietary indexing systems can't match.

What this means in practice: queries that might take minutes in Splunk take seconds in RunReveal. Ingestion pipelines that require complex tuning in Splunk work reliably out of the box. And as your data volumes grow, the performance holds up rather than degrading.

Splunk's indexing architecture has been around for a long time and is robust in its own right, but it wasn't designed with the modern cloud data landscape in mind. Scaling Splunk often requires architectural decisions (e.g., managing indexes, tiered storage configurations, forwarder management) that add operational complexity and, frequently, cost.

Detection engineering & AI capabilities

Detection is the core job of a SIEM. How well does each platform help you find real threats in the noise?

RunReveal ships with out-of-the-box detection coverage for common attack patterns and cloud-native threat scenarios. The detection library is maintained and updated, meaning your team isn't starting from scratch or relying entirely on community-contributed content. For teams that want to write custom detections, the SQL-compatible query language makes it accessible to anyone with basic data skills — you don't need a SPL specialist on staff.

This is where the 'AI-native' distinction matters most. RunReveal was built from the beginning with AI as a first-class feature and not just bolted on after the fact. The AI features are designed to help security teams write, test, and tune detections faster, surface anomalies that rule-based systems would miss, and reduce the time spent on false positives. 

In addition, RunReveal normalizes data out-of-the-box. This not only makes the data more readable (yay!), but more usable and ready for AI use. Traditional SIEMs like Splunk require more heavy-lifting around data engineering and preprocessing for it to be ready for analysis and AI usage.

With RunReveal’s Autonomous Security Operation Agent, RunReveal also automates traditional SOC workflows with AI. Using the agent, RunReveal will automatically open a new case, run its investigation and update the case with its finding and analysis, and provide the full query history and reasoning for your investigation. Investigative work that would traditionally take hours now takes minutes.

Splunk has made significant investments in AI capabilities over the years that are mostly add-ons to a core platform that wasn't built with AI workflows in mind. Integrating them adds complexity, cost, and in many cases, requires dedicated expertise to operate effectively.

Query language & ease of use

One of the most common pain points for Splunk users isn't just the technology, it's also the language. Splunk’s SPL (Search Processing Language) is powerful, but complex and proprietary. Learning it takes time, and using it fluently requires ongoing practice.

RunReveal uses SQL-compatible syntax. This is a deliberate choice that makes the platform accessible to a much wider pool of security analysts, data engineers, and developers.

Beyond the query language, RunReveal's interface is designed to reduce friction at every step. Investigation workflows are intuitive, dashboards are straightforward to build, and the onboarding experience is designed to get teams productive quickly rather than requiring weeks of configuration and training before they see value.

This isn't just about convenience or the simplicity of a product UI; there’s real implications to security. A tool that analysts actually enjoy using gets used more. Investigations happen faster. Detections get tuned more frequently. And the security posture of the organization improves because the tooling complexity isn't getting in the way.

Pipelines & routing: Built-in vs. bolted-on

Most security environments generate far more data than they can afford to store or analyze at full fidelity. VPC flow logs, DNS query logs, Cloudtrail logs — these sources can produce enormous volumes of data, most of which is noise. The ability to enrich, transform, filter, and selectively route that data before it lands in your SIEM isn't just a nice-to-have; it's how security teams keep their costs manageable and their signal-to-noise ratio high.

RunReveal ships with Pipelines as a native, first-class capability. You can define pipelines that enrich events with additional context (geolocation, asset metadata, threat intelligence), transform fields to normalize data across sources, filter out low-value events before they're ever stored, and drop data entirely when it has no security relevance. All of this happens inside the platform you're already using requiring no additional tools, vendors, or bills.

How does Splunk handle this data preprocessing and filtering? In two primary ways:

1. Splunk's native approach to data routing and filtering has historically been manual and config-file-driven. Recently, Splunk has introduced newer tools to address this: Ingest Actions for ingest-time processing and Edge Processor for transformation closer to the data source. Edge Processor is an improvement and is included for Splunk Cloud customers. But it's worth noting what it represents: Splunk building capabilities that were missing from the platform, prompted in large part by the success of third-party tools like Cribl that filled the gap. 
2. Third-party tooling (Cribl): The clearest evidence that Splunk's native pipeline capabilities have historically been insufficient is the market that grew up around that gap. Cribl, founded in 2018 by ex-Splunk employees who knew the limitations firsthand, built a $3.5B company largely by solving the problem Splunk couldn't: giving security teams a powerful pipeline layer that sat in front of their SIEM. That means many Splunk shops are effectively paying twice: once for the SIEM, and again for the pipeline tool needed to make the SIEM affordable. It's a pattern that RunReveal eliminates entirely.

RunReveal Pipelines

With RunReveal, pipelines aren't a separate product or an add-on; they're a core part of the platform. Security teams can enrich incoming events with context that makes detections more actionable, transform and normalize data across disparate sources without writing custom parsers, filter out noisy or low-value events before they consume storage, and drop data entirely when it has no security value. The result is that you're only storing and analyzing data that matters, which keeps both your costs and your alert queue under control.

This matters especially for high-volume data sources that are notoriously expensive to ingest at full fidelity (e.g., VPC flow logs, DNS logs, verbose endpoint telemetry). With RunReveal Pipelines, you can define smart rules that keep the security-relevant events and discard the rest, without needing a separate tool, a separate contract, or a separate team to manage it.

The bottom line: with Splunk, data pipeline management is a problem you solve by buying additional products. With RunReveal, it's a capability that comes with the platform.

Customer support & success

When something breaks at 2 AM during a security incident, how does your vendor respond? Support quality is often the difference between a SIEM that teams trust and one that becomes a source of frustration.

RunReveal takes a high-touch, hands-on approach to customer support. The team works closely with customers during onboarding and remains accessible throughout the relationship; not through a ticket queue, but through direct access to people who know the product deeply. For a growing startup, this kind of engagement is something larger vendors simply can't match.

Splunk offers tiered support that scales with your contract level. Enterprise customers get dedicated support with defined SLAs. But the experience is fundamentally different from what you get with a smaller, more focused vendor, and many customers report that navigating Splunk's support organization can itself be a challenge.

RunReveal customers like Sentry have noted that the responsiveness and technical depth of RunReveal's team is a meaningful differentiator. When you're dealing with a security incident or trying to tune a detection that's generating noise, being able to get a fast, informed answer matters.

Real-world results: What RunReveal customers say

The best evidence for any security tool is how it performs in production. RunReveal works with some of the most technically sophisticated companies in the world, including Cursor, Harvey, ClickHouse, DigitalOcean, and more.

Here’s just some of the amazing things they’re saying about us:

• “RunReveal is our cloud security partner in crime. Their expertise in data security and commitment to technical collaboration is why ClickHouse selected RunReveal over legacy SIEM solutions.” - Julio Jimenez, Cloud Security Lead, ClickHouse
• “I can add a new [source], write the detection, read queries, find the data that I want, and wire it up to get alerts for it, all within an hour or two. Pretty great compared to existing tool stacks that would be weeks or more.” - Travis McPeak, Security, Cursor
• “The amount of transparency with RunReveal is the highest I’ve had with any vendor.” - Geoff Goldsmith, Senior Security Engineer, Sentry
• “Data collection isn’t the goal, detection is. Pipelines in RunReveal let us enrich what we need and cut what we don’t, so we’re not buried under terabytes of irrelevant logs.” - Dave Green, Threat & Detection Response Lead, Temporal

Who is RunReveal built for?

RunReveal is purpose-built for security teams that need modern, fast, AI-native, and cost-effective SIEM capabilities without the operational weight of legacy platforms.

RunReveal is particularly well-suited for high-growth companies that need security infrastructure that scales with them, without the pricing model that punishes growth. It's also a strong fit for teams that have experienced the Splunk complexity spiral and are ready for something built for the way security teams actually work today.

If you're evaluating RunReveal for an enterprise environment with significant legacy or on-premises infrastructure, the team is worth talking to; product coverage continues to expand, and the migration support has helped teams in complex environments make the transition successfully.

Frequently asked questions (FAQs)

Getting started with RunReveal

If you've read this far, you're probably seriously evaluating your options. The best way to understand whether RunReveal is the right fit for your environment is to see it in action with your actual data.

RunReveal offers demos tailored to your specific environment and use cases. You'll get a hands-on look at the platform with someone who can answer your specific questions.

For teams actively migrating from Splunk, RunReveal's team has helped organizations of various sizes and complexity levels make the transition. They can walk you through what migration looks like for your specific environment, including how to bring over detection content and data sources.

Ready to explore? Book a demo with our team or start a free trial.