Best SIEM Tools List For SOC Team – 2023

What is SIEM?

A security information and event management (SIEM) system is the foundation of security processes in the modern security operations center (SOC).

A SIEM saves security analysts the effort of monitoring many different systems. 

SIEM systems integrate with security tools, network monitoring tools, performance monitoring tools, critical servers and endpoints, and other IT systems.

It aggregates the data, correlates it, analyzes it to discover anomalous or suspicious activity, and generates alerts when it identifies an activity that might be a security incident.

Every cybersecurity workflow starts from log data collection and management, that’s why we curated the Best SIEM Tools list that is highly demanded among enterprises that strive to maintain a stable security posture and comply with necessary regulations.

This overview offers a brief look at the top 5 SIEM vendors for the beginning of 2023, both on-premises and cloud-native depending on the infrastructure.

Find out about their distinctive features to choose the best security solution perfectly tailored to your organization-specific needs.

SIEM Capabilities and Applications

SIEM solutions offer various capabilities that provide visibility into a corporate network of devices and apps.

SIEM provides a centralized location for data collection and aggregation, including dashboards that offer insights into overall security and specific threats.

Threat intelligence

SIEM solutions offer insight into known indicators of compromise (IoC) and attacker tactics, techniques, and procedures (TTP). The tool uses several threat intelligence feeds, organizing and analyzing information on current and potential threats.

Threat detection

SIEM tools can detect threats in various locations, including emails, applications, cloud resources, endpoints, and external threat intelligence sources.

Most SIEM solutions achieve threat detection by employing user and entity behavior analytics (UEBA).

It helps monitor and detect abnormal behaviors indicating a threat, such as compromised accounts and lateral movement.

Alerting and investigation

After detecting a vulnerability, threat, suspicious behavior, or attack, SIEM tools create and send alerts to the relevant personnel for response and mitigation, supporting incident response operations.

You can customize SIEM alerts to suit user needs and use managed rules to react almost in real-time to critical threats. Some solutions also offer workflow and case management with automatically created investigation instructions. 

Compliance and reporting

SIEM solutions support compliance and alert reporting to help organizations simplify compliance reporting. This functionality includes data dashboards that help monitor privileged user access and retain and organize event information. 

Best SIEM Tools List and Keywords

SIEM Tools	Key features
1. Splunk	1. Works in the cloud and on-premises log sources 2. Quick threat detection 3. Enables automated actions
2. IBM Security QRadar	1. Supports multiple logging protocols 2. Provides AI-powered investigations 3. Runs intelligent root cause analysis
3. ArcSight	1. Distributed correlation 2. Baselining and outlier mechanism 3. Compliance with GDPR
4. Microsoft Sentinel	1. Query performance 2. Iteration speed 3. Azure Security Center playbook
5. Google Chronicle Security	1. Integration With Virustotal 2. Speed Threat Discovery 3. Low False Positive
6. OSSIM
7. OSSEC
8. Wazuh
9. Apache Metron
10. SIEMonster
11. Prelude SIEM
12. Security Onion
13. Suricata

Best SIEM Tools List 2023

• Splunk
• IBM Security QRadar
• ArcSight
• Microsoft Sentinel
• Google Chronicle Security
• OSSIM
• OSSEC
• Wazuh 
• Apache Metron
• SIEMonster 
• Prelude SIEM
• Security Onion
• Suricata

As the world is now shifting its focus to digital transformation, it has become more critical than ever to ensure that your systems and data are secure.

1. Splunk

Splunk is an American tech company that produces SIEM Tools for searching, monitoring, and analyzing machine-generated data via a Web-style interface.

Organizations can choose the most applicable setup depending on their infrastructure with the same capabilities available in the cloud or on-premises.

Splunk Enterprise covers the needs of on-premises SOCs while Splunk Cloud is suitable for cloud and hybrid architectures. This software is infinitely scalable and effectively deals with big data. Splunk can be installed quickly and is compatible with multiple platforms.

This SIEM is capable of monitoring and searching through vast amounts of data from the organization’s log sources. Next, the information gets indexed and correlated within containers that make it available for search.

It is also possible to automatically generate alerts and reports with a detailed visualization, with the Splunk tool in the Best SIEM Tools List.

Splunk provides improved security operations like customizable dashboards, an asset investigator, statistical analysis, as well as incident review, classification, and investigation.

Key Characteristics:

• Works both with cloud and on-premises log sources
• Allows quick threat detection
• Enables automated actions, workflows, and event sequencing
• Includes the functionality of an asset investigator, statistical analysis, and incident review

Splunk is packed with a lot of useful functions. It’s one of the popular SIEM Tools used across a wide variety of industries by startups and large-scale businesses alike.

Plus, it delivers customizable dashboards so any SOC team can create one that suits their needs and particular system architecture.

For added efficiency and speed, engineers may use the SOC Prime CCM App, both for Splunk Cloud and on-premises to continuously stream new detection rules directly into their environment and update the existing ones.

2. IBM Security QRadar

QRadar SIEM is available both on-premises and in cloud environments. SOC teams can connect a whole network of configured devices, apps, workstations, and servers to collect log data. It also helps to ensure accurate threat detection and run prioritization.

The software ingests and correlates data from endpoints, clouds, networks, and users against the latest threat intel feeds. Advanced security analytics helps to track down threats at every stage of the kill chain.

Prominent Features:

• Supports multiple logging protocols
• Provides AI-powered investigations
• Runs intelligent root cause analysis
• Includes zero-trust model
• Generates reports with visualizations

QRadar delivers a number of useful features that can be further enhanced by integrating other IBM security products. It helps to reduce the manual workload by automation and prioritization.

3. ArcSight

ArcSight Enterprise Security Manager (ESM) is one of the SIEM Tools that scalable solution for collecting, correlating, and reporting on security event information.

It collects data from more than 500 types of log sources. Its scalable data collection framework unlocks visibility across the entire organization’s network.

The aggregation, normalization, and data enrichment enable the performance of advanced security analytics throughout the appliance, software, and cloud environments.

Besides the standard ingestion and interpretation of log data, ArcSight offers threat intelligence, security alerts, compliance reporting, and real-time correlation through intuitive user interface dashboards.

The product is compatible with other security tools from ArcSight such as User Behavior Analytics with the Best SIEM Tools List.

Recent Enhancements to ESM Include:

• Distributed correlation via distributed cluster technology
• Baselining and outlier mechanism notification
• Integration with machine learning algorithms
• Compliance with GDPR
• Default content and customizable rule sets
• Community marketplace support
• Asset, network, user, and vulnerability modeling with geo-location

ArcSight is a highly scalable SIEM solution that is popular among large enterprises and suitable for a wide range of cybersecurity environments. Generally, it provides high-speed performance combined with effective threat blocking.

Overall, the SIEM market stretches far beyond the most popular big players. New startups can find cheaper solutions with more services provided on a subscription basis if they wish to keep a small in-house team.

Moreover, cybersecurity enterprises are looking for highly-scalable solutions that will help overcome the pressure of cost and time caused by cross-tool migrations.

The use of automated content translation engines, like Uncoder.IO, enables converting detection algorithms from the Sigma standard to multiple SIEM language formats on the fly while saving time and costs on cross-tool detection.

4. Microsoft Sentinel

Microsoft Sentinel is the best SIEM tool that enhanced the version of the preexisting on-premises SIEM Microsoft Azure Sentinel which also supports cloud-based functionality.

As a result, the number of available ingested events has grown to over 20 billion daily. 

New Features Include:

• Query performance has become 12 times faster than in the previous version and up to 100 times faster in some particular cases
• The iteration speed of the features set now executes at a faster rate
• The use of out-of-the-box connectors allows easier data ingestion
• Microsoft provides simplified training and onboarding of security engineers for an easy start with the platform
• The newly implemented Azure Security Center playbook automates over 800 Azure subscriptions and soon is about to include 20,000 additional subscriptions

Overall, Microsoft Sentinel is one of the most powerful and best SIEM Tools that offers high performance and needed agility for all kinds of organizations, from small businesses to large-scale enterprises.

Its powerful capabilities for creating analytics rules, hunting, and incident response with playbook support ensure a high level of automation, often demanded by complex networks.

5. Google Chronicle Security

This security analytics platform is built on Google’s infrastructure which gives this platform an edge over its competitors. Chronicle Security offers a cloud-based elastic container for storing enterprises’ security telemetry.

The data integrity is provided by built-in threat signals along with automation capabilities.

Some of the Other Services Include:

• The integration of the largest malware database in the world by VirusTotal Enterprise
• The improved speed of threat discovery and investigation (within seconds)
• Reduced rate of false positives and elimination of the triaging for speeding up threat hunting and detection
• Retroactive correlation of log data with backing from threat intelligence sources such as Avast and AVG
• Ingestion of large data sets, as well as indexing, correlating, and analyzing in a matter of seconds

Backed by Google’s core infrastructure, Chronicle Security provides a number of services that work together at maximum speed.

Security event and information management, as well as extensive threat detection and analysis, are available driven by the ability to process petabytes of data on a whim.

Chronicle is also compatible with popular cybersecurity solutions like SOC Prime’s Detection as Code platform for collaborative cyber defense, threat hunting, and discovery that helps security teams address the challenges of building custom use cases while making threat detection easier, faster, and more efficient.

6. OSSIM

Deployment model: on-premise

AlienVault OSSIM is an open source security solution that provides an intuitive platform for analyzing impending security risks. It provides various tools, including event correlation, vulnerability assessment, behavioral monitoring, and asset discovery.

OSSIM provides a complete SIEM by employing correlation capabilities, native log storage, and various open source projects, such as FProbe, Nagios, Munin, NFSen/NFDump, OSSEC, OpenVAS, PRADS, Suricata, TCPTrack, Snort.

7. OSSEC

Deployment model: on-premise

Atomic Enterprise OSSEC is a cloud-based solution that offers various security and compliance capabilities.

It helps organizations automate cloud, hybrid, and on-premise security processes. OSSEC is based on an open source security framework that enables you to monitor and route logs and events to multiple SIEMs.

OSSEC offers intrusion detection, compliance reporting, file integrity monitoring, and policy management. It supports many compliance regulations, including JSIG, HIPAA, GDPR, and PCI DSS.

Additionally, the platform lets you manage rules centrally and sends alerts to notify users about security changes to systems or files. 

8. Wazuh 

Deployment model: on-premise

Wazuh is an open source platform that provides threat prevention, detection, and response capabilities. You can use Wazuh to protect workloads across on-premises, containerized, cloud-based, and virtualized environments.

Wazuh employs various mechanisms, including an endpoint security agent that monitors systems. It uses a management server to collect and analyze data collected by these agents.

Additionally, Wazuh is fully integrated with the Elastic Stack, providing a search engine and data visualization tool that enables navigating through security alerts.

9. Apache Metron

Deployment model: on-premise

Apache Metron is a security framework for ingesting, processing, and storing diverse security data feeds at scale. It aims to enable organizations to detect and rapidly respond to cyber anomalies.

Here are the key capabilities of this framework:

• Security data lake or vault—the framework provides cost-effective, long-term storage for enriched telemetry data. You can leverage this data for feature engineering and discovery analytics, as well as search and query operational analytics.
• Pluggable framework—Metron provides a rich set of parsers for common security data sources, including pcap, bro, netflow, snort, sourcefire, and fireye. It also offers a pluggable framework. You can use it to add new custom parsers for various new data sources and add new enrichment services for context. It lets you use pluggable extensions for threat intel feeds and customize your security dashboards.
• Security application—the framework offers standard SIEM capabilities, including alerting, agents to ingest data sources, and threat intel framework. It also includes packet replay utilities and hunting services. 
• Threat intelligence—the framework provides next-generation defense techniques that employ anomaly detection and machine learning algorithms in real-time while events stream in.

10. SIEMonster 

Deployment model: on-premise

SIEMonster is an enterprise-grade SIEM tool that combines several open source solutions into one centralized platform to provide real-time threat intelligence. Here are key features of SIEMonster

• Human-based behavior—the tool can integrate with behavioral analysis tools to ensure recorded threats are true and minimize false positives.
• Threat intelligence—the tool offers real-time threat intelligence, including open source or commercial feeds, to stop attacks as they occur.
• Deep learning—the tool employs machine learning for analysis and to automatically kill attacks.

11. Prelude SIEM

Deployment model: on-premise

Prelude SIEM extends Prelude OSS to include an ergonomic interface and various security capabilities.

It lets you continuously monitor your security posture for possible intrusion attempts and quickly analyze the cause of an alert. 

You can employ Prelude SIEM to correlate, search, investigate, and compare information to identify subtle threats and maintain the integrity of evidence.

The tool lets you design and publish various formats of functional or technical reports.

12. Security Onion

Deployment model: on-premise

Security Onion is a Linux distribution for enterprise security monitoring (ESM) and intrusion detection.

It offers network-based and host-based intrusion detection systems (IDS) and full packet capture (FPC), supporting various enterprise security monitoring and threat-hunting responsibilities.

Here are key features:

• Support for network-based intrusion detection systems (NIDS)—Security Onion collects network events from various tools, such as Suricata and Zeek, to provide complete coverage of the enterprise network.
• Support for host-based intrusion detection system (HIDS)—Security Onion supports host-based event collection agents, such as Wazuh, Osquery, and Beats.
• Static analysis (PCAP Import)—you can use Security Onion to import PCAP files for quick static analysis and case studies.

13. Suricata

Deployment model: on-premise

Suricata is an open-source engine for high-performance network IDS, IPS, and network security monitoring.

It is owned by the Open Information Security Foundation (OISF), a non-profit organization. Suricata can store TLS certificates, log HTTP request logs, and extract files from flows and store them on disks.

Suricata uses automatic protocol detection for protocols like HTTP on all ports to apply the proper detection.

It maintains integrations in JSON and YAML to support databases like Splunk and Elasticsearch and supports multithreading natively.

Conclusion

The Best SIEM Tools List help in selecting the right product for detecting and patching the vulnerabilities in a proactive way.

With automated scanning options, you can generate weekly incident analysis reports and compare the results to gain more insight.

While many of these SIEMs are not as fully featured as commercial solutions, they provide more than enough functionality for small-to-medium organizations building their first SOC.

Above mentioned Best SIEM Tools List scanning tools are tested by our expert and listed here based on their performance.