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Keel vs Splunk

Your Splunk renewal is a decision,
not an obligation.

Splunk is a powerful platform with a pricing model built for a different era. Keel gives you AI-native log analytics as a flat-price appliance you run inside your own network — with every feature included, your log data staying on infrastructure you own, and the AI model your choice. Here's the honest comparison.

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The short version

Choose based on what you actually need.

Keel is the better fit if you…

  • Are staring at a six-figure Splunk renewal for log analytics and search
  • Need self-hosted deployment on your own infrastructure — your cloud or on-prem, up to fully air-gapped — without a services project
  • Want to ask anything about your logs in plain English, with automatic root cause analysis — running on the model you choose (your own key, or a local model for air-gapped sites)
  • Want to connect your own AI agents to your logs over MCP — read-only and scoped
  • Have long compliance retention needs and don't want to pay per GB for the privilege
  • Want one flat, published price with every feature included

Splunk still leads if you…

  • Depend heavily on Splunk Enterprise Security and its detection content ecosystem
  • Use many third-party Splunkbase apps with no equivalent elsewhere
  • Run multi-petabyte estates with a dedicated Splunk platform team
  • Have deep organisational investment in SPL skills and tooling

Most teams aren't in the second column for their log analytics workload — they're paying premium SIEM prices for search, dashboards, and alerting. That's the workload Keel replaces, and you can migrate it source by source without touching the rest.

Side by side

The detailed comparison.

Last reviewed Oct 2026

DimensionKeelSplunk CloudSplunk Enterprise (self-hosted)
Pricing model Flat annual license per appliance, banded by volume. Published prices from $6,000/yr. All features, every tier. Per-GB ingest or workload pricing — not published, quote only. Independent analyses put effective cost at ≈ $900–$1,100 per GB/day per year before discounts. Ingest-licensed plus your infrastructure and a platform team to run it.
Cost at 50 GB/day $14,800/yr — Growth plan, everything included. ≈ $30K–$55K/yr depending on discount (list-price estimate). License + hardware + FTE time — typically well above Keel all-in.
Data sovereignty By architecture. Your log data stays in your network — ingest, storage, search and dashboards run on infrastructure you own. No phone-home. Air-gap supported and documented. Your logs live in Splunk's cloud. Regional options exist; the data still leaves your network. On-prem capable — with a significant deployment and operations footprint.
AI capabilities Native, and your model. Ask Keel anything in plain English (it answers with a result, a chart, or a summary), automatic RCA on incidents, a read-only chat assistant over your runbooks, and an MCP server for your own AI agents. Point it at your own Anthropic, OpenAI or Gemini key, any OpenAI-compatible endpoint, or a local model — for AI, only the context for that request goes to the endpoint you control, or nothing leaves at all in local mode. AI Assistant add-ons, cloud-delivered. Your queries and context transit Splunk's AI services, on Splunk's model. Limited. Cloud AI features don't apply to isolated deployments.
Deployment One VM image (OVA / VHDX / QCOW2). Import, boot, guided setup. HA as a 3-node cluster. None (SaaS) — onboarding and data migration still required. Multi-tier architecture — indexers, search heads, forwarders, cluster management.
Retention Your disk, your call. No enforced cap, no retention premium. Tiered and priced. Long compliance retention gets expensive. Configurable — you manage the storage architecture.
Query language Ask Keel anything. Ask in plain English; Keel answers — a result, a chart, or a summary — and you can save and pin it. Read-only SQL is there for power users. SPL — powerful, with a real learning curve and hiring dependency. SPL — same skills dependency.
Ingest standards OpenTelemetry-native — OTLP gRPC/HTTP, syslog, Fluentd, plus AWS/Azure/GCP connectors. Partial OTel support — forwarder-centric ecosystem. Partial OTel support — forwarder-centric ecosystem.
SIEM / detection content Alert rules + incident tracking, not a packaged SIEM content library. Enterprise Security — mature, and priced accordingly ($20–40/GB/day on top). Enterprise Security available — same premium.
App ecosystem Focused product, webhooks + connectors — no third-party app marketplace. Splunkbase — thousands of apps. Splunkbase — thousands of apps.

Splunk figures are good-faith estimates from published list pricing and independent 2026 analyses — see methodology. Your contract may differ.

A concrete example: 50 GB/day

A typical mid-market engineering estate — a few hundred services and hosts across two data centres.
Splunk Cloud (list-price estimate)≈ $47,500 / yr
Keel Growth — all features included$14,800 / yr
≈ $32,700 back in your budget, every year — before counting retention fees, add-ons, or the next volume increase.
Even against a heavily discounted Splunk contract at this volume (~$30K/yr), Keel halves the bill — and includes on-prem AI that isn't on Splunk's menu at any price. Run your own numbers →

Where we'll be straight with you

Splunk is a mature platform with an ecosystem nobody matches — if your security operation is built on Enterprise Security content and Splunkbase apps, ripping it all out in one quarter is the wrong move. That's why Keel supports gradual, per-source migration: start with the log analytics workload where the savings are immediate, keep anything Splunk still earns, and re-evaluate at each renewal. We'd rather you know the trade-offs before the POC than discover them during it.

Migration path

Run both. Migrate source by source.
Cancel nothing until you're sure.

1

Deploy Keel alongside Splunk

Import the VM image and dual-ship one or two log sources via OTLP, syslog, or Fluentd. Your Splunk pipeline is untouched — per-source isolation means adding Keel disrupts nothing.

2

Compare on your real data

During the 30-day guided POC, your team runs the same investigations in both tools. Test the natural-language search against SPL, and let automatic RCA handle a few real alerts.

3

Shift volume at renewal

Repoint sources to Keel and reduce your Splunk license band at renewal — or exit entirely. Keep long-tail retention on Keel where disk is cheap and yours.

Questions

Keel vs Splunk — FAQ

Is Keel a drop-in replacement for Splunk?
For log analytics, search, alerting, and incident workflows — yes, and you can migrate gradually. Keel ingests from OTLP, syslog, and Fluentd, so most Splunk forwarder estates can be repointed source by source. Keel does not attempt to replicate Splunk's full app marketplace or its premium SIEM suite; if you depend heavily on Splunk Enterprise Security content, evaluate that workload separately during the POC.
How much cheaper is Keel than Splunk?
Splunk doesn't publish prices — quotes are negotiated with sales. Independent analyses of real-world contracts put Splunk Cloud at roughly $900–$1,100 per GB/day of licensed capacity per year before discounts. Keel is a flat, published annual license — $14,800/year covers up to 50 GB/day with every feature included. At typical volumes teams see an 80–90% reduction versus estimated list, and large savings even against discounted contracts. Run your numbers in the calculator.
Can Keel run in air-gapped environments like Splunk Enterprise?
Yes — this is Keel's home turf. Keel ships as a single VM appliance (OVA, VHDX, QCOW2) and requires no phone-home. For air-gapped sites, point its AI at a local model served via any OpenAI-compatible endpoint (for example Ollama) and use offline licensing — then asking Keel anything in plain English and automatic root cause analysis run fully offline, with nothing leaving your network. Where you do have connectivity, you can instead bring your own hosted Anthropic, OpenAI, or Google Gemini key; the model is always your choice. Splunk Enterprise can be deployed on-prem, but its AI Assistant features are cloud-delivered.
What about our team's SPL skills?
They transfer better than you'd expect — and matter less than you'd fear. Keel accepts direct queries for engineers who want precision, while natural-language search means the rest of your organisation stops filing tickets to the two people who know SPL. Most POC teams report the on-call rotation adopts plain-English search within days.
Do we have to migrate everything at once?
No. Per-source isolation means you can point one log source at Keel while everything else keeps flowing to Splunk. Most teams run both platforms side by side during the 30-day POC, compare results on real data, then migrate source by source at renewal time.

Put Keel next to your Splunk.
Let the data decide.

Full-feature 30-day POC inside your network. Our team deploys it, connects your sources, and walks your engineers through it. No credit card, nothing to cancel.

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