ilert vs. Splunk: What is the better option for your company?

Overview: Where each platform shines

ilert is an AI-First incident management platform that combines alerting, on-call scheduling, and native status pages – all powered by ilert AI SRE. ilert AI agents understand the context of incidents and act as experienced SREs, providing actionable steps towards remediation or even fixing issues autonomously. ilert is built with one major purpose – to significantly lower MTTR and ensure higher uptime.

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Splunk, on the other hand, is a broad observability and AIOps platform. Splunk On-Call, formerly known as VictorOps, handles alerting and escalation, while predictive analytics and event correlation are available through ITSI and the wider Splunk Observability Cloud. While Splunk offers the On-Call suite as part of its offerings, it's not Splunk's major product.

So, what’s the difference between ilert and Splunk?

Let's examine the key incident management features available on both platforms.

AI-First vs. AI-Enabled

ilert takes an AI-First approach to incident management, meaning that artificial intelligence isn’t an add-on – it’s the foundation of the platform. Every workflow in ilert is supported by ilert AI, an intelligent system designed to help site reliability and DevOps teams focus on automating manual tasks and achieving faster resolution. Instead of forcing engineers to sift through noisy alerts, ilert automatically analyzes and groups related events. During an incident, ilert AI SRE recognizes recurring patterns, identifies the most probable root causes, and provides recommendations for quick incident resolution. It can act as an advisor, or, by providing it with permissions, you can enable it to resolve incidents autonomously without waking you up during the night. These agentic capabilities transform AI from a passive recommender into an active teammate – a key differentiator that defines ilert’s AI-First vision.

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Splunk, in contrast, provides AI-Enabled functionality primarily through its machine learning models and AIOps integrations. Within Splunk On-Call, the platform includes ML-based responder recommendations, which analyze past incidents to suggest who should be involved in future ones. For more advanced AI capabilities, such as event correlation, noise reduction, anomaly detection, and predictive alerting, users must integrate Splunk IT Service Intelligence (ITSI) or the broader Splunk Observability Cloud. These components offer powerful data-driven insights, but they operate as separate parts within a larger ecosystem, meaning AI in Splunk often depends on how fully an organization invests in its observability stack.

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While both platforms leverage AI, their philosophies differ: ilert embeds AI into every part of the incident lifecycle to augment human response in real time, while Splunk positions AI as part of a wider analytics and AIOps framework that enhances visibility across infrastructure.

Live call routing: Never miss a critical call

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ilert offers a Call Routing add-on designed for teams that rely on voice as part of their critical alerting process. Each team can create dedicated hotlines with local numbers, ensuring that customers or internal stakeholders can always reach the right responder. The powerful Call Flow Builder lets teams visually design call paths with drag-and-drop blocks, defining exactly how calls are handled: from greeting messages to conditional routing, voicemail, PIN codes, and much more. Calls automatically follow the on-call schedule and escalation policies, so the next available responder is always reachable. This level of configurability makes ilert’s hotline system a fully managed voice channel inside the incident workflow.

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Splunk On-Call also supports live call routing, connecting a published phone number to the current on-call responder. It can handle team-based routing, escalation policies, phone trees, and voicemails, and logs call details in the incident timeline for context. However, this functionality requires an external setup through Twilio, where the routing logic is configured and maintained separately. While it delivers core call-routing capabilities, it lacks the visual flexibility and native management found in ilert’s Call Flow. In practice, Splunk’s approach relies on integration and scripting, which can add complexity for teams seeking a quick and intuitive hotline solution.

Status pages: Keep everyone posted

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ilert includes native, fully integrated status pages that make it easy to communicate transparently during incidents. Teams can create public, private, or audience-specific pages and link them directly to active services so updates appear automatically. Subscribers can receive notifications, reducing inbound support noise and keeping stakeholders informed in real time. With ilert AI assistance, engineers create clear, empathetic updates in seconds and with one click, saving valuable time when communication matters most.

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Splunk On-Call, by contrast, does not include built-in status pages. Most organizations pair it with third-party tools such as Atlassian Statuspage to share incident updates externally. While effective, this setup adds cost, configuration effort, and another interface for teams to manage. ilert’s integrated approach removes that overhead, providing a single, seamless environment for both incident response and customer communication.

Scope and Simplicity

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ilert is designed with focus and efficiency in mind. It brings together everything SRE and DevOps teams need for incident response in a single, unified platform. With a clean interface, fast setup, and over 140 integrations, ilert eliminates the difficulties of adopting a new solution or migrating from other tools. Its SaaS architecture means no infrastructure overhead, and easy-to-reach technical support ensures that any inquiry will be addressed in a matter of minutes.

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Splunk, on the other hand, takes a modular approach. Splunk On-Call handles alerting and escalations, but advanced AIOps and observability features depend on additional components. This makes Splunk a powerful enterprise platform for end-to-end monitoring, but also more complex to deploy and maintain.

Built to fit your ecosystem, not lock you in

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ilert was built to be vendor-neutral from day one. It integrates seamlessly with more than 140 tools across monitoring, observability, ITSM, CI/CD, and communication platforms – from Datadog, Grafana, and Prometheus to ServiceNow, Jira, and Slack. Additionally, ilert's open APIs, webhooks, and Terraform provider make it simple to automate configuration and scale adoption across teams. Because the platform is lightweight and SaaS-based, setup takes minutes. ilert’s neutral design means it can plug into any toolchain and deliver instant value without forcing you to standardize on a specific vendor ecosystem.

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Splunk On-Call, by contrast, shines for organizations already invested in the Splunk ecosystem. It connects tightly with Splunk Observability Cloud and IT Service Intelligence (ITSI), leveraging the platform’s telemetry data, dashboards, and event correlation to extend incident response workflows. While Splunk On-Call also supports integrations with many external tools, the best experience – and the most automation – comes when it’s paired with other Splunk products. That depth can be powerful for large enterprises already using Splunk for monitoring and analytics, but it also makes adoption heavier for teams coming from other stacks.