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Apica vs Cribl comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Jun 15, 2025

Review summaries and opinions

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:
 

ROI

Sentiment score
8.3
Apica alerts enhance operational efficiency by reducing costs, staffing needs, and downtime, delivering significant ROI and improved performance.
Sentiment score
5.5
Cribl reduces costs, enhances efficiency, and automates tasks, significantly lowering SIEM expenses and data ingestion costs for organizations.
What we've seen is really an overall reduction of just shy of 40% in our ingest into our SIM platform versus prior to having Cribl.
In terms of reduction, we were able to save almost ~40% of our total cost.
In the case of optimization, it has helped return on investment to somewhere close to 50%.
 

Customer Service

Sentiment score
7.1
Apica offers responsive service and custom scripts, though time zone challenges affect support efficiency for global customers.
Sentiment score
5.8
Cribl's support is praised for quick, effective responses, knowledgeable staff, and valuable resources, despite needing better customer requirement understanding.
They had extensive expertise with the product and were able to facilitate everything we needed.
Usually, within an hour, we get a response, and we are able to work with them back and forth until we resolve the issues.
If they could enhance their internal logging, we won't require Cribl support to engage.
 

Scalability Issues

Sentiment score
7.6
Apica offers scalable, reliable monitoring and performance testing with seamless integration, allowing diverse users to manage infrastructure effortlessly.
Sentiment score
6.4
Cribl offers scalable workload distribution and seamless cloud integration, efficiently scaling from small organizations to large enterprises.
APICa is scalable.
The infrastructure behind Cribl Search is also scalable as it uses a CPU and just spawns horizontally more instances as it demands and requires.
It's an enterprise version, and we have a good amount of users using this solution.
I don't need to talk to a Cribl engineer to connect a new log source.
 

Stability Issues

Sentiment score
7.3
Apica is praised for stability and reliability, with minimal outages, effective monitoring, and quick bug resolution.
Sentiment score
6.5
Cribl is generally stable and reliable, with minor issues mitigated by improvements, strong support, and effective documentation.
Migrating from those SC4S servers to Cribl worker nodes has truly been a game-changer.
I would rate the stability as ten out of ten.
If the pipeline is down and we receive an alert that it's not sending information to the log collection platform for more than one or two hours, if we receive an alert, it would be great.
 

Room For Improvement

Apica lacks an intuitive interface, needs more customization, better alert accuracy, and improved documentation, scripting compatibility, and update management.
Cribl should enhance compatibility, improve user interface, offer training, optimize performance, and expand features to boost functionality and usability.
When editing scripts, only one can be accessed at a time, risking changes affecting other folders.
If we can have more internal logs and more debug logs to validate the error, that would be beneficial because instead of reaching out to Cribl support, we can troubleshoot and find the root cause ourselves.
In terms of large datasets—whether they originated from network inputs, virtual machines, or cloud instances—ingesting the data into the destination was relatively easy.
Since Cribl is such a large platform with numerous features, having a clear, structured approach would make it easier for me and others to understand and utilize its capabilities.
 

Setup Cost

Apica offers cost-effective licensing with negotiable discounts, primarily based on the number of checks, including cloud hybrid features.
Cribl offers cost-effective pricing with scalability and efficiency, appreciated for handling large data volumes despite annual price increases.
Over time, the licensing cost has increased.
Cribl is very inexpensive, with enterprise pricing around 30 cents per GB, which is really decent.
They have a universal license that allows us to consume the portions of Cribl that we want to use or flex into other portions of Cribl.
 

Valuable Features

Apica offers global monitoring with flexible scripting, user-friendly interface, accurate alerts, and seamless integration for efficient operations.
Cribl transforms and manages data efficiently with scalable, intuitive UI, enhancing integration, reducing storage costs, and maintaining integrity.
It is useful for both performance and automation testing, facilitating access to headers and payloads easily, enhancing scripts with dynamic values.
The data reduction and preprocessing capabilities make Cribl really unique.
Cribl has a feature called JSON Unroll or Unroll function that allows you to differentiate the events; each event will come ingested as a single log instead of piling it up with multiple events.
The Cribl UI is very simple and easy to use, particularly when working with data from various sources; it makes it very easy to create pipelines, add complex logic to those pipelines, and then gives you a preview of what your data looks like before applying that pipeline and what you get after.
 

Categories and Ranking

Apica
Ranking in Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability
16th
Ranking in Log Management
18th
Ranking in Observability Pipeline Software
2nd
Average Rating
8.2
Reviews Sentiment
7.3
Number of Reviews
11
Ranking in other categories
IT Operations Analytics (6th)
Cribl
Ranking in Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability
12th
Ranking in Log Management
6th
Ranking in Observability Pipeline Software
1st
Average Rating
8.6
Reviews Sentiment
6.7
Number of Reviews
25
Ranking in other categories
Security Information and Event Management (SIEM) (10th)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of October 2025, in the Observability Pipeline Software category, the mindshare of Apica is 2.4%, down from 8.6% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Cribl is 44.6%, down from 47.7% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Observability Pipeline Software Market Share Distribution
ProductMarket Share (%)
Cribl44.6%
Apica2.4%
Other53.0%
Observability Pipeline Software
 

Featured Reviews

Punith H K - PeerSpot reviewer
Enables users to create scripts easily and provides excellent real-time monitoring features
It is easy to create scripts. We don't have to write any script. Ready-made options are available. We can select, drag, and drop the options, and the script is ready. The solution’s real-time monitoring features have had a huge impact on our service delivery. If we have an application and the script for it, we keep monitoring it. When the script goes red, it indicates that something is not working. So, we check and analyze the applications. We keep track of applications and monitor whether they are live or not. The tool is also useful for monitoring cloud services.
Richard McIver - PeerSpot reviewer
Simplifies data processing and reduces ingest costs through real-time transformation
My favorite feature of Cribl is just how easy it makes working with the data; it's always been a pain point for us with other solutions, just taking our raw data from the source, transforming and manipulating it into what we need on the SIM side. That's always been a pretty heavy lift, however, Cribl has made that much easier. The tools built into the platform allow us to work with the data, see the results in real-time, see what the output's going to look before we commit it, and has really made our job in that respect a lot easier. The Cribl UI is very simple and easy to use, particularly when working with data from various sources; it makes it very easy to create pipelines, add complex logic to those pipelines, and then gives you a preview of what your data looks like before applying that pipeline and what you get after. As we're bringing data in and Cribl's processing it, it makes it very easy to identify subsets of data or certain events that source data that maybe are less useful or just noisy, not really applicable to to what we need what our security team needs, and we're able to just drop those events before they get sent out and and ingested by our SIEM. So that helps keep our data pipeline streamlined, keeps our output clean. It filters out noise, and then it makes our analysis more efficient. That reduces the data volume going into our SIMs, and that reduces and limits the ingest costs associated with that end. With less data, there's less to process when you're running complex searches. So we have charges against those compute resources reduced.
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
24%
Media Company
11%
Comms Service Provider
8%
Insurance Company
7%
Financial Services Firm
16%
Computer Software Company
8%
Manufacturing Company
8%
Healthcare Company
7%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business4
Midsize Enterprise2
Large Enterprise17
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business9
Midsize Enterprise5
Large Enterprise14
 

Questions from the Community

What do you like most about Apica Synthetic?
The GUI is powerful and doesn't require scripting or regular expressions. It has a vast finder for correlation, which is easier than other tools like JMeter and LoadRunner. It's also easy to integr...
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Apica Synthetic?
I know Apica is an expensive solution, but it is worth the money for the service it provides.
What needs improvement with Apica Synthetic?
Apica cannot perform endurance or scale-up tests independently. It requires other tools like ALM. When editing scripts, only one can be accessed at a time, risking changes affecting other folders. ...
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Cribl?
Cribl is very inexpensive, with enterprise pricing around 30 cents per GB, which is really decent. Organizations looking to ingest terabytes or petabytes of data each day find it quite an inexpensi...
What needs improvement with Cribl?
The product is very good. They could add more AI-assisted pipeline development in the future release.
What is your primary use case for Cribl?
My current use cases involve using it as a pipeline to process data, to route data from cloud logs to different repositories. Some data goes to Splunk and others go to different data lakes. I didn'...
 

Comparisons

 

Also Known As

Apica LoadTest, Apica Synthetic
No data available
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

HBO, JPMC, Morgan Stanley, Xander, EA Sports, Volvo
Information Not Available
Find out what your peers are saying about Apica vs. Cribl and other solutions. Updated: October 2025.
872,655 professionals have used our research since 2012.