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Chronosphere vs Cribl comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Dec 28, 2025

Review summaries and opinions

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

Categories and Ranking

Chronosphere
Ranking in Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability
31st
Ranking in Log Management
31st
Average Rating
9.0
Reviews Sentiment
6.8
Number of Reviews
1
Ranking in other categories
AIOps (18th)
Cribl
Ranking in Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability
10th
Ranking in Log Management
5th
Average Rating
8.6
Reviews Sentiment
6.7
Number of Reviews
29
Ranking in other categories
Security Information and Event Management (SIEM) (8th), Observability Pipeline Software (1st)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of December 2025, in the Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability category, the mindshare of Chronosphere is 0.6%, up from 0.3% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Cribl is 1.1%, up from 0.4% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability Market Share Distribution
ProductMarket Share (%)
Cribl1.1%
Chronosphere0.6%
Other98.3%
Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability
 

Featured Reviews

Arvind Pant - PeerSpot reviewer
Senior Data Engineer at DoorDash, Inc.
Monitors pipelines with real-time alerts and good documentation
It isn't very easy. It's not easy for everyone. It would be much easier if there could be a simpler version, like a data number version or an SQL version. It's hard to debug if you don't know the syntax. Also, I saw the Slack alerts feature, which is pretty cool, but I cannot customize my messages on the Slack alerts. It would be great if it were possible to tag people in the alerts. At DoorDash, we have hundreds of pipelines, and if something fails, I want to tag specific people so they can start working on the issue immediately.
Aman Verma - PeerSpot reviewer
Senior Software Engineer at a retailer with 1,001-5,000 employees
Has helped reduce daily log volume significantly and streamline data routing across multiple destinations
Regarding complexity, as I mentioned before, Cribl is very simple to use. When I started 2.5 years ago, it was very easy to learn. I learned Cribl within a week, and even though I was a fresher at the time, it was easy to understand and not complex enough that someone would need to spend money on labs. It's not that complex to learn. Regarding cost efficiency, it's very good because nowadays the SIEM tools we use are too expensive on license, and SIEM tools base their license on how many logs get ingested. The unwanted logs, particularly firewall logs, represent a significant portion of unnecessary ingestion. Cribl saves our license by filtering out half of the firewall logs that are unwanted. Our main purpose for using Cribl is to save our license and save money. Currently, everyone is moving toward AI agents. We currently use regex, and AI agents could help us create those regex patterns to drop events or add raw data to events. Currently, we sit down, review the logs, and create regex patterns manually, which can be time-consuming. An AI agent could reduce this time. I read some articles indicating that Cribl Cloud has started using AI and considering MCPs and model context, but I'm not certain how far along they are. If Cribl asked me what they could improve, that would be my suggestion. The support is very good, and I had a few issues with Cribl where I raised support cases and received good responses, which is better than the quick response I didn't get from other SIEM tools and vendor tools I use. Compared to other SIEM tools, Cribl is cheaper than Splunk and DataDogs. However, it's still a bit expensive from my point of view, though I won't call it expensive. Overall, I think 99% of companies use Cribl before their SIEM tools, and compared to SIEM tools, Cribl is cheaper. Companies can use any SIEM tool such as Google, Splunk, or Cisco, and Cribl is cheaper than those SIEM tools. They might have a slight chance to reduce costs further, but I'm not the correct person to evaluate that since I'm more focused on the operational side. Regarding training, it was quite easy to grasp. It took me almost a week to understand the basic functionalities and what Cribl does. Getting more expertise took additional time, but basic functionalities and understanding what Cribl does took around four to five days. One point I want to mention is that Cribl could improve their labs or training materials in their Cribl Cloud or whatever portal they have.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"The alerting features are good"
"Features such as Cribl Stream, Cribl LogStream, and Cribl Edge have been the most beneficial. The Cribl LogStream, in particular, is valuable for routing data, creating firewalls on pipelines, and putting security measures in place to ensure data reaches its destination without issues."
"The best feature in Cribl, when getting logs from some custom application, is the ability to break up logs that pile up together and come as one event."
"We save around 2.2 TB every day using Cribl by filtering out unwanted logs coming from syslog devices and other networking devices, which saves our license."
"The ease of management and configuration of Cribl Edge features is highly beneficial—I have many thousands of Cribl Edge nodes deployed, and it's very easy to make configuration changes across the board or update the agent."
"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."
"Cribl has been instrumental in containing our data costs, especially as we use leading log aggregation and SIEM tools known for their heavy licensing costs by ingest."
"Enhancing those events to optimize, to add new fields or to remove the extra fields that are of no use helps us in log reduction by dumping the raw logs and only ingesting the interested fields, which helps us in 50 to 60% volume reduction."
"Cribl does a really great job of making sure that no matter how crazy the data set is, we're able to see that data and understand it, and then perform advanced functions against the data to make sure that it is in the ready state for whatever the end place is in which we wish to send it."
 

Cons

"It's not easy for everyone."
"Currently, Cribl Search is dedicated to one bucket at a time in the case of S3 buckets. The ability to search for multiple buckets would be awesome."
"Cribl doesn't have as many packs available"
"Currently, we sit down, review the logs, and create regex patterns manually, which can be time-consuming."
"However, the endpoint plug-in tool can use some refinement, as it tends to hit system resources and can sometimes be detrimental to systems to the point where it must be turned off and a scan restarted when a user is offline."
"Cribl should consider adding more features that are applicable to smaller firms, allowing broader access to their data migration through Cribl."
"Cribl can improve by providing automated analytics and advanced parsing capabilities since it handles data at its core."
"Improvement could be made in the logging area, as sometimes we encounter issues in a pipeline or something, and it's not immediately obvious when you look at the logs that the pipeline is failing."
"The deployment itself is a bit complicated and the documentation is not very clear."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

Information not available
"I would not say it is a cheaply priced tool as it has been doing wonders in the market. The tool has been budget-friendly for organizations."
"The product pricing is reasonable compared to other solutions."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Transportation Company
15%
Retailer
11%
Financial Services Firm
10%
Computer Software Company
10%
Financial Services Firm
20%
Manufacturing Company
12%
Healthcare Company
6%
Computer Software Company
6%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
No data available
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business9
Midsize Enterprise5
Large Enterprise16
 

Questions from the Community

What needs improvement with Chronosphere?
It isn't very easy. It's not easy for everyone. It would be much easier if there could be a simpler version, like a data number version or an SQL version. It's hard to debug if you don't know the s...
What is your primary use case for Chronosphere?
I work as a data engineer, and we have many streaming pipelines. We use Chronosphere to monitor various metrics, such as how much data our pipeline is processing in each batch, the volume of incomi...
What advice do you have for others considering Chronosphere?
If you want to monitor pipelines and use something like Kafka or any streaming platform, Chronosphere is the best option for monitoring pipelines with real-time alerts. It is loosely coupled with y...
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Cribl?
Cribl has been excellent when it comes to pricing, setup cost, and licensing. The team navigates us through their models seamlessly and we adopt Cribl Cloud easily. Within a month's time, we're abl...
What needs improvement with Cribl?
Cribl handles a high volume of diverse data types very well, such as logs and metrics. However, the endpoint plug-in tool can use some refinement, as it tends to hit system resources and can someti...
What is your primary use case for Cribl?
Cribl is used to manage routing of different log systems and vulnerability type log scanning and retention, which is then re-routed to log retention servers. Firewall logs are sent directly from fi...
 

Comparisons

 

Overview

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