Try our new research platform with insights from 80,000+ expert users

Cortex XSIAM vs Cribl comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive Summary

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
4.6
Cortex XSIAM enhances incident management and provides significant financial returns by automating detection and response, reducing staffing needs.
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
5.8
Cortex XSIAM support varies; premium service excels, while non-premium experiences depend on distributor expertise and sometimes face delays.
Sentiment score
5.8
Cribl's support is praised for quick, effective responses, knowledgeable staff, and valuable resources, despite needing better customer requirement understanding.
With premium support, core Palo Alto technical experts handle issues directly.
It is ineffective in terms of responding to basic queries and addressing future requirements.
The Palo Alto support team is fully responsive and helpful.
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
6.5
Cortex XSIAM is scalable for various business sizes with cloud-based integration, but lacks on-premises deployment and mixed reviews.
Sentiment score
6.4
Cribl offers scalable workload distribution and seamless cloud integration, efficiently scaling from small organizations to large enterprises.
Without proper integration, scaling up with more servers is meaningless.
Cortex XSIAM is highly 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
7.6
Cortex XSIAM is praised for its stability, rapid issue resolution, and efficient performance despite minor post-update challenges.
Sentiment score
6.5
Cribl is generally stable and reliable, with minor issues mitigated by improvements, strong support, and effective documentation.
The product was easy to install and set up and worked right.
Overall, Cortex XSIAM is stable.
It works really nice and performs really efficiently after configuration.
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

Cortex XSIAM needs improved integration, performance, interface, pricing, support, ASM, AI, onboarding, tagging, and identity management enhancements.
Cribl should enhance compatibility, improve user interface, offer training, optimize performance, and expand features to boost functionality and usability.
Obtaining validation for integrations from Palo Alto takes around eight months, which is quite long.
Cortex XSIAM needs improvements in terms of data onboarding, parsers, and third-party integration supports.
Cortex XSIAM is on the expensive side and requires substantial improvement in pricing.
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

Cortex XSIAM is viewed as competitively priced but complex, aligning with market expectations despite some regional variations.
Cribl offers cost-effective pricing with scalability and efficiency, appreciated for handling large data volumes despite annual price increases.
The first impression is that XSIAM would be more expensive than others we tried.
The product is very expensive.
Cortex XSIAM is pretty expensive, and the licensing process is not very comfortable.
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

Cortex XSIAM excels in machine learning threat detection, SOAR features, and advanced automation for efficient security management.
Cribl transforms and manages data efficiently with scalable, intuitive UI, enhancing integration, reducing storage costs, and maintaining integrity.
The advanced visualization capabilities of the product are important for understanding security trends in an organization.
One of the valued aspects of the product is its use of artificial intelligence to detect security vulnerabilities.
The flexibility for creating manual workflows stands out.
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

Cortex XSIAM
Ranking in Security Information and Event Management (SIEM)
13th
Average Rating
8.6
Reviews Sentiment
6.7
Number of Reviews
15
Ranking in other categories
Identity Threat Detection and Response (ITDR) (5th), AI-Powered Cybersecurity Platforms (7th)
Cribl
Ranking in Security Information and Event Management (SIEM)
10th
Average Rating
8.6
Reviews Sentiment
6.7
Number of Reviews
25
Ranking in other categories
Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability (12th), Log Management (6th), Observability Pipeline Software (1st)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of October 2025, in the Security Information and Event Management (SIEM) category, the mindshare of Cortex XSIAM is 3.0%, up from 1.7% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Cribl is 1.2%, up from 0.2% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Security Information and Event Management (SIEM) Market Share Distribution
ProductMarket Share (%)
Cribl1.2%
Cortex XSIAM3.0%
Other95.8%
Security Information and Event Management (SIEM)
 

Featured Reviews

AKASH MAJUMDER - PeerSpot reviewer
Incident response times have significantly reduced with efficient device integration and log parsing capabilities
Cortex XSIAM needs improvements in terms of data onboarding, parsers, and third-party integration supports. Additionally, a future update request is to enable tagging of endpoints in groups, similar to a feature available in Cortex XDR. The AI analytics need fine-tuning because some use cases are not working from my side.
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.
report
Use our free recommendation engine to learn which Security Information and Event Management (SIEM) solutions are best for your needs.
872,655 professionals have used our research since 2012.
 

Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Computer Software Company
12%
Financial Services Firm
10%
Manufacturing Company
10%
Government
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 Business9
Midsize Enterprise2
Large Enterprise4
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business9
Midsize Enterprise5
Large Enterprise14
 

Questions from the Community

What do you like most about Cortex XSIAM?
It is an effective solution in terms of performance and functionalities.
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Cortex XSIAM?
I did not participate in pricing discussions for Cortex XSIAM solutions, so I cannot provide a review regarding prices for this solution.
What needs improvement with Cortex XSIAM?
Cortex XSIAM is on the expensive side and requires substantial improvement in pricing. There are other features that could be improved, including integration with vendors such as CyberArk. I would ...
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

 

Overview

Find out what your peers are saying about Cortex XSIAM vs. Cribl and other solutions. Updated: September 2025.
872,655 professionals have used our research since 2012.