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

Cribl vs Elastic Security 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
5.5
Cribl reduces costs, enhances efficiency, and automates tasks, significantly lowering SIEM expenses and data ingestion costs for organizations.
Sentiment score
6.0
Elastic Security is cost-effective, offers significant financial benefits, and is community-friendly, though premium support receives some criticism.
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%.
It does not require hefty security budgets and can be deployed for enterprise security effectively.
 

Customer Service

Sentiment score
5.8
Cribl's support is praised for quick, effective responses, knowledgeable staff, and valuable resources, despite needing better customer requirement understanding.
Sentiment score
6.4
Feedback on Elastic Security support is mixed, with community resources praised but technical support often inconsistent and improved communication needed.
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.
Support is prompt and helpful.
Most of the time when my team encounters issues, they receive responses within 24 hours.
I have not faced any difficulties with Elastic Security, as we have a pretty good support service from them.
 

Scalability Issues

Sentiment score
6.4
Cribl offers scalable workload distribution and seamless cloud integration, efficiently scaling from small organizations to large enterprises.
Sentiment score
7.3
Elastic Security scales effectively across business sizes, though infrastructure, licensing, and resource management adjustments may be necessary.
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.
It allows us to think about specific use cases, such as gathering malicious IPs in a single view and analyzing threats based on geolocation.
Elastic Security is quite scalable.
 

Stability Issues

Sentiment score
6.5
Cribl is generally stable and reliable, with minor issues mitigated by improvements, strong support, and effective documentation.
Sentiment score
7.7
Elastic Security is stable and reliable, but big data challenges require proper configuration for optimal performance and care during upgrades.
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.
In terms of stability, I would rate Elastic a solid eight out of ten.
 

Room For Improvement

Cribl should enhance compatibility, improve user interface, offer training, optimize performance, and expand features to boost functionality and usability.
Users seek better authentication, automation, machine learning, intuitive design, scalability, integration, training resources, and pricing transparency in Elastic Security.
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.
CrowdStrike and Defender have more established threat intelligence integration due to having a larger client base.
My security testing team continuously reports vulnerabilities, and we have to fix and update the versions frequently.
Machine learning algorithms become better with time; as they ingest a huge volume of data, they become better.
 

Setup Cost

Cribl offers cost-effective pricing with scalability and efficiency, appreciated for handling large data volumes despite annual price increases.
Elastic Security offers a competitive pricing model with a free core version, suitable for small to medium enterprises.
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.
The pricing is reasonable, especially for Small Medium Enterprises (SMEs), making it a viable option for businesses building their security infrastructure.
This is beneficial for SMEs as they do not need extensive budgets for security solutions.
Elastic Security is considered cost-effective, especially at lower EPS levels.
 

Valuable Features

Cribl transforms and manages data efficiently with scalable, intuitive UI, enhancing integration, reducing storage costs, and maintaining integrity.
Elastic Security impresses with indexing, visualization, search, AI, scalability, open-source nature, and free, customizable dashboards.
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.
Elastic Security offers good insight regarding alerts, reports, and cases.
Elastic Security offers advanced features such as machine learning and integration with ChatGPT.
We require rapid processing speed for alerts and event data, and Elastic Security is very efficient at handling this level of data.
 

Categories and Ranking

Cribl
Ranking in Log Management
6th
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), Observability Pipeline Software (1st)
Elastic Security
Ranking in Log Management
11th
Ranking in Security Information and Event Management (SIEM)
5th
Average Rating
7.8
Reviews Sentiment
6.8
Number of Reviews
66
Ranking in other categories
Endpoint Detection and Response (EDR) (17th), Security Orchestration Automation and Response (SOAR) (7th), Extended Detection and Response (XDR) (9th)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of October 2025, in the Log Management category, the mindshare of Cribl is 2.5%, up from 0.7% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Elastic Security is 2.9%, down from 5.0% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Log Management Market Share Distribution
ProductMarket Share (%)
Cribl2.5%
Elastic Security2.9%
Other94.6%
Log Management
 

Featured Reviews

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.
SyedAli17 - PeerSpot reviewer
Centralized monitoring improves security posture through rapid data processing
The processing part of Elastic Security is very interesting for us since we handle almost 7,000 to 8,000 alerts per minute. We require rapid processing speed for alerts and event data, and Elastic Security is very efficient at handling this level of data. Additionally, Elastic Security helps improve the security posture of Pakistan through centralized visibility and real-time processing.
report
Use our free recommendation engine to learn which Log Management solutions are best for your needs.
872,706 professionals have used our research since 2012.
 

Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
16%
Computer Software Company
8%
Manufacturing Company
8%
Healthcare Company
7%
Computer Software Company
14%
Government
10%
Comms Service Provider
8%
Financial Services Firm
7%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business9
Midsize Enterprise5
Large Enterprise14
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business40
Midsize Enterprise11
Large Enterprise15
 

Questions from the Community

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'...
Datadog vs ELK: which one is good in terms of performance, cost and efficiency?
With Datadog, we have near-live visibility across our entire platform. We have seen APM metrics impacted several times lately using the dashboards we have created with Datadog; they are very good c...
What do you like most about Elastic Security?
Elastic provides the capability to index quickly due to the reverse indexes it offers. This data is crucial as it contains critical information. The reverse index allows fast data indexing because ...
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Elastic Security?
I am satisfied with the pricing, setup cost, and licensing cost. It is a pure 10.
 

Comparisons

 

Also Known As

No data available
Elastic SIEM, ELK Logstash
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Information Not Available
Texas A&M, U.S. Air Force, NuScale Power, Martin's Point Health Care
Find out what your peers are saying about Cribl vs. Elastic Security and other solutions. Updated: September 2025.
872,706 professionals have used our research since 2012.