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
4.2
Cribl is a cost-effective, budget-friendly solution offering significant savings and efficiency compared to Splunk once mastered.
Sentiment score
5.9
Elastic Security is cost-effective, offers significant financial benefits, and is community-friendly, though premium support receives some criticism.
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 responsiveness and assistance, despite occasional miscommunications and substantial help needed during setup.
Sentiment score
6.4
Feedback on Elastic Security support is mixed, with community resources praised but technical support often inconsistent and improved communication needed.
The community, including the engineering and sales teams, is available on Slack and is very supportive.
Most of the time when my team encounters issues, they receive responses within 24 hours.
Support is prompt and helpful.
 

Scalability Issues

Sentiment score
6.5
Cribl excels in scalability, offering seamless deployment and upgrades, with cloud and on-site support for diverse company needs.
Sentiment score
7.3
Elastic Security scales effectively across business sizes, though infrastructure, licensing, and resource management adjustments may be necessary.
It is pretty scalable, just in terms of cost.
It allows us to think about specific use cases, such as gathering malicious IPs in a single view and analyzing threats based on geolocation.
 

Stability Issues

Sentiment score
6.8
Cribl is stable, rated 6-8/10, with persistent queuing preventing crashes and minor issues resolved in updates.
Sentiment score
7.7
Elastic Security is stable and reliable, but big data challenges require proper configuration for optimal performance and care during upgrades.
In terms of stability, I would rate Elastic a solid eight out of ten.
 

Room For Improvement

Cribl requires better integration, improved documentation, enhanced customization, and more features for legacy systems and smaller firms.
Users seek better authentication, automation, machine learning, intuitive design, scalability, integration, training resources, and pricing transparency in Elastic Security.
Perhaps more flexibility in terms of metrics would be helpful.
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.
Elastic Security consumes a lot of resources, requiring a substantial deployment setup.
 

Setup Cost

Cribl offers a cost-effective, scalable pricing model with potential savings and flexibility, appealing to many organizations.
Elastic Security offers a competitive pricing model with a free core version, suitable for small to medium enterprises.
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 streamlines data transformation, integration, and log management with efficient processing, user-friendly tools, and a supportive community.
Elastic Security impresses with indexing, visualization, search, AI, scalability, open-source nature, and free, customizable dashboards.
The community on Slack is excellent for solving questions and getting ideas.
The platform provides more visibility and requires less effort in monitoring.
We require rapid processing speed for alerts and event data, and Elastic Security is very efficient at handling this level of data.
Elastic Security offers good insight regarding alerts, reports, and cases.
 

Categories and Ranking

Cribl
Ranking in Log Management
8th
Ranking in Security Information and Event Management (SIEM)
12th
Average Rating
8.2
Reviews Sentiment
6.6
Number of Reviews
12
Ranking in other categories
Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability (14th), 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
65
Ranking in other categories
Endpoint Detection and Response (EDR) (17th), Security Orchestration Automation and Response (SOAR) (8th), Extended Detection and Response (XDR) (10th)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of July 2025, in the Log Management category, the mindshare of Cribl is 2.1%, up from 0.5% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Elastic Security is 3.0%, down from 6.0% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Log Management
 

Featured Reviews

Phanindra Ponnada - PeerSpot reviewer
Provides good documentation and worth the investment
As of now, there are some environments where some organizations are still on legacy infrastructure, so they are still in virtual environments and are using old versions of devices. Some companies bought Splunk, while others bought Cribl for a very low-priced license. There are some protocols to connect from Cribl to Splunk. I understand Cribl has come into the market very recently, but the tool might have had a picture in its mind where organizations might also have some legacy infrastructure. In the future, with our protocols or our level of architecture, Cribl should not come and say that it is not compatible with them. If Cribl is the reason because I have to change my environment, then I will have to end up investing more. There are some organizations where the end machines have forwarders that forward the data to Cribl, and from it, the data is forwarded to Splunk. This is how general architecture works. There are two methods of connection between Cribl and Splunk. One is the S2S protocol, which collects logs from Cribl or sends data between Cribl and Splunk. There is another method called HTTP Event Collector (HEC) and HTTPS protocol. With Cribl, connecting to Splunk mostly uses the S2S protocol. The tool supports all the latest devices and platform devices, like all the latest operating systems. There are some organizations where there is legacy infrastructure or if they are still on the old platforms. Companies using old platforms have to consider HTTP Event Collector (HEC), and then they have to change their infrastructure setup in order to fulfill that setup. In order to have Google and Splunk set up in my organization, if I have to change my existing infrastructure connectivity or setup, that might incur more cost or more investment for me to have Cribl and Splunk. Cribl should provide compatibility, or else the tool's developers should speak to the people of such organizations and understand the challenges. Cribl could have developed some version that can give backward compatibility.
SyedAli17 - PeerSpot reviewer
Centralized monitoring improves security posture through rapid data processing
The processing part of Elastic Security ( /products/elastic-security-reviews ) 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.
864,053 professionals have used our research since 2012.
 

Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
17%
Computer Software Company
9%
Healthcare Company
8%
Manufacturing Company
7%
Computer Software Company
16%
Government
10%
Comms Service Provider
8%
Financial Services Firm
7%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
 

Questions from the Community

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Cribl?
I am not aware of the pricing details, however, I know they use a credit format for billing.
What needs improvement with Cribl?
At the moment, I don't have specific feedback on what can be improved as I do not work with Cribl daily. Perhaps more flexibility in terms of metrics would be helpful.
What is your primary use case for Cribl?
I am using Cribl to have everything centralized in one tool in terms of data collection. We were working with different Splunk customers, and Cribl helps collect data and then send it to an S3 buck...
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: July 2025.
864,053 professionals have used our research since 2012.