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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
3.5
Cribl is cost-effective compared to Splunk, but not all users see clear returns in time and cost savings.
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
5.3
Cribl's customer support is effective and prompt, with high satisfaction despite some noted areas needing improved understanding of customer needs.
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.
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
5.5
Cribl is highly scalable, enabling efficient workload distribution and quick deployment, appealing to businesses of all sizes.
Sentiment score
7.3
Elastic Security scales effectively across business sizes, though infrastructure, licensing, and resource management adjustments may be necessary.
I don't need to talk to a Cribl engineer to connect a new log source.
Cribl is quite scalable, as we could add worker nodes as our data grows.
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
5.8
Cribl is stable and reliable, with quick bug resolution and improvements over time despite occasional connectivity issues.
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 deploying it into enterprise or production environments, it's quite reliable.
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 faces compatibility issues, UI limitations, and documentation inconsistencies, requiring enhancements in integration, customization, and data handling.
Users seek better authentication, automation, machine learning, intuitive design, scalability, integration, training resources, and pricing transparency in Elastic Security.
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.
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 competitive pricing valued for cost-effectiveness and scalability, though its complex credit system can cause confusion.
Elastic Security offers a competitive pricing model with a free core version, suitable for small to medium enterprises.
I don't think any other solution offers this much value at this price point.
This is beneficial for SMEs as they do not need extensive budgets for security solutions.
The pricing is reasonable, especially for Small Medium Enterprises (SMEs), making it a viable option for businesses building their security infrastructure.
Elastic Security is considered cost-effective, especially at lower EPS levels.
 

Valuable Features

Cribl provides efficient, real-time data transformation and routing, supporting scalability, cost reduction, and rapid integration for enhanced operational efficiency.
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.
The community on Slack is excellent for solving questions and getting ideas.
The platform provides more visibility and requires less effort in monitoring.
Elastic Security offers good insight regarding alerts, reports, and cases.
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
7th
Ranking in Security Information and Event Management (SIEM)
10th
Average Rating
8.4
Reviews Sentiment
6.3
Number of Reviews
16
Ranking in other categories
Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability (13th), 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) (16th), Security Orchestration Automation and Response (SOAR) (7th), Extended Detection and Response (XDR) (9th)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of September 2025, in the Log Management category, the mindshare of Cribl is 2.4%, up from 0.6% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Elastic Security is 2.9%, down from 5.4% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Log Management Market Share Distribution
ProductMarket Share (%)
Cribl2.4%
Elastic Security2.9%
Other94.7%
Log Management
 

Featured Reviews

Abdullah Zubair - PeerSpot reviewer
Enables seamless SIEM/Data Migration and Log Filtration across the enterprise estate
They've already done many good things with the product, but perhaps they could implement a temporary SIEM solution where we could store logs and display them as a SIEM, though I think that's not the space that Cribl is actually looking into. Based on my experience, this product is brilliant and there isn't much or anything important lacking in the product. We encountered some occasional issues with the syslog data stream, particularly when handling large data volume, and getting it to parse and field extracted correctly, but no major alarms that would halt the days operation. There were few source vendor specific challenges, but overall, I didn't notice anything major beyond that. Most of the process went smoothly. However, we did need to carry some troubleshooting to resolve the issues we faced while connecting with other platforms and few data stream miss-behaving, which wasn't a straightforward task for us. 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. In summary, aside from the usual difficulties or issues that someone could face with any project, everything else went well.
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.
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
16%
Computer Software Company
9%
Manufacturing Company
7%
Healthcare Company
7%
Computer Software Company
15%
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 Business8
Midsize Enterprise4
Large Enterprise6
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business40
Midsize Enterprise11
Large Enterprise14
 

Questions from the Community

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Cribl?
I think the pricing for Cribl is reasonable. For large usage, but I heard the calculation of those credits is a bit complicated.
What needs improvement with Cribl?
So since we’re handling a ton of data, I think we could really benefit from a more integrated or connected way to manage it all. Like, if there is a way to better track data lineage, metadata, thos...
What is your primary use case for Cribl?
We use Cribl Stream to collect logs from multiple sources, transform and enrich them, filter out unnecessary data before sending them to SIEM. We also use Cribl to route logging to data lake.
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.
867,349 professionals have used our research since 2012.