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Cribl vs Grafana 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:
 

ROI

Sentiment score
5.6
Cribl enhances cost-effectiveness by reducing licensing costs and optimizing data management, offering up to 50% ROI.
Sentiment score
6.0
Grafana improves ROI by enhancing data insights, streamlining operations, reducing AWS costs, and improving detection times with visual dashboards.
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.
Senior Security Engineer at a university with 10,001+ employees
The second thing is that data aggregation, sampling, and reduction that we're able to do of the data, lowering our overall data volume, both traversing the network as well as what's being stored inside of our final solutions.
Director, Performance Engineering at a tech services company with 10,001+ employees
In terms of reduction, we were able to save almost ~40% of our total cost.
Sr. Lead Security Engineer at a tech vendor with 10,001+ employees
I identified over-provisioned servers and reduced my AWS monthly bill by 15%, which is a significant saving in terms of costs.
System Engineer at a retailer with 10,001+ employees
 

Customer Service

Sentiment score
6.0
Cribl's customer service is praised for responsiveness and expertise, despite needing improved customer understanding and internal logging.
Sentiment score
6.7
Grafana's support is praised for efficiency, with users favoring community forums and benefiting from responsive customer service.
They had extensive expertise with the product and were able to facilitate everything we needed.
Security Consultant at Riversafe Ltd
Usually, within an hour, we get a response, and we are able to work with them back and forth until we resolve the issues.
Engineering Fellow at Pegasystems
Sometimes by hearing the problem itself, they will know what the solution is, and they will let us know how to resolve it, and we do it immediately.
Senior Specialist at LTIMindtree
The technical support team is very helpful with complex PromQL troubleshooting.
System Engineer at a retailer with 10,001+ employees
My advice for people who are new to Grafana or considering it is to reach out to the community mainly, as that's the primary benefit of Grafana.
Sr. DevOps at a tech vendor with 1,001-5,000 employees
I do not use Grafana's support for technical issues because I have found solutions on Stack Overflow and ChatGPT helps me as well.
DevOps Team Lead at Kadabra
 

Scalability Issues

Sentiment score
6.7
Cribl efficiently scales to handle large data volumes, supports diverse workloads, and adapts to growing data processing needs.
Sentiment score
5.6
Grafana offers scalable performance for complex environments, though higher costs and configurations are needed for extensive deployments.
The infrastructure behind Cribl Search is also scalable as it uses a CPU and just spawns horizontally more instances as it demands and requires.
Engineering Fellow at Pegasystems
Compared to other SIEM tools I use, any slight change on the operating system end impacts a lot on our SIEM tools and other things, but Cribl performs well in that regard.
Senior Software Engineer at a retailer with 1,001-5,000 employees
It's an enterprise version, and we have a good amount of users using this solution.
SIEM Engineer at National Australia Bank (NAB)
It is highly scalable and built on a big data architecture capable of ingesting trillions of data points.
System Engineer at a retailer with 10,001+ employees
In terms of our company, the infrastructure is using two availability zones in AWS.
DevOps Team Lead at Kadabra
In assessing Grafana's scalability, we started noticing logs missing or metrics not syncing in time.
Sr. DevOps at a tech vendor with 1,001-5,000 employees
 

Stability Issues

Sentiment score
6.8
Cribl is stable and reliable, with effective support, despite minor bugs and issues at high volumes or advanced usage.
Sentiment score
7.8
Grafana is stable with reliable performance, minor backend challenges, and responsive visualization despite occasional integration and data source issues.
Migrating from those SC4S servers to Cribl worker nodes has truly been a game-changer.
Sr. Lead Security Engineer at a tech vendor with 10,001+ employees
Regarding scalability, we started with zero servers and have around 285 servers now.
Senior Specialist at LTIMindtree
I would rate the stability as ten out of ten.
SIEM Engineer at National Australia Bank (NAB)
When something in their dashboard does not work, because it is open source, I am able to find all the relative combinations that people are having, making it much easier for me to fix.
DevOps Team Lead at Kadabra
Once you get to a higher load, you need to re-evaluate your architecture and put that into account.
Sr. DevOps at a tech vendor with 1,001-5,000 employees
Even when handling millions of data points, the visualization layer remains responsive.
System Engineer at a retailer with 10,001+ employees
 

Room For Improvement

Cribl users seek improvements in integration, documentation, AI, analytics, and cost-efficiency, alongside better support for legacy systems and downtime prevention.
Grafana faces challenges in security, usability, customization, and integration, requiring improvements in features, cost management, and documentation.
A more stringent role-based access control feature would enhance security and allow granular control over what users can see and access.
Manager for Monitoring and Logging at Velera
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.
SIEM Engineer at National Australia Bank (NAB)
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.
Security Consultant at Riversafe Ltd
It would be better if they made the technology easy to use without needing to read extensive documentation.
AWS Cloud Re-Start Program Specialist at Orange RDC (Congo)
Grafana cannot be easily embedded into certain applications and offers limited customization options for graphs.
BI and Analytics Engineer at Sandvine Inc
I would want to see improvements, especially in the tracing part, where following different requests between different services could be more powerful.
Director of Engineering at a insurance company with 10,001+ employees
 

Setup Cost

Cribl offers cost-effective enterprise pricing, simplifying usage with universal licensing and supporting scalability for large data volumes.
Enterprise users experience varied pricing with Grafana, from free open-source to paid licenses, influenced by metrics and features.
Over time, the licensing cost has increased.
SIEM Engineer at National Australia Bank (NAB)
Cribl is very inexpensive, with enterprise pricing around 30 cents per GB, which is really decent.
Security Consultant at Riversafe Ltd
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.
Senior Security Engineer at a healthcare company with 5,001-10,000 employees
In an enterprise setting, pricing is reasonable, as many customers use it.
Aplication Architect at Amazon
The costs associated with using Grafana are somewhere in the ten thousands because we are able to control the logs in a more efficient way to reduce it.
DevOps Team Lead at Kadabra
I purchased my Grafana Cloud subscription through the AWS Marketplace, which simplified my procurement process and allowed me to apply the cost towards my AWS committed spend.
System Engineer at a retailer with 10,001+ employees
 

Valuable Features

Cribl offers efficient data transformation, cost reduction, and seamless integration with intuitive UI and scalable, vendor-agnostic solutions.
Grafana is a popular, open-source tool known for customizable dashboards, integrations, real-time analysis, and extensive community support.
The data reduction and preprocessing capabilities make Cribl really unique.
Security Consultant at Riversafe Ltd
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.
Security Engineer at Tecplix
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.
Senior Security Engineer at a university with 10,001+ employees
Users can monitor metrics with greater ease, and the tool aids in quickly identifying issues by providing a visual representation of data.
Aplication Architect at Amazon
The fact that I can join data from my SQL database with metrics from Prometheus in the same table is a feature I have not found performed as well elsewhere.
System Engineer at a retailer with 10,001+ employees
Its alerting feature is effective because it allows me to set thresholds to send an email if a certain threshold is met.
BI and Analytics Engineer at Sandvine Inc
 

Categories and Ranking

Cribl
Ranking in Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability
9th
Average Rating
8.6
Reviews Sentiment
6.7
Number of Reviews
31
Ranking in other categories
Log Management (5th), Security Information and Event Management (SIEM) (8th), Observability Pipeline Software (1st)
Grafana
Ranking in Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability
5th
Average Rating
7.8
Reviews Sentiment
6.9
Number of Reviews
48
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
 

Mindshare comparison

As of January 2026, in the Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability category, the mindshare of Cribl is 1.2%, up from 0.5% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Grafana is 3.6%, down from 6.7% 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 (%)
Grafana3.6%
Cribl1.2%
Other95.2%
Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability
 

Featured Reviews

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.
BasilJiji - PeerSpot reviewer
System Engineer at a retailer with 10,001+ employees
Unified dashboards have empowered teams and have democratized real-time operational insights
Grafana's snapshot and dashboard sharing features are critical for our remote incident response. During production issues, I generate a public snapshot of a dashboard at a specific point and share the URL in our Slack war room so every engineer can see exactly what the metrics looked like when the error occurred. This helps significantly during the process of finding the root cause in those scenarios. The best features Grafana offers go beyond just pretty charts; it is an integration engine. The fact that I can join data from my SQL database with metrics from Prometheus in the same table is a feature I have not found performed as well elsewhere. My team uses this feature by comparing two different tables from the databases to show one single view, which Grafana is really helping with. In a visualized way, the charts can be displayed on one dashboard, allowing end users who are not familiar with these technical aspects to extract valuable data from it. Grafana has positively impacted our organization by democratizing data within our company. Before using Grafana, only developers could see the system health, but now our product managers and executives have their own high-level dashboards, which has improved cross-departmental transparency and alignment.
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
20%
Manufacturing Company
12%
Healthcare Company
6%
Computer Software Company
5%
Financial Services Firm
19%
Computer Software Company
12%
Manufacturing Company
9%
Comms Service Provider
6%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business9
Midsize Enterprise5
Large Enterprise18
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business13
Midsize Enterprise8
Large Enterprise25
 

Questions from the Community

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Cribl?
I'm not sure of Cribl pricing because it has been procured as a package by our client, and we are not exposed to or do not have an idea of how much they have spent to get a license from Cribl. But ...
What needs improvement with Cribl?
I am not in a position to comment on how Cribl could be improved or enhanced because it is a good tool, and I have only used a small part of the entire Cribl product. As of now I am pretty happy wi...
What is your primary use case for Cribl?
My usual use cases for Cribl involve collecting logs from many endpoints, including user activities. We collect logs into either Log Analytical Workspace or Event Hub and redirect to Cribl so that ...
What do you like most about Grafana?
The product's initial setup phase was very easy.
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Grafana?
The costs associated with using Grafana are somewhere in the ten thousands because we are able to control the logs in a more efficient way to reduce it. That is pretty much great for us.
What needs improvement with Grafana?
Grafana could be improved through enhancement of graphs and visualizations and providing more integrations. Grafana is going to start working with OpenTelemetry, which would be helpful to have the ...
 

Comparisons

 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Information Not Available
Microsoft, Adobe, Optum, Sky, Nvidia, Roblox, Wells Fargo, BlackRock, Informatica, Maersk, Daimler Truck, SNCF, Atlassian, DHL, SAP, JPMorgan Chase, Cisco, Citi and many others.
Find out what your peers are saying about Cribl vs. Grafana and other solutions. Updated: December 2025.
881,114 professionals have used our research since 2012.