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Cribl vs Grafana Loki 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:
 

Categories and Ranking

Cribl
Ranking in Log Management
6th
Average Rating
8.6
Reviews Sentiment
6.7
Number of Reviews
25
Ranking in other categories
Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability (12th), Security Information and Event Management (SIEM) (10th), Observability Pipeline Software (1st)
Grafana Loki
Ranking in Log Management
3rd
Average Rating
8.2
Reviews Sentiment
7.8
Number of Reviews
18
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
 

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 Grafana Loki is 7.9%, up from 6.5% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Log Management Market Share Distribution
ProductMarket Share (%)
Grafana Loki7.9%
Cribl2.5%
Other89.6%
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.
Volodymyr Bondarchuk - PeerSpot reviewer
Integrations enhance monitoring but problem-solving proves challenging
Different types of integrations with various sources are the most helpful and useful features of Grafana Loki that I found for myself. As part of Kubernetes technology, I noticed benefits from using this product such as availability, configuration balancing, high availability solutions for high performance, and failover clustering. It provides a clear picture about the state of the system and gives needed information for taking action and quickly fixing problems.

Quotes from Members

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:
 

Pros

"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."
"The features of Cribl that I appreciate the most are the vendor agnosticism and the ability to send data almost anywhere you want, regardless of the data type, the format, or the destination."
"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, and those ingest costs have basically canceled out the pricing of Cribl licensing for us based on the volume of data that we have."
"The best feature in Cribl, when getting logs from some custom application, is the ability to break up logs that pile up together and come as one event."
"The Stream product benefits us as it gives us the ability to reduce and streamline the logs that we have getting into our SIEM."
"Our experience with Cribl has been very smooth; everything runs seamlessly, there are no delays or sluggishness, which I really appreciate."
"I'd rate the solution ten out of ten."
"Cribl search has affected us greatly, and it has optimized our operations teams' time and efficiency; they're able to troubleshoot and find issues for our customers in a minimal amount of time."
"The most valuable features of the solution stem from the fact that it is an open-source tool that is stable and flexible."
"I appreciate the capability to process logs from microservices and seamlessly integrate them into Grafana."
"Different types of integrations with various sources are the most helpful and useful features of Grafana Loki that I found for myself."
"The effectiveness of filters is pivotal for optimizing the search process and extracting the specific information we need from the extensive log data."
"The most valuable feature of the solution is the tool's GUI. The solution's GUI is very user-friendly."
"Grafana Loki is easy to monitor and detect errors."
"Grafana agent is very lightweight and does not cost significant resources of our cluster."
"Loki significantly saves time in troubleshooting by quickly pinpointing network issues."
 

Cons

"There is no alerting mechanism for the leader/worker nodes status."
"Improvement could be made in the logging area, as sometimes we encounter issues in a pipeline or something, and it's not immediately obvious when you look at the logs that the pipeline is failing."
"It's very difficult to aggregate low-volume logs because the worker processes don't share state."
"Regarding Cribl's ability to contain data cost and complexity, if they can reduce their cost, that will make them more competitive."
"Currently, Cribl Search is dedicated to one bucket at a time in the case of S3 buckets. The ability to search for multiple buckets would be awesome."
"Currently, Cribl Search is dedicated to one bucket at a time in the case of S3 buckets. The ability to search for multiple buckets would be awesome."
"We encountered some issues with the syslog data stream, particularly with handling large databases and extensive data logs."
"Cribl could be improved by some UI tweaks and some usability tweaks, mostly centered around error troubleshooting for large volumes of Edge nodes."
"I do not see any areas for improvement at the moment."
"The Docker container partition feature needs improvement as they do not reuse the space and goes into a pending state."
"I would rate Grafana Loki a seven out of ten because it is open source, and sometimes there can be problems that are difficult to fix without official support."
"My main concern is the recommended production-grade setup. They suggest using tools like Tanka or Jsonnet. They should simplify the process to increase adoption."
"It's not intended for proprietary services, so you have to struggle with configuration a lot."
"We face some bugs when we install the latest version of Grafana Loki."
"The platform's stability needs improvement."
"Visualization-wise, Grafana Loki's dashboard looks a little outdated compared to other open-source visualization tools like Chronograf."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The product pricing is reasonable compared to other solutions."
"I would not say it is a cheaply priced tool as it has been doing wonders in the market. The tool has been budget-friendly for organizations."
"Grafana Loki is an open-source solution."
"We use a free version."
"The solution is open source."
"I find the licensing structure quite reasonable, as the free license effectively meets my requirements."
"Since we are using the open-source version of Grafana Loki, we are not paying anything for the solution."
"I use the solution's open-source version. Grafana Loki is a completely free solution for me."
"The cost is less than other paid services like CloudWatch."
"Grafana Loki is a free, open-source solution."
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Top Industries

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

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 Business7
Midsize Enterprise8
Large Enterprise3
 

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'...
What do you like most about Grafana Loki?
We are using Grafana Loki as a database for real-time metrics.
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Grafana Loki?
Since it is an open source tool, there are no charges or fees.
What needs improvement with Grafana Loki?
I have no ideas at this moment about what could be improved in Grafana Loki.
 

Comparisons

 

Overview

Find out what your peers are saying about Cribl vs. Grafana Loki and other solutions. Updated: September 2025.
872,706 professionals have used our research since 2012.