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Cribl vs Graylog 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
9th
Average Rating
8.4
Reviews Sentiment
7.1
Number of Reviews
10
Ranking in other categories
Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability (14th), Security Information and Event Management (SIEM) (12th), Observability Pipeline Software (1st)
Graylog
Ranking in Log Management
15th
Average Rating
8.0
Reviews Sentiment
7.2
Number of Reviews
21
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
 

Mindshare comparison

As of June 2025, in the Log Management category, the mindshare of Cribl is 1.9%, up from 0.4% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Graylog is 6.7%, up from 5.9% 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.
Ivan Kokalovic - PeerSpot reviewer
Facilitates backend service monitoring with efficient log retrieval and API flexibility
Graylog is valuable because it bridges technical knowledge to non-technical teams, presenting complex backend processes in a simple timeline. It boosts the knowledge of sales and customer support teams by allowing them to see the backend operations without needing to read the code. Its API is flexible for visualization, and its powerful search engine efficiently handles large volumes of log data. Moreover, its stability, fast search capabilities, and compatibility with languages like ANSI SQL enhance its utility in IT infrastructure.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"I'd rate the solution ten out of ten."
"The support team was very helpful and managed to get everything production-ready."
"Features such as Cribl Stream, Cribl LogStream, and Cribl Edge have been the most beneficial. The Cribl LogStream, in particular, is valuable for routing data, creating firewalls on pipelines, and putting security measures in place to ensure data reaches its destination without issues."
"The capability to reduce logs in a user-friendly manner is a standout feature. Cribl allows us to view logs live as they are being processed, giving us quick feedback on the changes made."
"My favorite option in Cribl is the Stream product."
"Cribl offers easy plugin configurations and source collection settings, allowing us to collect logs from any source."
"When it comes to the product's installation phase, it is not tough for people who have good knowledge...The tool is worth the investment."
"The product's most valuable features include the internal management of events, coding perspective, data processing, and serialization."
"Allowing us to set up alerts and integrate with platforms we already use, such as Slack and OpsGenie to alert users of these errors proactively, is also a very useful feature."
"Graylog is valuable because it bridges technical knowledge to non-technical teams, presenting complex backend processes in a simple timeline."
"Graylog is very handy."
"Graylog's search functionality, alerting functionality, user management, and dashboards are useful."
"The ability to write custom alerts is key to information security and compliance."
"I like the correlation and the alerting."
"We have scaled from a single machine installation (a VM with a Graylog + ES + MongoDB) to (2 Graylog + 2 ES + 3 MongoDB). This was done smoothly with a minimal impact on logging."
"The best feature of Graylog is the Elasticsearch integration. We can integrate and we can run filters, such as an event of interest, and those logs we can send to any SIEM tool or as an analytic. Additionally, there are clear and well-documented implementation instructions on their website to follow if needed."
 

Cons

"Cribl should consider adding more features that are applicable to smaller firms, allowing broader access to their data migration through Cribl."
"There have been several administrative issues. Another point is that the browsing functions aren't very intuitive."
"The sys logging could be enhanced to make it easier to identify errors, especially when dealing with multiple functions."
"Perhaps more flexibility in terms of metrics would be helpful."
"Cribl could improve by offering easier integrations with enterprise products, similar to what Splunk provides."
"There is no alerting mechanism for the leader/worker nodes status."
"Cribl doesn't have as many packs available"
"There is room for improvement in the documentation and knowledge base, particularly regarding configurations like sources where logs are being ingested"
"More customization is always useful."
"Since container orchestration systems are popular and Graylog fits the niche well, perhaps they could officially support running in docker containers on Kubernetes as a StatefulSet as a use case. That way, the declarative nature of Kubernetes config files would document their best case deployment scenario-"
"I would like to see a default dashboard widget that shows the topology of the clusters defined for the graylog install."
"We ran into problems with Elasticsearch throwing a circuit-breaking exception due to field data size being too large. It turned out that the heap size directly impacted this size in a high-throughput environment, causing unexplained instability in Graylog. We were able to troubleshoot on the Elasticsearch size, but we should have been able to reference some minimum requirements for Graylog to know that our settings weren't sufficient."
"I hope to see improvements in Graylog for more interactivity, user-friendliness, and creating alerts. The initial setup is complex."
"Graylog can improve the index rotation as it's quite a complex solution."
"The area in Graylog that needs to be improved or enhanced would be the integrations."
"Over six months, I had two similar issues where searches were performed on field "messages". It exhausted all the memory of the ES node causing an ES crash and a Graylog halt."
 

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."
"If you want something that works and do not have the money for Splunk or QRadar, take Graylog.​​"
"It's an open-source solution that can be used free of charge."
"​You get a lot out-of-the-box with the non-enterprise version, so give it a try first."
"Having paid official support is wise for projects."
"Graylog is a free open-source solution. The free version has a capacity limitation of 2 GB daily, if you want to go above this you have to purchase a license."
"I am using a community edition. I have not looked at the enterprise offering from Graylog."
"It's open source and free. They have a paid version, but we never looked into that because we never needed the features of the paid version."
"I use the free version of Graylog."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
18%
Computer Software Company
10%
Healthcare Company
8%
Government
7%
Computer Software Company
17%
Comms Service Provider
10%
Educational Organization
7%
Government
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...
What do you like most about Graylog?
The product is scalable. The solution is stable.
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Graylog?
I am not familiar with the pricing details of Graylog, as I was not responsible for that aspect. It was determined that we didn't need an enterprise plan, which is more suited for clients with less...
What needs improvement with Graylog?
An improvement I would suggest is in Graylog's user interface, such as allowing for font size adjustments. A potential enhancement could be the integration with Ollama to run large language models ...
 

Comparisons

 

Also Known As

No data available
Graylog2
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Information Not Available
Blue Cross Blue Shield, eBay, Cisco, LinkedIn, SAP, King.com, Twilio, Deutsche Presse-Agentur
Find out what your peers are saying about Cribl vs. Graylog and other solutions. Updated: June 2025.
856,873 professionals have used our research since 2012.