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Cribl vs OpenText Enterprise Security Manager 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
5.4
Cribl provides major cost savings by reducing data and SIEM expenses, often offsetting the cost of its licensing.
Sentiment score
4.9
ROI from OpenText Enterprise Security Manager varies widely, influenced by threat detection, compliance benefits, and prevention of incidents.
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
 

Customer Service

Sentiment score
5.9
Cribl's customer service is praised for responsiveness, knowledge, and supportive assistance, though some suggest improvements in needs understanding.
Sentiment score
5.4
OpenText Enterprise Security Manager support receives mixed reviews, with common complaints about slow resolution and inadequate expertise in complex issues.
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
If they could enhance their internal logging, we won't require Cribl support to engage.
SIEM Engineer at National Australia Bank (NAB)
If I raise a P1 or P0 ticket, the response time is often delayed by four to eight hours.
Senior Security Engineer at Valuepoint Systems
 

Scalability Issues

Sentiment score
6.6
Cribl efficiently scales with data growth, supporting seamless deployment and expansion, suitable for diverse and growing business environments.
Sentiment score
5.9
OpenText Enterprise Security Manager is scalable for large deployments but faces cost challenges at the logger level.
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 lacks some capabilities compared to other tools available in the market.
Senior Security Engineer at Valuepoint Systems
 

Stability Issues

Sentiment score
6.7
Cribl offers reliable performance and responsive support, handling up to 12 TB data with minimal issues or downtime.
Sentiment score
5.1
OpenText Enterprise Security Manager is stable and reliable, though performance varies with challenges in virtualization and specific components.
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
I would rate the stability as ten out of ten.
SIEM Engineer at National Australia Bank (NAB)
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.
Senior Security Delivery Analyst at Accenture
The stability of ArcSight Enterprise Security Manager (ESM) is not very robust.
Senior Security Engineer at Valuepoint Systems
 

Room For Improvement

Cribl requires improved compatibility, logging, documentation, resource optimization, Microsoft support, data storage, and AI integration for better user experience.
OpenText Enterprise Security Manager needs user interface upgrades, better integration, improved documentation, and enhancements in analytics and scalability.
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
The integration aspect of ArcSight Enterprise Security Manager (ESM) needs improvement.
Senior Security Engineer at Valuepoint Systems
 

Setup Cost

Cribl offers competitive pricing and flexible licensing, appealing to enterprises seeking cost-effective, scalable data processing solutions.
OpenText Enterprise Security Manager is costly but offers robust features and scalability, with possible discounts and cost management strategies.
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
ArcSight Enterprise Security Manager (ESM) is very cheap compared to other tools.
Senior Security Engineer at Valuepoint Systems
 

Valuable Features

Cribl offers real-time data transformation, ease of use, and flexibility, enhancing data processing and cost management for organizations.
ArcSight offers advanced threat detection, robust integration, customizable dashboards, and automates event correlation for efficient security operations.
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
The ability to interpret data is highly valued.
Senior Security Engineer at Valuepoint Systems
 

Categories and Ranking

Cribl
Ranking in Security Information and Event Management (SIEM)
8th
Average Rating
8.6
Reviews Sentiment
6.7
Number of Reviews
29
Ranking in other categories
Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability (10th), Log Management (5th), Observability Pipeline Software (1st)
OpenText Enterprise Securit...
Ranking in Security Information and Event Management (SIEM)
21st
Average Rating
7.8
Reviews Sentiment
6.7
Number of Reviews
98
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
 

Mindshare comparison

As of December 2025, in the Security Information and Event Management (SIEM) category, the mindshare of Cribl is 1.2%, up from 0.3% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of OpenText Enterprise Security Manager is 1.6%, up from 1.2% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Security Information and Event Management (SIEM) Market Share Distribution
ProductMarket Share (%)
Cribl1.2%
OpenText Enterprise Security Manager1.6%
Other97.2%
Security Information and Event Management (SIEM)
 

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.
NM
Senior Security Engineer at Valuepoint Systems
Interpreting data effectively despite challenges in integration and support
If someone lacks the budget for a new SIEM tool with advanced capabilities, I would recommend ArcSight Enterprise Security Manager (ESM). However, if they have the budget, I would suggest looking into other options. Overall, I would give ArcSight Enterprise Security Manager (ESM) a rating of seven out of ten.
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Comparison Review

VS
Manager, Enterprise Risk Consulting at a tech company with 1,001-5,000 employees
Jun 28, 2015
Qradar vs. ArcSight
Continuing with the SIEM posts we have done at Infosecnirvana, this post is a Head to head comparison of the two Industry leading SIEM products in the market – HP ArcSight and IBM QRadar Both the products have consistently been in the Gartner Leaders Quadrant. Both HP and IBM took over niche SIEM…
 

Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
20%
Manufacturing Company
12%
Healthcare Company
6%
Computer Software Company
6%
Manufacturing Company
11%
Financial Services Firm
10%
Computer Software Company
10%
Performing Arts
9%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business9
Midsize Enterprise5
Large Enterprise17
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business37
Midsize Enterprise14
Large Enterprise57
 

Questions from the Community

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Cribl?
Cribl has been excellent when it comes to pricing, setup cost, and licensing. The team navigates us through their models seamlessly and we adopt Cribl Cloud easily. Within a month's time, we're abl...
What needs improvement with Cribl?
Cribl handles a high volume of diverse data types very well, such as logs and metrics. However, the endpoint plug-in tool can use some refinement, as it tends to hit system resources and can someti...
What is your primary use case for Cribl?
Cribl is used to manage routing of different log systems and vulnerability type log scanning and retention, which is then re-routed to log retention servers. Firewall logs are sent directly from fi...
Which is the best SIEM tool for a mid-sized financial services firm: Arcsight or Securonix?
In my market, a lot of financial companies had or have an ArcSight installation. Just because in former times it was pretty good. Now a lot of them are looking for a more effective solution due to ...
What do you like most about ArcSight Enterprise Security Manager (ESM)?
We utilize ArcSight ESM for real-time threat detection in our organization. We have custom rules that we've developed on top of the WAN services, along with scheduled licensing activities.
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for ArcSight Enterprise Security Manager (ESM)?
ArcSight Enterprise Security Manager (ESM) is very cheap compared to other tools. It is worth the investment if you are considering the cost.
 

Also Known As

No data available
Micro Focus ArcSight, HPE ArcSight, ArcSight
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Information Not Available
Lake Health, U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, Bank AlJazira, Banca Intesa, and Obrela.
Find out what your peers are saying about Cribl vs. OpenText Enterprise Security Manager and other solutions. Updated: December 2025.
879,310 professionals have used our research since 2012.