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Cribl vs Sentinel comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive Summary

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
4.3
Cribl offers cost-effective solutions with potential 30%-50% returns, reducing operational costs through log optimization and automation.
Sentiment score
6.0
Sentinel tracks user behavior to prevent security issues, offering financial gain typically within a three-year lease period.
In the case of optimization, it has helped return on investment to somewhere close to 50%.
we have saved a significant amount of time and resources moving from a manual approach to something that's more automated.
 

Customer Service

Sentiment score
5.0
Cribl's customer support is highly responsive with quick issue resolution, knowledgeable staff, and strong technical assistance despite minor improvements needed.
Sentiment score
4.5
Clients find Sentinel service excellent overall, but some face delays and difficulties, especially with low-priority issues.
They had extensive expertise with the product and were able to facilitate everything we needed.
If they could enhance their internal logging, we won't require Cribl support to engage.
The community, including the engineering and sales teams, is available on Slack and is very supportive.
 

Scalability Issues

Sentiment score
5.9
Cribl offers scalable, automated deployment and seamless growth for efficient data handling, suitable for businesses of all sizes.
Sentiment score
8.0
Sentinel efficiently scales and integrates with systems, favored by large organizations for enterprise-grade performance in extensive environments.
It's an enterprise version, and we have a good amount of users using this solution.
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.
 

Stability Issues

Sentiment score
6.3
Cribl is stable and reliable, with minor bugs quickly resolved, earning stability ratings between six and nine.
Sentiment score
8.0
Sentinel is generally stable, with some users noting Java-related issues and region-specific outages, but high ratings overall.
I would rate the stability as ten out of ten.
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.
Cribl is quite stable and doesn't crash; there's no unusual behavior.
 

Room For Improvement

Cribl struggles with legacy integration, advanced customization, and documentation, while users seek better logging, indexing, and Microsoft connectors.
Sentinel requires improved web integration, user interface, customization, documentation, and dashboard simplicity, while addressing regional outages and cost concerns.
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.
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.
Since Cribl is such a large platform with numerous features, having a clear, structured approach would make it easier for me and others to understand and utilize its capabilities.
Price is always a consideration, so the price would be nice if it were lower.
 

Setup Cost

Enterprise users find Cribl cost-effective, offering good value and savings, despite its complex credit-based billing and yearly price increases.
Sentinel is a subscription-based enterprise solution with competitive pricing, offering discounts and regular updates, requiring a support contract.
Over time, the licensing cost has increased.
Cribl is very inexpensive, with enterprise pricing around 30 cents per GB, which is really decent.
They nearly always bill it in dollars, so if it can be billed in our currency, that would be helpful and fixed in our currency.
 

Valuable Features

Cribl excels in real-time data transformation, routing, and management with user-friendly tools, cost efficiency, and extensive integration support.
Sentinel excels with its scalable, user-friendly design, integrating advanced threat detection and automated incident response, enhancing security management.
The data reduction and preprocessing capabilities make Cribl really unique.
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.
The community on Slack is excellent for solving questions and getting ideas.
Sentinel's best features include that it's a very easy product to use.
 

Categories and Ranking

Cribl
Ranking in Security Information and Event Management (SIEM)
10th
Average Rating
8.4
Reviews Sentiment
6.5
Number of Reviews
20
Ranking in other categories
Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability (12th), Log Management (6th), Observability Pipeline Software (1st)
Sentinel
Ranking in Security Information and Event Management (SIEM)
19th
Average Rating
7.6
Reviews Sentiment
6.7
Number of Reviews
17
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
 

Mindshare comparison

As of October 2025, in the Security Information and Event Management (SIEM) category, the mindshare of Cribl is 1.2%, up from 0.2% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Sentinel is 3.9%, up from 2.5% 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%
Sentinel3.9%
Other94.9%
Security Information and Event Management (SIEM)
 

Featured Reviews

Manoj Gowda J - PeerSpot reviewer
Helps reduce log ingestion cost by dropping unnecessary events and customizing pipelines
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. 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. This is critical as this generally happens in CrowdStrike. This feature helps us significantly. When the ingestion is high from unwanted logs, logs not related to security purposes can be dropped by writing the parser function. By dropping events that are not required for security purpose monitoring, we can reduce the ingestion, which drastically reduces the cost as well. Cribl gives another option where I can store some logs, and when needed, I can pick them up from there. The interface is very handy and not very complicated, yet there are many functions you can perform. You can play around with numerous functions, parse there, and add UDMs to SecOps, which makes it really easy. To simplify the pipeline, when we go to the pipelines, there are vast options. We can make it specific requirements based on the customers. I would prefer a customized or simplified version. Cribl is a very good platform to work with, with lots of features that other platforms don't provide.
Simon Johnston - PeerSpot reviewer
Simple antivirus solution integrates well but could improve pricing and currency options
I don't really have experience working with these solutions. I promote them for our clients, but I don't work with them. I can't share my experience with these tools as I make assumptions about that. For both Adlumin and CrowdStrike, both confirm that they're scalable and enterprise-ready and all those kinds of things. We haven't had any specific problem with either of those. We just have a preference for which one we would prefer. If somebody says they want to use a different one from the one that we prefer, then we have to find reasons why they aren't. But scalability is not one of the reasons that one is better over the other. I don't really have advice for people that are looking into using Sentinel; just do your research across what is available. On a scale of one to ten, I rate Sentinel a seven.
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
16%
Computer Software Company
9%
Manufacturing Company
8%
Healthcare Company
7%
Computer Software Company
13%
Financial Services Firm
9%
Manufacturing Company
8%
Government
6%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business9
Midsize Enterprise4
Large Enterprise8
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business9
Midsize Enterprise3
Large Enterprise7
 

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?
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 th...
What is your primary use case for Cribl?
Our main use case for Cribl was SIEM migration, where we merged multiple SIEM solutions to a single SIEM solution. SIEM migration was the most major use case we were looking for. The second use cas...
What do you like most about NetIQ Sentinel?
The solution lets us get all the logs properly and regularly monitor customer infrastructure.
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for NetIQ Sentinel?
I don't have too many comments overall about pricing as we're in South Africa, so it makes more sense if it's billed in rand. They nearly always bill it in dollars, so if it can be billed in our cu...
What needs improvement with NetIQ Sentinel?
I'm not sure what the room for improvement is for Sentinel. It needs to stay current, and it does, so I suppose that's fine. I don't have a high demand for what it should do. Price is always a cons...
 

Comparisons

 

Also Known As

No data available
NetIQ Sentinel, Novell SIEM
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Information Not Available
Faysal Bank, GaVI, Handelsbanken, ISC Mªnster, Lambeth Council, Swisscard, The Municipality of Siena, Tukes, University of Dayton, University of the Sunshine Coast
Find out what your peers are saying about Cribl vs. Sentinel and other solutions. Updated: September 2025.
869,760 professionals have used our research since 2012.