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Cribl vs Splunk comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Jul 13, 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
4.2
Cribl is a cost-effective, budget-friendly solution offering significant savings and efficiency compared to Splunk once mastered.
Sentiment score
6.9
Splunk Enterprise Security boosts efficiency by automating processes, reducing costs, improving visibility, and delivering valuable returns on investment.
The documentation for Splunk Enterprise Security is outstanding. It is well-organized and easy to access.
I have noticed a return on investment with Splunk Enterprise Security, as it delivers substantial value for money.
Customers see the value in investing in this solution, particularly when it helps resolve issues quickly, turning a potential 20-hour response into one hour.
 

Customer Service

Sentiment score
5.8
Cribl's support is praised for responsiveness and assistance, despite occasional miscommunications and substantial help needed during setup.
Sentiment score
6.5
Splunk Enterprise Security support is knowledgeable and efficient, though response times for complex issues could be improved.
The community, including the engineering and sales teams, is available on Slack and is very supportive.
We have paid for Splunk support, and we’re not on the free tier hoping for assistance; we are a significant customer and invest a lot in this service.
If you want to write your own correlation rules, it is very difficult to do, and you need Splunk's support to write new correlation rules for the SIEM tool.
They try to close issues as soon as possible, often just offering documentation links.
 

Scalability Issues

Sentiment score
6.5
Cribl excels in scalability, offering seamless deployment and upgrades, with cloud and on-site support for diverse company needs.
Sentiment score
7.6
Splunk Enterprise Security is praised for scalability, handling large data efficiently with flexible architecture and strong cloud integration.
It is pretty scalable, just in terms of cost.
They struggle a bit with pure virtual environments, but in terms of how much they can handle, it is pretty good.
It is easy to scale.
It's big in a Central European context, and small from a Splunk North American context.
 

Stability Issues

Sentiment score
6.8
Cribl is stable, rated 6-8/10, with persistent queuing preventing crashes and minor issues resolved in updates.
Sentiment score
7.8
Splunk Enterprise Security is stable and reliable, though performance issues and bugs may arise with large data or updates.
They test it very thoroughly before release, and our customers have Splunk running for months without issues.
It provides a stable environment but needs to integrate with ITSM platforms to achieve better visibility.
I would rate it a ten out of ten for stability.
 

Room For Improvement

Cribl requires better integration, improved documentation, enhanced customization, and more features for legacy systems and smaller firms.
Users seek simplified setup, better integration, improved pricing, accessible training, automation, AI, and reduced false positives in Splunk.
Perhaps more flexibility in terms of metrics would be helpful.
Improving the infrastructure behind Splunk Enterprise Security is vital—enhanced cores, CPUs, and memory should be prioritized to support better processing power.
Splunk Enterprise Security is not something that automatically picks things; you have to set up use cases, update data models, and link the right use cases to the right data models for those detections to happen.
For any future enhancements or features, such as MLTK and SOAR platform integration, we need more visibility, training, and certification for the skilled professionals who are working.
 

Setup Cost

Cribl offers a cost-effective, scalable pricing model with potential savings and flexibility, appealing to many organizations.
Splunk Enterprise Security's pricing is high, justifying value for large businesses but prompting others to seek cheaper alternatives.
I saw clients spend two million dollars a year just feeding data into the Splunk solution.
The platform requires significant financial investment and resources, making it expensive despite its comprehensive features.
Splunk is priced higher than other solutions.
 

Valuable Features

Cribl streamlines data transformation, integration, and log management with efficient processing, user-friendly tools, and a supportive community.
Splunk Enterprise Security offers scalable log management, integrates easily, and provides advanced threat detection with customizable, user-friendly data analysis tools.
The community on Slack is excellent for solving questions and getting ideas.
This capability is useful for performance monitoring and issue identification.
I assess Splunk Enterprise Security's insider threat detection capabilities for helping to find unknown threats and anomalous user behavior as great.
Splunk Enterprise Security provides the foundation for unified threat detection, investigation, and response, enabling fast identification of critical issues.
 

Categories and Ranking

Cribl
Ranking in Log Management
8th
Ranking in Security Information and Event Management (SIEM)
12th
Average Rating
8.2
Reviews Sentiment
6.6
Number of Reviews
12
Ranking in other categories
Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability (14th), Observability Pipeline Software (1st)
Splunk Enterprise Security
Ranking in Log Management
2nd
Ranking in Security Information and Event Management (SIEM)
1st
Average Rating
8.4
Reviews Sentiment
7.5
Number of Reviews
322
Ranking in other categories
IT Operations Analytics (1st)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of July 2025, in the Security Information and Event Management (SIEM) category, the mindshare of Cribl is 1.0%, up from 0.1% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Splunk Enterprise Security is 9.4%, down from 12.1% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Security Information and Event Management (SIEM)
 

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.
ROBERT-CHRISTIAN - PeerSpot reviewer
Has many predefined correlation rules and is brilliant for investigation and log analysis
It is very complicated to write your own correlation rules without the help of Splunk support. What Splunk could do better is to create an API to the standard SIEM tools, such as Microsoft Sentinel. The idea would be to make it less painful. In ELK Stack, Kibana is the query language with which you can search log files. I believe Splunk has also a query language in which they search their log files, but once you have identified the log file that you want to use for further security correlation, you want to very quickly transport that into your SIEM tool, such as Microsoft Sentinel. That is something that Splunk could make a little bit less painful because it is a lot of effort to find that log file and forward it. An API with Microsoft Sentinel or a similar SIEM tool would be a good idea.
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Comparison Review

VS
Feb 26, 2015
HP ArcSight vs. IBM QRadar vs. ​McAfee Nitro vs. Splunk vs. RSA Security vs. LogRhythm
We at Infosecnirvana.com have done several posts on SIEM. After the Dummies Guide on SIEM, we are following it up with a SIEM Product Comparison – 101 deck. So, here it is for your viewing pleasure. Let me know what you think by posting your comments below. The key products compared here are…
 

Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
17%
Computer Software Company
9%
Healthcare Company
8%
Manufacturing Company
7%
Financial Services Firm
14%
Computer Software Company
14%
Manufacturing Company
8%
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 SOC product do you recommend?
For tools I’d recommend: -SIEM- LogRhythm -SOAR- Palo Alto XSOAR Doing commercial w/o both (or at least an XDR) is asking to miss details that are critical, and ending up a statistic. Also, rememb...
What is a better choice, Splunk or Azure Sentinel?
It would really depend on (1) which logs you need to ingest and (2) what are your use cases Splunk is easy for ingestion of anything, but the charge per GB/Day Indexed and it gets expensive as log ...
How does Splunk compare with Azure Monitor?
Splunk handles a high amount of data very well. We use Splunk to capture information and as an aggregator for monitoring information from different sources. Splunk is very good at alerting us if we...
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Information Not Available
Splunk has more than 7,000 customers spread across over 90 countries. These customers include Telenor, UniCredit, ideeli, McKenney's, Tesco, and SurveyMonkey.
Find out what your peers are saying about Cribl vs. Splunk Enterprise Security and other solutions. Updated: July 2025.
863,901 professionals have used our research since 2012.