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Cribl vs Splunk ITSI (IT Service Intelligence) 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:
 

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
7.5
Splunk ITSI quickly delivers ROI by enhancing visibility, reducing costs, and improving performance with centralized data and efficient analytics.
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
6.3
Splunk ITSI support is generally good, but experiences vary by company size and issue, with occasional delays reported.
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.
The technical support is excellent, and I would rate it at ten.
 

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
7.7
Splunk ITSI is scalable for various deployments, though costly; supports large datasets with predictive analysis for resource optimization.
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.
Splunk is highly scalable, with the ability to expand efficiently.
 

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
7.8
Splunk ITSI is stable and reliable, managing large datasets efficiently, with minor challenges mainly during updates and configuration.
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.
The setup, however, must be done correctly as incorrect deployment can lead to issues.
 

Room For Improvement

Cribl struggles with legacy integration, advanced customization, and documentation, while users seek better logging, indexing, and Microsoft connectors.
Splunk ITSI needs better integration, user interface, predictive analytics, machine learning, real-time alerting, automated response, and user support.
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.
I would appreciate additional features in the next release of Splunk ITSI (IT Service Intelligence) such as cloud infrastructure monitoring including CICDs, Kubernetes, and similar technologies.
Splunk ITSI could benefit from including more features that other solutions support, such as vulnerability management modules.
 

Setup Cost

Enterprise users find Cribl cost-effective, offering good value and savings, despite its complex credit-based billing and yearly price increases.
Splunk ITSI is a costly but comprehensive tool, valued for its observability despite complex licensing and high pricing.
Over time, the licensing cost has increased.
Cribl is very inexpensive, with enterprise pricing around 30 cents per GB, which is really decent.
Splunk ITSI tends to be more expensive compared to some open-source solutions.
 

Valuable Features

Cribl excels in real-time data transformation, routing, and management with user-friendly tools, cost efficiency, and extensive integration support.
Splunk IT Service Intelligence enhances incident management with agile data handling, advanced analytics, and effective troubleshooting features for quick issue resolution.
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.
The predictive analysis can give you proactive information about potential bottlenecks that can occur on applications, desk, storage, SQL servers, databases, or other systems.
Splunk ITSI allows for integration with threat intelligence, enabling my organization to correlate more than two events for generating alerts.
 

Categories and Ranking

Cribl
Ranking in Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability
12th
Average Rating
8.4
Reviews Sentiment
6.5
Number of Reviews
20
Ranking in other categories
Log Management (6th), Security Information and Event Management (SIEM) (10th), Observability Pipeline Software (1st)
Splunk ITSI (IT Service Int...
Ranking in Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability
10th
Average Rating
8.2
Reviews Sentiment
7.0
Number of Reviews
51
Ranking in other categories
IT Alerting and Incident Management (3rd)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of October 2025, in the Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability category, the mindshare of Cribl is 1.1%, up from 0.3% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Splunk ITSI (IT Service Intelligence) is 0.7%, down from 0.8% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability Market Share Distribution
ProductMarket Share (%)
Splunk ITSI (IT Service Intelligence)0.7%
Cribl1.1%
Other98.2%
Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability
 

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.
Ahmed Naguib - PeerSpot reviewer
Identifying complex diagnostics and alert management improvements needed
The best features of Splunk ITSI (IT Service Intelligence) are the APM, the Application Performance Monitoring, and the diagnostic capabilities. It is state-of-the-art. The intelligent alerting in Splunk ITSI (IT Service Intelligence) is very good. The predictive analysis can give you proactive information about potential bottlenecks that can occur on applications, desk, storage, SQL servers, databases, or other systems. It is very effective. The customizable dashboards in Splunk ITSI (IT Service Intelligence) facilitate our customers because they are highly adaptable. We have multiple types of dashboards, depending on who will be utilizing them, such as engineering, middle management, IT heads, or NOC teams that will be monitoring systems. The metrics I rely on for monitoring in Splunk ITSI (IT Service Intelligence) depend on what kind of asset or CI we are monitoring. For applications, we have the number of concurrent transactions, response time from the database, and write time on the desk. There are multiple parameters and metrics that we utilize in the monitoring part within ITSI.
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
16%
Computer Software Company
9%
Manufacturing Company
8%
Healthcare Company
7%
Financial Services Firm
19%
Manufacturing Company
10%
Computer Software Company
9%
Government
8%
 

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 Business11
Midsize Enterprise9
Large Enterprise32
 

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 is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Splunk ITSI (IT Service Intelligence)?
Pricing can vary significantly based on the selected modules and deployment choices. Splunk ITSI tends to be more expensive compared to some open-source solutions.
What needs improvement with Splunk ITSI (IT Service Intelligence)?
Splunk ITSI (IT Service Intelligence) can be improved in terms of the service management function, which is the only drawback, and there are some limitations in terms of event correlation, specific...
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Information Not Available
TransUnion, Cox Automotive, Carnival Cruises, Leidos, Econocom, National Ignition Factory, Entrust Datacard, Molina Healthcare, United States Census Bureau
Find out what your peers are saying about Cribl vs. Splunk ITSI (IT Service Intelligence) and other solutions. Updated: September 2025.
869,202 professionals have used our research since 2012.