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Cribl vs Splunk comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Sep 21, 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
5.3
Cribl offers significant cost savings and efficiency, reducing SIEM platform expenses and log ingestion while enhancing automation and returns.
Sentiment score
7.0
Users experienced increased ROI with Splunk Observability Cloud, citing improved visibility, efficiency, collaboration, and reduced downtime.
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.
In terms of reduction, we were able to save almost ~40% of our total cost.
In the case of optimization, it has helped return on investment to somewhere close to 50%.
Using Splunk has saved my organization about 30% of our budget compared to using multiple different monitoring products.
Anyone working in front-end management should recognize the market price to see the true value of end-user monitoring.
I have definitely seen a return on investment with Splunk Observability Cloud, particularly through how fast it has grown and how comfortable other teams are in relying on its outputs for monitoring and observability.
 

Customer Service

Sentiment score
5.9
Cribl's support is praised for responsiveness, knowledgeable assistance, and effective resolution across time zones, with room for improvement.
Sentiment score
7.0
Splunk Observability Cloud support is generally responsive, highly rated, with helpful resources, despite occasional delays in resolution.
They had extensive expertise with the product and were able to facilitate everything we needed.
Usually, within an hour, we get a response, and we are able to work with them back and forth until we resolve the issues.
If they could enhance their internal logging, we won't require Cribl support to engage.
On a scale of 1 to 10, the customer service and technical support deserve a 10.
They have consistently helped us resolve any issues we've encountered.
They often require multiple questions, with five or six emails to get a response.
 

Scalability Issues

Sentiment score
6.5
Cribl efficiently scales for all business sizes, handling large data volumes with adaptable deployment and automated resource management.
Sentiment score
7.4
Splunk Observability Cloud offers scalability and smooth transitions, despite costs and challenges with custom metrics and rapid onboarding.
The infrastructure behind Cribl Search is also scalable as it uses a CPU and just spawns horizontally more instances as it demands and requires.
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.
It's an enterprise version, and we have a good amount of users using this solution.
We've used the solution across more than 250 people, including engineers.
As we are a growing company transitioning all our applications to the cloud, and with the increasing number of cloud-native applications, Splunk Observability Cloud will help us achieve digital resiliency and reduce our mean time to resolution.
I would rate its scalability a nine out of ten.
 

Stability Issues

Sentiment score
6.6
Cribl is praised for stability, reliability, cost efficiency, and effective management of large data volumes with minimal issues.
Sentiment score
7.7
Splunk Observability Cloud is highly stable with minor issues, rated 8-9/10, and offers reliable customer support.
Migrating from those SC4S servers to Cribl worker nodes has truly been a game-changer.
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.
I would rate its stability a nine out of ten.
We rarely have problems accessing the dashboard or the page.
Unlike NetScout or regular agents for APM, RUM has many problems during the POC phase because customer environments vary widely.
 

Room For Improvement

Cribl needs improvements in compatibility, documentation, UI, metrics, custom packs, Microsoft support, AI features, and aggregation.
Splunk Observability Cloud needs better integration, user-friendly interfaces, enhanced AI, and simpler customization for improved user experience.
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.
The out-of-the-box customizable dashboards in Splunk Observability Cloud are very effective in showcasing IT performance to business leaders.
The next release of Splunk Observability Cloud should include a feature that makes it so that when looking at charts and dashboards, and also looking at one environment regardless of the product feature that you're in, APM, infrastructure, RUM, the environment that is chosen in the first location when you sign into Splunk Observability Cloud needs to stay persistent all the way through.
There is room for improvement in the alerting system, which is complicated and has less documentation available.
 

Setup Cost

Cribl's pricing is cost-effective, scalable, with enterprise rates at 30 cents/GB, providing strong value for large data volumes.
Splunk Observability Cloud is costly but reasonable compared to competitors; appreciated for capabilities despite concerns over data volume pricing.
Over time, the licensing cost has increased.
Cribl is very inexpensive, with enterprise pricing around 30 cents per GB, which is really decent.
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.
Splunk is a bit expensive since it charges based on the indexing rate of data.
It is expensive, especially when there are other vendors that offer something similar for much cheaper.
It appears to be expensive compared to competitors.
 

Valuable Features

Cribl optimizes data transformation, simplifies management with an intuitive UI, and enhances integration and log handling efficiency.
Splunk Observability Cloud excels in log analytics, real-time dashboards, alerting, AI insights, and seamless integration for cloud 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 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.
Splunk provides advanced notifications of roadblocks in the application, which helps us to improve and avoid impacts during high-volume days.
For troubleshooting, we can detect problems in seconds, which is particularly helpful for digital teams.
It offers unified visibility for logs, metrics, and traces.
 

Categories and Ranking

Cribl
Ranking in Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability
11th
Average Rating
8.6
Reviews Sentiment
6.7
Number of Reviews
26
Ranking in other categories
Log Management (5th), Security Information and Event Management (SIEM) (9th), Observability Pipeline Software (1st)
Splunk Observability Cloud
Ranking in Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability
8th
Average Rating
8.2
Reviews Sentiment
7.0
Number of Reviews
71
Ranking in other categories
Network Monitoring Software (6th), IT Infrastructure Monitoring (7th), Cloud Monitoring Software (7th), Container Management (6th), Digital Experience Monitoring (DEM) (2nd)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of November 2025, in the Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability category, the mindshare of Cribl is 1.1%, up from 0.4% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Splunk Observability Cloud is 2.0%, up from 1.3% 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 Observability Cloud2.0%
Cribl1.1%
Other96.9%
Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability
 

Featured Reviews

Aman Verma - PeerSpot reviewer
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.
Taiwo Ige - PeerSpot reviewer
Alerting improves incident response across teams and enables faster awareness before customer impact
Splunk Observability Cloud could be improved in terms of integrations with more technical add-ons, such as Zoom. Although they have one with Zoom, it's not available in the cloud, so having that feature would be beneficial. Essentially, Splunk should continue expanding to create easier ways to ingest logs from different products. The out-of-the-box customizable dashboards in Splunk Observability Cloud are very effective in showcasing IT performance to business leaders. However, there are aspects that could be improved, such as linking dashboards to one another. While IT leaders may not drill down, it's crucial to create levels of dashboards for technical users to find root causes, making it effective for stakeholders.
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
15%
Computer Software Company
8%
Manufacturing Company
8%
Healthcare Company
7%
Financial Services Firm
14%
Computer Software Company
12%
Manufacturing Company
9%
Retailer
8%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business9
Midsize Enterprise5
Large Enterprise15
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business20
Midsize Enterprise10
Large Enterprise43
 

Questions from the Community

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Cribl?
I did not deal with pricing directly. We had a team that dealt with Cribl.
What needs improvement with Cribl?
One area that could be improved is the aggregation functionality within Cribl. It's very difficult to aggregate low-volume logs because the worker processes don't share state. Since each worker pro...
What is your primary use case for Cribl?
Our main use case for Cribl is to help us reduce cost. Currently, we use the Stream and Edge products of Cribl, and it's on-premise for us. The Stream helps us with any optimization work that we ha...
What do you like most about SignalFx?
The most valuable feature is dashboard creation.
What needs improvement with SignalFx?
Regarding dashboard customization, while Splunk has many dashboard building options, customers sometimes need to create specific dashboards, particularly for applicative metrics such as Java and pr...
What is your primary use case for SignalFx?
The solution involves observability in general, such as Application Performance Monitoring, and generally addresses digital applications, web applications, sites, and mobile applications. I worked ...
 

Also Known As

No data available
Splunk Infrastructure Monitoring, Splunk Real User Monitoring (RUM), Splunk Synthetic Monitoring
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Information Not Available
Sunrun, Yelp, Onshape, Tapjoy, Symphony Commerce, Chairish, Clever, Grovo, Bazaar Voice, Zenefits, Avalara
Find out what your peers are saying about Cribl vs. Splunk Observability Cloud and other solutions. Updated: November 2025.
873,347 professionals have used our research since 2012.