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Cribl vs Splunk 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
5.5
Cribl is cost-effective, enhancing efficiency, reducing data costs by 40%, optimizing log management, and improving operational workflows.
Sentiment score
6.9
Splunk Observability Cloud boosts visibility, efficiency, and financial returns with faster debugging, reduced downtime, and improved collaboration.
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
Using Splunk has saved my organization about 30% of our budget compared to using multiple different monitoring products.
Senior Manager at a financial services firm with 10,001+ employees
Anyone working in front-end management should recognize the market price to see the true value of end-user monitoring.
General Manager at MOCOMSYS
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.
IT Operations Engineer at ABC Supply Co. Inc.
 

Customer Service

Sentiment score
5.9
Cribl's customer service is highly rated for quick, knowledgeable support and effective issue resolution across various time zones.
Sentiment score
7.1
Splunk Observability Cloud generally receives positive customer support reviews, citing prompt, knowledgeable assistance, despite occasional resolution delays.
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
Sometimes by hearing the problem itself, they will know what the solution is, and they will let us know how to resolve it, and we do it immediately.
Senior Specialist at LTIMindtree
On a scale of 1 to 10, the customer service and technical support deserve a 10.
Systems Administrator at a insurance company with 1,001-5,000 employees
They have consistently helped us resolve any issues we've encountered.
Software Engineer at UKG
They often require multiple questions, with five or six emails to get a response.
Splunk Observability Expert
 

Scalability Issues

Sentiment score
6.7
Cribl efficiently scales workloads and automates deployments, praised for flexibility and seamless growth across diverse environments.
Sentiment score
7.3
Splunk Observability Cloud scales efficiently with organization needs, though costly, offering flexible integration and handling large deployments seamlessly.
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)
We've used the solution across more than 250 people, including engineers.
Splunk Observability Expert
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.
Application Developer at UMB Financial
I would rate its scalability a nine out of ten.
Senior Manager at a financial services firm with 10,001+ employees
 

Stability Issues

Sentiment score
6.8
Cribl is stable and efficient, with quick issue resolution, minimal disruptions, and praised performance across different setups.
Sentiment score
7.7
Splunk Observability Cloud is praised for stability and reliability, with occasional performance issues managed effectively by support.
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
Regarding scalability, we started with zero servers and have around 285 servers now.
Senior Specialist at LTIMindtree
I would rate the stability as ten out of ten.
SIEM Engineer at National Australia Bank (NAB)
I would rate its stability a nine out of ten.
Head of DevOps at a tech services company with 1-10 employees
We rarely have problems accessing the dashboard or the page.
Splunk Observability Expert
Unlike NetScout or regular agents for APM, RUM has many problems during the POC phase because customer environments vary widely.
General Manager at MOCOMSYS
 

Room For Improvement

Cribl users desire enhanced compatibility, integration, documentation, alert mechanisms, AI analytics, and improved interfaces, training, and customization.
Splunk Observability Cloud needs better integration, automation, user interface, Azure support, and enhanced log analysis for improved user experience.
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 out-of-the-box customizable dashboards in Splunk Observability Cloud are very effective in showcasing IT performance to business leaders.
IT Operations Engineer at ABC Supply Co. Inc.
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.
Systems Monitoring Engineer II at a government with 10,001+ employees
There is room for improvement in the alerting system, which is complicated and has less documentation available.
Head of DevOps at a tech services company with 1-10 employees
 

Setup Cost

Cribl offers cost-effective, scalable solutions with flexible licensing, remaining competitively priced despite some pricing complexities and increased costs.
Enterprise users see Splunk Observability Cloud as costly but valued for features, though some explore alternatives due to expenses.
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
Splunk is a bit expensive since it charges based on the indexing rate of data.
Senior Manager at a financial services firm with 10,001+ employees
It is expensive, especially when there are other vendors that offer something similar for much cheaper.
Solutions Architect at Ikusi
It appears to be expensive compared to competitors.
Head of DevOps at a tech services company with 1-10 employees
 

Valuable Features

Cribl enhances data management with real-time transformation, log reduction, seamless integration, user-friendly UI, and flexible data handling.
Splunk Observability Cloud offers real-time monitoring, data integration, and APM with machine learning for scalable, user-friendly performance insights.
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
Splunk provides advanced notifications of roadblocks in the application, which helps us to improve and avoid impacts during high-volume days.
Senior Manager at a financial services firm with 10,001+ employees
For troubleshooting, we can detect problems in seconds, which is particularly helpful for digital teams.
Splunk Observability Expert
It offers unified visibility for logs, metrics, and traces.
Administrator at a tech vendor with 10,001+ employees
 

Categories and Ranking

Cribl
Ranking in Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability
9th
Average Rating
8.6
Reviews Sentiment
6.7
Number of Reviews
30
Ranking in other categories
Log Management (5th), Security Information and Event Management (SIEM) (8th), 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
75
Ranking in other categories
Network Monitoring Software (6th), IT Infrastructure Monitoring (7th), Cloud Monitoring Software (6th), Container Management (6th), Digital Experience Monitoring (DEM) (2nd)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of January 2026, in the Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability category, the mindshare of Cribl is 1.2%, up from 0.5% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Splunk Observability Cloud is 2.2%, up from 1.4% 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 Cloud2.2%
Cribl1.2%
Other96.6%
Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability
 

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.
Dhananjay Dileep - PeerSpot reviewer
Senior Software Engineer at a consultancy with 10,001+ employees
Unified monitoring has improved end-to-end visibility and reduced detection time across apps
When we have too many detectors in place for one particular app, such as when I have created 50+ detectors through my account, the entire page becomes a bit loaded when creating the 51st detector, feeling heavy and taking time to load. Additionally, it throws random errors; for example, when we try to save one detector, it might throw some random error which is not even related, with something else being wrong, not that particular error, but the underlying root cause might be different. Sometimes the error is just "some problem occurred," and we are not able to point out what the real cause is. This mainly happens when we have too many detectors or too many alerts in place rather than a standard number. One more thing is in the alert rules; if we have a main general alert, and instead of creating a new detector, we are adding a new rule under one detector, when the number of rules also increases, such as when we have 10 or 15 rules under one generic detector, that again creates the same kind of problem, taking some time to save that particular newly added rule, and it might not save at times, just keeps on spinning. Those are the two drawbacks which I spotted recently; other than that, everything looks perfect.
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
20%
Manufacturing Company
12%
Healthcare Company
6%
Computer Software Company
5%
Financial Services Firm
13%
Manufacturing Company
10%
Computer Software Company
9%
Retailer
8%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business9
Midsize Enterprise5
Large Enterprise18
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business20
Midsize Enterprise10
Large Enterprise47
 

Questions from the Community

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Cribl?
I'm not sure of Cribl pricing because it has been procured as a package by our client, and we are not exposed to or do not have an idea of how much they have spent to get a license from Cribl. But ...
What needs improvement with Cribl?
I am not in a position to comment on how Cribl could be improved or enhanced because it is a good tool, and I have only used a small part of the entire Cribl product. As of now I am pretty happy wi...
What is your primary use case for Cribl?
My usual use cases for Cribl involve collecting logs from many endpoints, including user activities. We collect logs into either Log Analytical Workspace or Event Hub and redirect to Cribl so that ...
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 ...
 

Comparisons

 

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: December 2025.
880,745 professionals have used our research since 2012.