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Cribl vs Splunk comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Jun 19, 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
3.8
Cribl is cost-effective compared to Splunk, but not all users see clear returns in time and cost savings.
Sentiment score
7.0
Organizations saw improved visibility, productivity, and efficiency, with reduced downtime and costs using Splunk Observability Cloud, enhancing KPIs.
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.
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
5.5
Cribl's customer support is effective and prompt, with high satisfaction despite some noted areas needing improved understanding of customer needs.
Sentiment score
6.8
Splunk Observability Cloud support is generally responsive but can be slow, with improvement needed, especially in the APAC region.
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.
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
5.6
Cribl is highly scalable, enabling efficient workload distribution and quick deployment, appealing to businesses of all sizes.
Sentiment score
7.6
Splunk Observability Cloud is scalable and flexible but can be costly, with challenges in data ingestion and implementation.
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.
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
5.9
Cribl is stable and reliable, with quick bug resolution and improvements over time despite occasional connectivity issues.
Sentiment score
7.7
Splunk Observability Cloud is highly stable, rated 8-10/10 for reliability, with minor issues usually from user configurations.
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.
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 faces compatibility issues, UI limitations, and documentation inconsistencies, requiring enhancements in integration, customization, and data handling.
Splunk Observability Cloud requires improved integration, scalability, cost-effectiveness, ease of use, monitoring features, customization, and enhanced customer 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.
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 offers competitive pricing valued for cost-effectiveness and scalability, though its complex credit system can cause confusion.
Splunk Observability Cloud offers advanced features but can become costly as data volume and infrastructure needs grow.
Over time, the licensing cost has increased.
Cribl is very inexpensive, with enterprise pricing around 30 cents per GB, which is really decent.
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 provides efficient, real-time data transformation and routing, supporting scalability, cost reduction, and rapid integration for enhanced operational efficiency.
Splunk Observability Cloud offers seamless data integration, real-time insights, and efficient monitoring, enhancing performance visibility across diverse environments.
The data reduction and preprocessing capabilities make Cribl really unique.
The community on Slack is excellent for solving questions and getting ideas.
Log enhancement is another feature, and when I say log optimization, this has been one of the best features for Cribl where you can reduce the log size by filtering the selective logs, enhancing the log quality by filtering the requested fields within the logs and filtering out the unnecessary garbage value within our logs.
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
13th
Average Rating
8.4
Reviews Sentiment
6.4
Number of Reviews
18
Ranking in other categories
Log Management (7th), Security Information and Event Management (SIEM) (10th), 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
70
Ranking in other categories
Network Monitoring Software (6th), IT Infrastructure Monitoring (7th), Cloud Monitoring Software (7th), Container Management (7th), Digital Experience Monitoring (DEM) (2nd)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of September 2025, in the Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability category, the mindshare of Cribl is 1.0%, up from 0.2% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Splunk Observability Cloud is 1.9%, up from 1.0% 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 Cloud1.9%
Cribl1.0%
Other97.1%
Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability
 

Featured Reviews

Abdullah Zubair - PeerSpot reviewer
Enables seamless SIEM/Data Migration and Log Filtration across the enterprise estate
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 the space that Cribl is actually looking into. Based on my experience, this product is brilliant and there isn't much or anything important lacking in the product. We encountered some occasional issues with the syslog data stream, particularly when handling large data volume, and getting it to parse and field extracted correctly, but no major alarms that would halt the days operation. There were few source vendor specific challenges, but overall, I didn't notice anything major beyond that. Most of the process went smoothly. However, we did need to carry some troubleshooting to resolve the issues we faced while connecting with other platforms and few data stream miss-behaving, which wasn't a straightforward task for us. 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. In summary, aside from the usual difficulties or issues that someone could face with any project, everything else went well.
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
17%
Computer Software Company
9%
Healthcare Company
7%
Manufacturing Company
7%
Financial Services Firm
15%
Computer Software Company
13%
Retailer
8%
Manufacturing Company
7%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business8
Midsize Enterprise4
Large Enterprise7
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business19
Midsize Enterprise10
Large Enterprise44
 

Questions from the Community

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Cribl?
I think the pricing for Cribl is reasonable. For large usage, but I heard the calculation of those credits is a bit complicated.
What needs improvement with Cribl?
So since we’re handling a ton of data, I think we could really benefit from a more integrated or connected way to manage it all. Like, if there is a way to better track data lineage, metadata, thos...
What is your primary use case for Cribl?
We use Cribl Stream to collect logs from multiple sources, transform and enrich them, filter out unnecessary data before sending them to SIEM. We also use Cribl to route logging to data lake.
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: September 2025.
867,676 professionals have used our research since 2012.