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Cribl vs syslog-ng by One Identity comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Jul 20, 2026

Review summaries and opinions

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:
 

Categories and Ranking

Cribl
Ranking in Log Management
3rd
Average Rating
8.6
Reviews Sentiment
6.8
Number of Reviews
65
Ranking in other categories
Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability (6th), Security Information and Event Management (SIEM) (5th), Observability Pipeline Software (1st)
syslog-ng by One Identity
Ranking in Log Management
19th
Average Rating
9.0
Reviews Sentiment
3.2
Number of Reviews
7
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
 

Mindshare comparison

As of August 2026, in the Log Management category, the mindshare of Cribl is 2.5%, up from 2.2% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of syslog-ng by One Identity is 1.3%, down from 2.5% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Log Management Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
Cribl2.5%
syslog-ng by One Identity1.3%
Other96.2%
Log Management
 

Featured Reviews

JigarHirani - PeerSpot reviewer
Splunk Engineer at a recruiting/HR firm with 11-50 employees
Log pipelines have reduced daily data volume and now simplify traffic analysis
Overall, the pipelines and all the features are good with Cribl. The UI is good. Just sometimes, when I actually started using Cribl, I faced the issue where I was not able to connect the nodes. The pipeline is structured in a certain way, then the data will be routed to there, and something of that nature. I was very much confused about their whole products, such as Data Lake and pipelines. It's possible that at that time I didn't take any university courses, which is why I did not know much. But if they can give an intro on how we can connect nodes, or they can provide simple use cases showing what you can do with Cribl, it would help. If you just need to add the source and the destination and pre-build some proper workflow, then it will be easy for new customers to navigate through Cribl.
OC
IT Infrastructure & Cloud Security Manager at Thux
Has ensured compliance by centralizing log data and supporting secure connections
We currently do not use that feature. We currently have just an open-source release, not a premium release. My boss has indicated that he wants to buy a premium syslog-ng version next month. I think we can use other features of this tool in the future. In syslog-ng, I think a GUI would be beneficial. I am unsure if the premium module has a GUI to administer it.

Quotes from Members

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:
 

Pros

"We save around 2.2 TB every day using Cribl by filtering out unwanted logs coming from syslog devices and other networking devices, which saves our license."
"The support team was very helpful and managed to get everything production-ready."
"Cribl offers easy plugin configurations and source collection settings, allowing us to collect logs from any source."
"I'd rate the solution ten out of ten."
"Cribl intelligently formats syslogs, extracting the data and reducing their size by almost 30 to 40 percent in my experience, stripping out null values and discarding what is not required so only what is needed is presented."
"Cribl feels a lot easier to use and more intuitive, gives you more capability, and you don't have to work as hard to set things up."
"Cribl is intuitive, and a user can easily see how the payload or log looks before conversion and how it looks after conversion, and what has been transferred to the destination."
"Cribl has the ability to send data to different destinations, making it a vendor-agnostic tool, and for log management we can parse values or enhance fields at Cribl level and then send it to different destinations such as S3, Splunk, Elastic, or other destinations, which I love most because it acts as an intermediate heavy forwarder that can route data to different destinations."
"Syslog-ng has a separate config file in addition to the core configuration."
"What I appreciate most about syslog-ng is its configuration; its C-style config is much easier to understand, read, and write than other popular solutions such as syslog or rsyslog."
"Syslog-ng provides easy access to all my logs. It helps me show managers and other clients precisely where an incident occurred. I also like it because you can integrate syslog-ng with multiple solutions to allow real-time monitoring."
"We chose syslog-ng because it is easy to install, easy to maintain, easy to update, and due to the fact that all data arrive in raw format, we can manipulate it as we want."
"For us, the most valuable feature is the use of compound search for searching logs at a specific time, by a specific user, or specific behavior."
"Syslog-ng has built-in features that we can use to create alerts for a SIEM solution. It isn't a true SIEM solution, but it's sufficient for the time being."
"The ability to extract and store the logs is the most valuable feature of syslog-ng."
 

Cons

"The sys logging could be enhanced to make it easier to identify errors, especially when dealing with multiple functions."
"Cribl could improve by offering easier integrations with enterprise products, similar to what Splunk provides."
"From my perspective of the stability and reliability of the solution, there have been times where certain releases have bugs inside of them that we have to work around in order to make the solution work as intended."
"What I dislike about Cribl is that it represents my direct pain point."
"The speed was fast. The quality, however, there wasn't a solution just because I think it was a bug and it was never fixed as far as I know."
"One area that could be improved is the aggregation functionality within Cribl."
"Something that Cribl could do better is processing time. There is not enough customization to improve performance."
"There have been several administrative issues. Another point is that the browsing functions aren't very intuitive."
"There is always the potential for additional integration and protocol extensions."
"There is room for improvement in terms of observability."
"It's hard to find people who know how to use syslog-ng. I often find problems with configurations, and solutions aren't integrated correctly with syslog-ng. For example, there might be data with extra decimals, or the collector agents are incorrectly named. It isn't a problem with the solution; it's a lack of professionals."
"In syslog-ng, I think a GUI would be beneficial. I am unsure if the premium module has a GUI to administer it."
"The filtering has room for improvement."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"I would not say it is a cheaply priced tool as it has been doing wonders in the market. The tool has been budget-friendly for organizations."
"The product pricing is reasonable compared to other solutions."
"Syslog-ng is a free open-source solution."
"Syslog-ng is open-source."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
19%
Manufacturing Company
12%
Healthcare Company
6%
Government
5%
Financial Services Firm
11%
Government
10%
Manufacturing Company
9%
Comms Service Provider
7%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business50
Midsize Enterprise8
Large Enterprise35
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business3
Midsize Enterprise2
Large Enterprise3
 

Questions from the Community

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Cribl?
I find the pricing of Cribl to be cost-efficient because it has helped us save costs for data storage by removing unwanted logs.
What needs improvement with Cribl?
One improvement Cribl could work on is Cribl's Git integration. If I want to integrate my private repository, I can do this, but there is a specific format required in Git. If I commit something to...
What is your primary use case for Cribl?
We started using Cribl one year ago for data optimization. Currently, we are using Cribl for its one terabyte ingestion that is free, which is one significant advantage. We are using it for that pu...
What needs improvement with syslog-ng?
We currently do not use that feature. We currently have just an open-source release, not a premium release. My boss has indicated that he wants to buy a premium syslog-ng version next month. I thin...
What is your primary use case for syslog-ng?
In Italy, we have to be compliant with the Garante for privacy. We have to log every login, logout, or login failure made by a system administrator. We store all syslog data of the infrastructure. ...
What advice do you have for others considering syslog-ng?
When it comes to parsing, I can parse both structured and unstructured data, though our data are only structured. Currently, we collect all data we receive as raw data. Each file is stored for each...
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Information Not Available
Tecnocom, University of Victoria, University of Exeter, Datapath
Find out what your peers are saying about Cribl vs. syslog-ng by One Identity and other solutions. Updated: June 2026.
908,402 professionals have used our research since 2012.