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Apica vs Cribl 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
8.3
Apica alerts enhance operational efficiency by reducing costs, staffing needs, and downtime, delivering significant ROI and improved performance.
Sentiment score
4.3
Cribl is cost-effective compared to Splunk, but not all users see clear returns in time and cost savings.
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
7.1
Apica offers responsive service and custom scripts, though time zone challenges affect support efficiency for global customers.
Sentiment score
5.0
Cribl's customer support is effective and prompt, with high satisfaction despite some noted areas needing improved understanding of customer needs.
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.
 

Scalability Issues

Sentiment score
7.6
Apica offers scalable, reliable monitoring and performance testing with seamless integration, allowing diverse users to manage infrastructure effortlessly.
Sentiment score
5.9
Cribl is highly scalable, enabling efficient workload distribution and quick deployment, appealing to businesses of all sizes.
APICa is scalable.
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.
 

Stability Issues

Sentiment score
7.3
Apica is praised for stability and reliability, with minimal outages, effective monitoring, and quick bug resolution.
Sentiment score
6.3
Cribl is stable and reliable, with users praising its 99.9% uptime and effective problem-solving mechanisms, despite minor issues.
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.
 

Room For Improvement

Apica lacks an intuitive interface, needs more customization, better alert accuracy, and improved documentation, scripting compatibility, and update management.
Cribl faces compatibility issues, UI limitations, and documentation inconsistencies, requiring enhancements in integration, customization, and data handling.
When editing scripts, only one can be accessed at a time, risking changes affecting other folders.
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.
 

Setup Cost

Apica offers cost-effective licensing with negotiable discounts, primarily based on the number of checks, including cloud hybrid features.
Cribl offers competitive pricing valued for cost-effectiveness and scalability, though its complex credit system can cause confusion.
Over time, the licensing cost has increased.
Cribl is very inexpensive, with enterprise pricing around 30 cents per GB, which is really decent.
 

Valuable Features

Apica offers global monitoring with flexible scripting, user-friendly interface, accurate alerts, and seamless integration for efficient operations.
Cribl is praised for its efficient data management, integration capabilities, user-friendly interface, and flexibility in handling large volumes.
It is useful for both performance and automation testing, facilitating access to headers and payloads easily, enhancing scripts with dynamic values.
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.
 

Categories and Ranking

Apica
Ranking in Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability
16th
Ranking in Log Management
18th
Ranking in Observability Pipeline Software
2nd
Average Rating
8.2
Reviews Sentiment
7.3
Number of Reviews
11
Ranking in other categories
IT Operations Analytics (6th)
Cribl
Ranking in Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability
12th
Ranking in Log Management
6th
Ranking in Observability Pipeline Software
1st
Average Rating
8.4
Reviews Sentiment
6.5
Number of Reviews
20
Ranking in other categories
Security Information and Event Management (SIEM) (10th)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of October 2025, in the Observability Pipeline Software category, the mindshare of Apica is 2.4%, down from 8.6% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Cribl is 44.6%, down from 47.7% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Observability Pipeline Software Market Share Distribution
ProductMarket Share (%)
Cribl44.6%
Apica2.4%
Other53.0%
Observability Pipeline Software
 

Featured Reviews

Punith H K - PeerSpot reviewer
Enables users to create scripts easily and provides excellent real-time monitoring features
It is easy to create scripts. We don't have to write any script. Ready-made options are available. We can select, drag, and drop the options, and the script is ready. The solution’s real-time monitoring features have had a huge impact on our service delivery. If we have an application and the script for it, we keep monitoring it. When the script goes red, it indicates that something is not working. So, we check and analyze the applications. We keep track of applications and monitor whether they are live or not. The tool is also useful for monitoring cloud services.
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.
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
24%
Media Company
11%
Insurance Company
7%
Comms Service Provider
7%
Financial Services Firm
16%
Computer Software Company
9%
Manufacturing Company
8%
Healthcare Company
8%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business4
Midsize Enterprise2
Large Enterprise17
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business9
Midsize Enterprise4
Large Enterprise8
 

Questions from the Community

What do you like most about Apica Synthetic?
The GUI is powerful and doesn't require scripting or regular expressions. It has a vast finder for correlation, which is easier than other tools like JMeter and LoadRunner. It's also easy to integr...
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Apica Synthetic?
I know Apica is an expensive solution, but it is worth the money for the service it provides.
What needs improvement with Apica Synthetic?
Apica cannot perform endurance or scale-up tests independently. It requires other tools like ALM. When editing scripts, only one can be accessed at a time, risking changes affecting other folders. ...
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...
 

Comparisons

 

Also Known As

Apica LoadTest, Apica Synthetic
No data available
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

HBO, JPMC, Morgan Stanley, Xander, EA Sports, Volvo
Information Not Available
Find out what your peers are saying about Apica vs. Cribl and other solutions. Updated: September 2025.
868,787 professionals have used our research since 2012.