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Cortex XSIAM vs Cribl comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive Summary

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
4.6
Cortex XSIAM enhances incident management and provides significant financial returns by automating detection and response, reducing staffing needs.
Sentiment score
5.7
Cribl reduces costs by streamlining data handling, lowering log volume, and decreasing operational and licensing expenses by up to 40%.
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
 

Customer Service

Sentiment score
5.8
Cortex XSIAM support varies; premium service excels, while non-premium experiences depend on distributor expertise and sometimes face delays.
Sentiment score
5.8
Cribl's support team is praised for quick, knowledgeable service, despite suggestions for better understanding customer needs.
With premium support, core Palo Alto technical experts handle issues directly.
Team Lead, Security at seamlessinfotech.com
It is ineffective in terms of responding to basic queries and addressing future requirements.
Associate Director at a financial services firm with 5,001-10,000 employees
The Palo Alto support team is fully responsive and helpful.
SOC Analyst at OVELOSEC
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
 

Scalability Issues

Sentiment score
6.5
Cortex XSIAM is scalable for various business sizes with cloud-based integration, but lacks on-premises deployment and mixed reviews.
Sentiment score
6.6
Cribl provides impressive scalability, enabling rapid deployment and efficient data management through horizontal scaling and minimal configuration needs.
Without proper integration, scaling up with more servers is meaningless.
Associate Director at a financial services firm with 5,001-10,000 employees
Cortex XSIAM is highly scalable.
SOC Analyst at OVELOSEC
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)
 

Stability Issues

Sentiment score
7.6
Cortex XSIAM is praised for its stability, rapid issue resolution, and efficient performance despite minor post-update challenges.
Sentiment score
6.7
Cribl is generally stable, handling large data well, with minor bugs and configuration-related reliability issues occasionally reported.
The product was easy to install and set up and worked right.
Owner at Xelere
Overall, Cortex XSIAM is stable.
SOC Analyst at OVELOSEC
It works really nice and performs really efficiently after configuration.
IT COMMUNICATIONS AND NETWORKS at Américas BPS
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)
 

Room For Improvement

Cortex XSIAM needs improved integration, performance, interface, pricing, support, ASM, AI, onboarding, tagging, and identity management enhancements.
Cribl users seek better integration, enhanced features, improved flexibility, and expanded documentation, with specific requests for Microsoft connectors and training.
Obtaining validation for integrations from Palo Alto takes around eight months, which is quite long.
Associate Director at a financial services firm with 5,001-10,000 employees
Cortex XSIAM needs improvements in terms of data onboarding, parsers, and third-party integration supports.
SOC Analyst at OVELOSEC
Cortex XSIAM is on the expensive side and requires substantial improvement in pricing.
Solutions Architect at ostec
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
 

Setup Cost

Cortex XSIAM is viewed as competitively priced but complex, aligning with market expectations despite some regional variations.
Cribl offers budget-friendly, scalable solutions with complex licensing, appreciated for balancing cost and service quality in enterprise data ingestion.
The first impression is that XSIAM would be more expensive than others we tried.
Owner at Xelere
The product is very expensive.
Associate Director at a financial services firm with 5,001-10,000 employees
Cortex XSIAM is pretty expensive, and the licensing process is not very comfortable.
Director at MICROLOGIC NETWORKS PRIVATE LIMITED
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
 

Valuable Features

Cortex XSIAM excels in machine learning threat detection, SOAR features, and advanced automation for efficient security management.
Cribl efficiently processes real-time data, integrates with SIEMs, reduces log sizes, and supports scalable, customizable data management.
The advanced visualization capabilities of the product are important for understanding security trends in an organization.
Solutions Architect at ostec
One of the valued aspects of the product is its use of artificial intelligence to detect security vulnerabilities.
Owner at Xelere
The flexibility for creating manual workflows stands out.
Associate Director at a financial services firm with 5,001-10,000 employees
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
 

Categories and Ranking

Cortex XSIAM
Ranking in Security Information and Event Management (SIEM)
12th
Average Rating
8.6
Reviews Sentiment
6.7
Number of Reviews
15
Ranking in other categories
Identity Threat Detection and Response (ITDR) (7th), AI-Powered Cybersecurity Platforms (7th)
Cribl
Ranking in Security Information and Event Management (SIEM)
8th
Average Rating
8.4
Reviews Sentiment
6.7
Number of Reviews
33
Ranking in other categories
Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability (8th), Log Management (5th), Observability Pipeline Software (1st)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of February 2026, in the Security Information and Event Management (SIEM) category, the mindshare of Cortex XSIAM is 2.1%, down from 2.5% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Cribl is 1.2%, up from 0.4% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Security Information and Event Management (SIEM) Market Share Distribution
ProductMarket Share (%)
Cribl1.2%
Cortex XSIAM2.1%
Other96.7%
Security Information and Event Management (SIEM)
 

Featured Reviews

reviewer2666148 - PeerSpot reviewer
Associate Director at a financial services firm with 5,001-10,000 employees
Integration challenges highlight the need for manual workflows
The standard integrations are very limited, and the integrations available are not listed in the marketplace. Obtaining validation for integrations from Palo Alto takes around eight months, which is quite long. The solution would benefit from having more standard playbooks and templates available, as in other partners. Currently, everything must be created from scratch. In terms of incident response automation, it is quite poor due to the lack of integration with all security tools, making manual intervention necessary.
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.
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Computer Software Company
11%
Financial Services Firm
10%
Manufacturing Company
9%
Government
7%
Financial Services Firm
20%
Manufacturing Company
12%
Healthcare Company
6%
Computer Software Company
5%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business9
Midsize Enterprise2
Large Enterprise4
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business9
Midsize Enterprise5
Large Enterprise20
 

Questions from the Community

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Cortex XSIAM?
I did not participate in pricing discussions for Cortex XSIAM solutions, so I cannot provide a review regarding prices for this solution.
What needs improvement with Cortex XSIAM?
Cortex XSIAM is on the expensive side and requires substantial improvement in pricing. There are other features that could be improved, including integration with vendors such as CyberArk. I would ...
What is your primary use case for Cortex XSIAM?
With Cortex XSIAM, we installed an agent on Active Directory on-premise. We connected our Firewalls to the Data Lake and the Active Directory, and protected the Firewalls with another authenticatio...
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Cribl?
I am not aware of the pricing because I was not a part of it. We were developers. But as far as I understood, I think it is a bit expensive. I am no one to complain, but there was this person on Li...
What needs improvement with Cribl?
In Cribl, I feel that maybe I am not aware of it, or maybe it is already there, but I think if there was a way to learn more about it. There are a lot of areas to explore. For example, if my work i...
What is your primary use case for Cribl?
I was not regularly using the same tool, but there was a time when our team needed to migrate some data from one tool to another, and during that data migration phase, we used Cribl for six to seve...
 

Comparisons

 

Overview

Find out what your peers are saying about Cortex XSIAM vs. Cribl and other solutions. Updated: December 2025.
881,665 professionals have used our research since 2012.