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Cribl vs Elastic Security 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
5.6
Cribl enhances cost-effectiveness by reducing licensing costs and optimizing data management, offering up to 50% ROI.
Sentiment score
6.0
Elastic Security provides satisfactory ROI and cost savings, though users experience varied support levels and payback periods.
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
It does not require hefty security budgets and can be deployed for enterprise security effectively.
Assistant Director at PTA
 

Customer Service

Sentiment score
6.0
Cribl's customer service is praised for responsiveness and expertise, despite needing improved customer understanding and internal logging.
Sentiment score
6.4
Elastic Security support is inconsistent; users favor community and documentation, while premium users seek more responsive and personalized help.
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
Support is prompt and helpful.
Senior Cyber Security Manager at a tech services company with 11-50 employees
Most of the time when my team encounters issues, they receive responses within 24 hours.
Assistant Director at PTA
I have not faced any difficulties with Elastic Security, as we have a pretty good support service from them.
Chief Product Officer at ClusterPower
 

Scalability Issues

Sentiment score
6.7
Cribl efficiently scales to handle large data volumes, supports diverse workloads, and adapts to growing data processing needs.
Sentiment score
7.3
Elastic Security offers scalable solutions adaptable to various environments, praised for flexibility and requiring careful planning for integration.
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)
It allows us to think about specific use cases, such as gathering malicious IPs in a single view and analyzing threats based on geolocation.
Assistant Director at PTA
Elastic Security is quite scalable.
Chief Product Officer at ClusterPower
 

Stability Issues

Sentiment score
6.8
Cribl is stable and reliable, with effective support, despite minor bugs and issues at high volumes or advanced usage.
Sentiment score
7.7
Elastic Security is generally stable and reliable but can face challenges with big data and requires careful configuration.
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)
In terms of stability, I would rate Elastic a solid eight out of ten.
Senior Cyber Security Manager at a tech services company with 11-50 employees
 

Room For Improvement

Cribl users seek improvements in integration, documentation, AI, analytics, and cost-efficiency, alongside better support for legacy systems and downtime prevention.
Elastic Security needs improvements in authentication, usability, automation, scalability, integration, and pricing, with user-friendly dashboards and documentation.
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
CrowdStrike and Defender have more established threat intelligence integration due to having a larger client base.
Senior Cyber Security Manager at a tech services company with 11-50 employees
My security testing team continuously reports vulnerabilities, and we have to fix and update the versions frequently.
Assistant Director at PTA
Machine learning algorithms become better with time; as they ingest a huge volume of data, they become better.
Chief Product Officer at ClusterPower
 

Setup Cost

Cribl offers cost-effective enterprise pricing, simplifying usage with universal licensing and supporting scalability for large data volumes.
Elastic Security provides a free open-source option, competitive pricing, and subscription plans, appealing to cost-conscious enterprises.
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
The pricing is reasonable, especially for Small Medium Enterprises (SMEs), making it a viable option for businesses building their security infrastructure.
Senior Cyber Security Manager at a tech services company with 11-50 employees
This is beneficial for SMEs as they do not need extensive budgets for security solutions.
Assistant Director at PTA
Elastic Security is considered cost-effective, especially at lower EPS levels.
Performance Practice Specialist at a local government with 10,001+ employees
 

Valuable Features

Cribl offers efficient data transformation, cost reduction, and seamless integration with intuitive UI and scalable, vendor-agnostic solutions.
Elastic Security provides scalable, customizable threat response with fast search, real-time analysis, and strong community support for actionable 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
Elastic Security offers good insight regarding alerts, reports, and cases.
Senior Cyber Security Manager at a tech services company with 11-50 employees
Elastic Security offers advanced features such as machine learning and integration with ChatGPT.
Performance Practice Specialist at a local government with 10,001+ employees
We require rapid processing speed for alerts and event data, and Elastic Security is very efficient at handling this level of data.
Assistant Director at PTA
 

Categories and Ranking

Cribl
Ranking in Log Management
5th
Ranking in Security Information and Event Management (SIEM)
8th
Average Rating
8.6
Reviews Sentiment
6.7
Number of Reviews
31
Ranking in other categories
Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability (9th), Observability Pipeline Software (1st)
Elastic Security
Ranking in Log Management
8th
Ranking in Security Information and Event Management (SIEM)
5th
Average Rating
7.8
Reviews Sentiment
6.8
Number of Reviews
66
Ranking in other categories
Endpoint Detection and Response (EDR) (15th), Security Orchestration Automation and Response (SOAR) (5th), Extended Detection and Response (XDR) (8th)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of January 2026, in the Log Management category, the mindshare of Cribl is 2.6%, up from 1.1% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Elastic Security is 2.9%, down from 4.1% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Log Management Market Share Distribution
ProductMarket Share (%)
Cribl2.6%
Elastic Security2.9%
Other94.5%
Log Management
 

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.
Laurentiu Popescu - PeerSpot reviewer
Chief Product Officer at ClusterPower
Has improved threat detection with deep log analysis and streamlined investigation workflows
The most useful features I find in Elastic Security are the forensic ones that allow us to carry deeper analysis into the logs for in-depth investigations, and the dashboards, with the reporting dashboard being quite user-friendly. Elastic Security is quite good at identifying threats, as it is part of the deep investigation tool that I mentioned before. Unless we need to look further into a certain log, we can carry out a deeper analysis and forensics on those particular logs. I can assess the impact of Elastic Security's real-time data analysis on our threat response efficiency as working pretty good. We are looking for real-time analysis because we have a continuous inflow of logs from different sources: from our cloud, from Active Directory, from our network. So it works pretty well.
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
20%
Manufacturing Company
12%
Healthcare Company
6%
Computer Software Company
5%
Computer Software Company
12%
Government
10%
Comms Service Provider
8%
Manufacturing Company
7%
 

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 Business40
Midsize Enterprise11
Large Enterprise15
 

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 ...
Datadog vs ELK: which one is good in terms of performance, cost and efficiency?
With Datadog, we have near-live visibility across our entire platform. We have seen APM metrics impacted several times lately using the dashboards we have created with Datadog; they are very good c...
What do you like most about Elastic Security?
Elastic provides the capability to index quickly due to the reverse indexes it offers. This data is crucial as it contains critical information. The reverse index allows fast data indexing because ...
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Elastic Security?
I am satisfied with the pricing, setup cost, and licensing cost. It is a pure 10.
 

Comparisons

 

Also Known As

No data available
Elastic SIEM, ELK Logstash
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Information Not Available
Texas A&M, U.S. Air Force, NuScale Power, Martin's Point Health Care
Find out what your peers are saying about Cribl vs. Elastic Security and other solutions. Updated: December 2025.
881,082 professionals have used our research since 2012.