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Cribl vs Elastic Stack 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:
 

Categories and Ranking

Cribl
Ranking in Log Management
8th
Average Rating
8.4
Reviews Sentiment
6.2
Number of Reviews
15
Ranking in other categories
Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability (14th), Security Information and Event Management (SIEM) (12th), Observability Pipeline Software (1st)
Elastic Stack
Ranking in Log Management
6th
Average Rating
8.0
Reviews Sentiment
6.7
Number of Reviews
17
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
 

Mindshare comparison

As of August 2025, in the Log Management category, the mindshare of Cribl is 2.2%, up from 0.5% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Elastic Stack is 5.3%, up from 2.3% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Log Management
 

Featured Reviews

Joe Cicero - PeerSpot reviewer
Facilitates seamless log integration and reduces data costs with efficient compression
My favorite feature is Cribl Stream. That's probably the only Cribl product I have a lot of experience with, and Cribl Stream makes it very easy to identify where all the customer's log sources are and to quickly connect them to a destination source such as Microsoft Sentinel and Microsoft Azure Data Storage. Cribl Stream does two things: not only does it make it easy to connect one log source or one dataset to multiple storage locations, but it also has compression features, which greatly reduce the storage cost for that data. It strips out and compresses data so that only the absolute information remains and not any duplicates. Dual destination and compression are the two top features.
Balamurali P - PeerSpot reviewer
Advanced query capabilities enhance monitoring effectiveness
Elastic Stack should be more simplified with ready-to-use widgets. Also, incorporating AI capabilities is essential as monitoring and observability tools are now adding AI features. Ideally, it should evolve into a full-stack observability tool, similar to AppDynamics or DynaTrace, which offers a solution that includes ISP provider, API monitoring, and infrastructure monitoring.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"I'd rate the solution ten out of ten."
"Features such as Cribl Stream, Cribl LogStream, and Cribl Edge have been the most beneficial. The Cribl LogStream, in particular, is valuable for routing data, creating firewalls on pipelines, and putting security measures in place to ensure data reaches its destination without issues."
"Cribl offers easy plugin configurations and source collection settings, allowing us to collect logs from any source."
"When it comes to the product's installation phase, it is not tough for people who have good knowledge...The tool is worth the investment."
"My favorite option in Cribl is the Stream product."
"Cribl offers other valuable features. For instance, you can replay data from an edge device, store your daily data in a stream, and replay specific event data into Splunk if a security incident occurs"
"The support team was very helpful and managed to get everything production-ready."
"The product's most valuable features include the internal management of events, coding perspective, data processing, and serialization."
"It supports various integrations. It's open source and has excellent community support."
"The machine learning capabilities are valuable."
"The detection rules in Elastic Stack are the most valuable feature. The search capabilities are excellent and fast. As we collect logs from workstations and devices, the detection rules run on top of the logs and detect any suspicious activity, raising alerts accordingly. Integration with Elastic Stack depends on the specific integration. Elastic provides some bridging integrations that make it easy, but require custom integration. Most integrations are simple, but customization can be challenging because we need to do some parsing. There's something called Elastic Common Schema, and we need to parse the source logs to match this schema, which can be a bit challenging."
"I have experienced a return on investment from the use of the solution."
"It is a very scalable solution...I didn't face any problem with this scalability part of the solution since we only have a few pieces of equipment in our company."
"I think the ecosystem is well supported, and for logs, it was faster compared to our previous previous log management."
"The only beneficial aspect of Elastic Stack is that it's open source."
"It is an excellent tool for monitoring purposes."
 

Cons

"Cribl could have developed some version that can give backward compatibility."
"Cribl should consider adding more features that are applicable to smaller firms, allowing broader access to their data migration through Cribl."
"There have been several administrative issues. Another point is that the browsing functions aren't very intuitive."
"Perhaps more flexibility in terms of metrics would be helpful."
"Cribl could improve by offering easier integrations with enterprise products, similar to what Splunk provides."
"The sys logging could be enhanced to make it easier to identify errors, especially when dealing with multiple functions."
"There is room for improvement in the documentation and knowledge base, particularly regarding configurations like sources where logs are being ingested"
"There is no alerting mechanism for the leader/worker nodes status."
"Elastic Stack should be more simplified with ready-to-use widgets."
"Elastic Stack's search capabilities can be challenging, especially when searching for precise data from past years, such as two or ten years ago. Its indexing performance for exact data retrieval may decrease as the data volume grows. Therefore, I believe there is room for improvement in the product's search functionality. It needs to improve its pricing as well."
"AI-enablement would be a big improvement in Elastic Stack...If there is room for an ML model in Elastic Stack, then it would be good."
"Agent deployment is a little tough in the on-premise version."
"The stability of the solution is rated as three or four out of ten as we frequently encounter issues."
"It should facilitate easier manual integration."
"The solution is expensive, particularly the training and certification. If customers want to increase their use of Elastic Stack, they should consider reducing the cost of certification and training."
"Improving integration capabilities, especially with authentication systems, firewalls, and security controls, is a crucial area for improvement in Elastic Stack. Additionally, enhancing functionality to handle large Yara queries more efficiently would be beneficial, as many EDR solutions can run such queries faster than Elastic Stack's current limitations."
 

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."
"The product is expensive."
"It depends on the specifics, but generally, Elastic is economical for certain use cases."
"I used the open-source version of Elastic Stack, because of which I did not have to pay anything."
"The pricing is reasonable."
"If I compare Elastic Stack to the other products in the market, I would say that the tool is available at a competitive price."
"I rate the solution's pricing a six out of ten."
"Ultimately, the pricing depends upon the capacity planning that the enterprise architect does."
"We are using the open-source community version of the product."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
17%
Computer Software Company
9%
Healthcare Company
8%
Manufacturing Company
7%
Computer Software Company
13%
Financial Services Firm
10%
Government
8%
Comms Service Provider
8%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
 

Questions from the Community

What needs improvement with Cribl?
Something that Cribl could do better is processing time. There is not enough customization to improve performance. An example would be with AWS Lambda functions, the way we were doing it before. Th...
What is your primary use case for Cribl?
Our use cases that we are exploring Cribl for right now are for data parsing and data manipulation.
What do you like most about Elastic Stack?
The tool is huge, and it performs brilliantly. I tested it for malware, and within two weeks of launching, the product alerted me about a network intrusion. This was a tough test for it, but it per...
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Elastic Stack?
My experience with Elastic Stack pricing indicates that it is node-based. While I do not have complete pricing details, they are available online. If I choose Elastic Cloud, it includes licensing a...
What needs improvement with Elastic Stack?
There are improvements needed for Elastic Stack. It is mostly based on Lucene, and the heart of Elastic Stack is Lucene, which has some limitations. Anything built on top of Lucene often feels an a...
 

Comparisons

 

Overview

Find out what your peers are saying about Cribl vs. Elastic Stack and other solutions. Updated: July 2025.
865,295 professionals have used our research since 2012.