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Cribl vs Logstash 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:
 

Categories and Ranking

Cribl
Ranking in Log Management
5th
Average Rating
8.4
Reviews Sentiment
6.7
Number of Reviews
33
Ranking in other categories
Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability (8th), Security Information and Event Management (SIEM) (8th), Observability Pipeline Software (1st)
Logstash
Ranking in Log Management
26th
Average Rating
9.0
Reviews Sentiment
5.6
Number of Reviews
5
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
 

Mindshare comparison

As of February 2026, in the Log Management category, the mindshare of Cribl is 2.6%, up from 1.2% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Logstash is 0.9%, up from 0.5% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Log Management Market Share Distribution
ProductMarket Share (%)
Cribl2.6%
Logstash0.9%
Other96.5%
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.
Mohammed-Abdelalim - PeerSpot reviewer
Assistant Vice President at QualityKiosk Technologies Pvt. Ltd.
Exploring resilience and integration capabilities while navigating complexity and technical challenges
Logstash lacks a graphical user interface, necessitating a strong programming background to handle it effectively. It is challenging for business users who need a skilled team for its operation. Changing pipelines is not easy because Logstash requires pipelines to be programmed and cannot just be dragged and dropped like other data solutions. Additionally, Logstash does not automatically make actions based on the data it receives; integrating automation tools is required.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"The platform's most valuable feature is the ability to transform data in real-time within the pipeline without sending it to a destination."
"When we had Cribl in place, it provided a vision and a platform for us to control what we send and how we send it in terms of data passing, data enrichment, and many more things, with massaging the data."
"The product's most valuable features include the internal management of events, coding perspective, data processing, and serialization."
"The support team was very helpful and managed to get everything production-ready."
"The feature I appreciate most about Cribl is the interface and how you're able to interact with the data, see the data both live on the ingest side as well as on the side where it goes out to the destination, which is a feature that was lacking in the previous solution I was using."
"Cribl's interface is user-friendly and easy to learn, making it simple to teach new users how to use it."
"Cribl is a very good platform to work with, with lots of features that other platforms don't provide."
"Cribl definitely helps with the complexity because you don't have to push for deployment—they provide the interface where you can mimic what the output will look like, and you can see that in real time when setting up the Cribl configuration, which definitely helps considerably."
"The transformation means we ship the logs in the way that we want them to be presented in Kibana, which is the main function we use Logstash for."
"We have three or four Logstash servers for high availability."
"I can collect logs from various data sources, including hardware."
"Logstash has numerous plugins for inputs and outputs, allowing it to work well in environments that do not contain other Elastic components."
"The functionality of Logstash is quite easy to implement and the plugin ecosystem of Logstash is great, with plugins for shell script monitoring and SQL monitoring working well with the tool."
"Everything aligns well with improving our organization."
 

Cons

"Cribl should consider adding more features that are applicable to smaller firms, allowing broader access to their data migration through Cribl."
"It's very difficult to aggregate low-volume logs because the worker processes don't share state."
"Improvement could be made in the logging area, as sometimes we encounter issues in a pipeline or something, and it's not immediately obvious when you look at the logs that the pipeline is failing."
"I think it is a bit expensive. I heard that this might be expensive."
"I think Cribl can be improved because I do not believe it is a mature product. It has gone down many times and when we are doing upgrades, many things break and we face a lot of issues, especially with scaling."
"Cribl could have developed some version that can give backward compatibility."
"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."
"We encountered some issues with the syslog data stream, particularly with handling large databases and extensive data logs."
"An enhancement we could implement is the ability to cluster Logstash to exist in more than one node."
"There can be a UI to implement with Logstash. Currently, I have to work with config files and everything."
"Almost all the research can be very bad. We still have a problem with importing the log system."
"The product needs to improve its compatibility."
"Elastic does not provide proper support for Logstash worldwide, and I rate their technical support as one out of ten."
"We still have a problem with importing the log system."
 

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."
Information not available
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
20%
Manufacturing Company
12%
Healthcare Company
6%
Computer Software Company
5%
Financial Services Firm
15%
Computer Software Company
9%
Manufacturing Company
8%
Real Estate/Law Firm
7%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business9
Midsize Enterprise5
Large Enterprise20
No data available
 

Questions from the Community

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...
What do you like most about Logstash?
I can collect logs from various data sources, including hardware.
What needs improvement with Logstash?
Customization can be automated with Logstash, but it is at the developer's disposal. The developer has to do it, not the tool as such. There is scope for optimization, but that is all outside the t...
What is your primary use case for Logstash?
The purposes for which I am using Logstash largely include log aggregation and application monitoring.
 

Comparisons

 

Overview

Find out what your peers are saying about Cribl vs. Logstash and other solutions. Updated: February 2026.
881,733 professionals have used our research since 2012.