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Cribl vs Nagios Log Server 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
8.6
Reviews Sentiment
6.7
Number of Reviews
31
Ranking in other categories
Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability (9th), Security Information and Event Management (SIEM) (8th), Observability Pipeline Software (1st)
Nagios Log Server
Ranking in Log Management
48th
Average Rating
8.0
Reviews Sentiment
6.9
Number of Reviews
4
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
 

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 Nagios Log Server is 0.8%, down from 0.9% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Log Management Market Share Distribution
ProductMarket Share (%)
Cribl2.6%
Nagios Log Server0.8%
Other96.6%
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.
Syarul Idzuddin Adzmi - PeerSpot reviewer
Operation Director at Digital Pulse Sdn Bhd
A scalable and affordable tool for monitoring data centers
Five engineers are needed for the maintenance of the product. I would definitely recommend the solution to those planning to use it. To increase the rating for the product, Nagios should offer remote support and offer more customization in reporting while making it easy for the customers to use it. Overall, I rate the solution an eight out of ten.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"Cribl offers easy plugin configurations and source collection settings, allowing us to collect logs from any source."
"The ease of management and configuration of Cribl Edge features is highly beneficial—I have many thousands of Cribl Edge nodes deployed, and it's very easy to make configuration changes across the board or update the agent."
"My favorite option in Cribl is the Stream product."
"The ease of management and configuration of Cribl Edge features is highly beneficial."
"My favorite feature of Cribl is just how easy it makes working with the data; it's always been a pain point for us with other solutions, just taking our raw data from the source, transforming and manipulating it into what we need on the SIM side."
"We save around 2.2 TB every day using Cribl by filtering out unwanted logs coming from syslog devices and other networking devices, which saves our license."
"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."
"Enhancing those events to optimize, to add new fields or to remove the extra fields that are of no use helps us in log reduction by dumping the raw logs and only ingesting the interested fields, which helps us in 50 to 60% volume reduction."
"The initial setup of Nagios Log Server was easy and straightforward."
"A great feature of the solution involves its internal portal."
"The product is scalable."
"One of the most valuable features is the dashboard because the UI was effective and easy to use. The alert systems are good as well. We had no failovers and had high availability. We can search the queries fast as well in Nagios Log Server."
 

Cons

"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."
"Cribl can improve by providing automated analytics and advanced parsing capabilities since it handles data at its core."
"Cribl could be improved by some UI tweaks and some usability tweaks, mostly centered around error troubleshooting for large volumes of Edge nodes."
"Cribl could improve by offering easier integrations with enterprise products, similar to what Splunk provides."
"There is room for improvement in the documentation and knowledge base, particularly regarding configurations like sources where logs are being ingested"
"Optimizing CPU utilization on the edge side is something that could be improved; we see, particularly on older hardware and older OSes, Cribl Edge service can eat up quite a bit of CPU resources compared to some other products we've used in the past, indicating there's room for improvement."
"There is no alerting mechanism for the leader/worker nodes status."
"The sys logging could be enhanced to make it easier to identify errors, especially when dealing with multiple functions."
"The support could be better."
"The configurations during initial setup could be improved. If they could be agentless, as in the case of the Ansible product, it would be better. I would like to be able to analyze the network bandwidth."
"The customization and dashboards have shortcomings and need to be improved to make the tool look more presentable."
"As we are talking about a product which is open to the public, the pricing makes it challenging for us to profit off of its marketing."
 

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."
"We found the pricing to be quite affordable."
"On a scale of one to ten, where one is expensive, and ten is cheap, I rate the pricing an eight or nine."
"For a single instance, the price is around $4,000."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
20%
Manufacturing Company
12%
Healthcare Company
6%
Computer Software Company
5%
Government
12%
Manufacturing Company
9%
Computer Software Company
8%
University
8%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business9
Midsize Enterprise5
Large Enterprise18
No data available
 

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 ...
Ask a question
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Comparisons

 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Information Not Available
IBM, impulse, wipro, comteco
Find out what your peers are saying about Cribl vs. Nagios Log Server and other solutions. Updated: December 2025.
881,082 professionals have used our research since 2012.