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Cribl vs Splunk ITSI (IT Service Intelligence) 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
5.7
Cribl improves efficiency, reduces processing time, and cuts costs, with significant data volume and ingest cost reductions.
Sentiment score
7.0
Splunk ITSI enhances efficiency and cost savings with fast implementation, centralized data for proactive monitoring, and strategic focus.
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
Risks can mean that if one failure happens, it can result in risks in hundreds of thousands of USD.
Technology And Digitization Lead at JLL
 

Customer Service

Sentiment score
5.8
Cribl's support is responsive and helpful, yet needs better customer understanding and availability across time zones.
Sentiment score
6.3
Splunk ITSI support is generally appreciated for its knowledge, but response efficiency varies, causing delays and occasional frustrations.
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
The technical support is excellent, and I would rate it at ten.
Senior consultant at a tech services company with 51-200 employees
We typically have weekly calls with the technical staff, and whenever we encounter issues, they usually reply with solutions within one or two days.
Senior Consultant at a consultancy with 10,001+ employees
 

Scalability Issues

Sentiment score
6.6
Cribl excels in scalability and adaptability, efficiently managing data volumes and supporting various enterprise growth needs despite minor cost concerns.
Sentiment score
7.6
Splunk ITSI efficiently scales to handle large data volumes, supports diverse environments, though memory constraints may impact performance.
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)
Splunk is highly scalable, with the ability to expand efficiently.
Senior consultant at a tech services company with 51-200 employees
When we create Glass Tables containing many searches, the Glass Tables sometimes fail due to memory constraints, and we receive error pages.
Senior Consultant at a consultancy with 10,001+ employees
 

Stability Issues

Sentiment score
6.7
Cribl is stable and reliable, with quick bug resolutions and high performance under large data volumes; support is responsive.
Sentiment score
7.7
Splunk ITSI is highly stable, performing reliably with adequate resources, despite occasional infrastructure or configuration issues.
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)
The setup, however, must be done correctly as incorrect deployment can lead to issues.
Senior consultant at a tech services company with 51-200 employees
Splunk ITSI (IT Service Intelligence) fails if you do not have good hardware requirements.
Senior Consultant at a consultancy with 10,001+ employees
 

Room For Improvement

Cribl needs better integration, scalability, customization, error handling, versioning, educational resources, and AI features for smoother pipeline development.
Splunk ITSI users face challenges with price, integration, user interface, and require better predictive analytics, scalability, and support.
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
I would appreciate additional features in the next release of Splunk ITSI (IT Service Intelligence) such as cloud infrastructure monitoring including CICDs, Kubernetes, and similar technologies.
Director at Techpace
On-cloud upgrades are easy, but on-premises upgrades are very painful.
Technology And Digitization Lead at JLL
Splunk ITSI could benefit from including more features that other solutions support, such as vulnerability management modules.
Senior consultant at a tech services company with 51-200 employees
 

Setup Cost

Enterprise buyers find Cribl pricing cost-effective and scalable, appreciating its value, flexibility, and straightforward structure for data processing.
Enterprise buyers find Splunk ITSI effective yet costly, with complex licensing, primarily affecting smaller companies due to its data-based pricing.
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
Splunk ITSI tends to be more expensive compared to some open-source solutions.
Senior consultant at a tech services company with 51-200 employees
I believe the pricing is based on daily volume ingestion.
Senior Consultant at a consultancy with 10,001+ employees
 

Valuable Features

Cribl optimizes real-time data processing with a user-friendly interface, integration, and scalable flexibility for efficient log management.
Splunk ITSI provides real-time analytics, customizable dashboards, and predictive analytics for enhanced incident management and proactive issue resolution.
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
The predictive analysis can give you proactive information about potential bottlenecks that can occur on applications, desk, storage, SQL servers, databases, or other systems.
Director at Techpace
One valuable feature is the scheduled maintenance window provided by Splunk ITSI (IT Service Intelligence) because Splunk does not offer this scheduling maintenance feature in the core product, but Splunk ITSI (IT Service Intelligence) helps us with these maintenance reports.
Senior Consultant at a consultancy with 10,001+ employees
The most beneficial aspect for me is that it is AI-enabled, providing us with very good analytics.
Technology And Digitization Lead at JLL
 

Categories and Ranking

Cribl
Ranking in Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability
8th
Average Rating
8.4
Reviews Sentiment
6.7
Number of Reviews
33
Ranking in other categories
Log Management (5th), Security Information and Event Management (SIEM) (8th), Observability Pipeline Software (1st)
Splunk ITSI (IT Service Int...
Ranking in Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability
12th
Average Rating
8.2
Reviews Sentiment
6.8
Number of Reviews
53
Ranking in other categories
IT Alerting and Incident Management (3rd)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of February 2026, in the Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability category, the mindshare of Cribl is 1.2%, up from 0.5% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Splunk ITSI (IT Service Intelligence) is 0.8%, up from 0.7% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability Market Share Distribution
ProductMarket Share (%)
Cribl1.2%
Splunk ITSI (IT Service Intelligence)0.8%
Other98.0%
Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability
 

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.
DS
Senior Consultant at a consultancy with 10,001+ employees
Service health has been monitored and visual insights support proactive telecom operations
The installation process is the first aspect I dislike about Splunk ITSI (IT Service Intelligence). If you do not configure it correctly, you will encounter issues in the search head. Because we use a distributed environment where each component has its own specific roles, installation is critical and requires careful attention. Splunk ITSI (IT Service Intelligence) is built with many applications. It is a compressed file, and when you extract the Splunk ITSI (IT Service Intelligence) app, you receive approximately 19 apps. Some applications, add-ons, and packages must be installed on specific components. If you do not configure an application correctly, it will not work. Sometimes we encounter issues during installation because of this complexity. I believe the installation process should be more uniform, meaning it could be deployed across all components to avoid post-installation issues. Sometimes after installation, you receive errors, and users cannot access Splunk ITSI (IT Service Intelligence). We have experienced this type of issue due to installation errors. I believe there is currently room for improvement regarding scalability. When we create Glass Tables containing many searches, the Glass Tables sometimes fail due to memory constraints, and we receive error pages. Splunk ITSI (IT Service Intelligence) should have a lightweight version to address these concerns. I would rate current scalability as medium.
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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
17%
Manufacturing Company
10%
Computer Software Company
7%
Government
7%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business9
Midsize Enterprise5
Large Enterprise20
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business11
Midsize Enterprise9
Large Enterprise34
 

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 is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Splunk ITSI (IT Service Intelligence)?
Pricing can vary significantly based on the selected modules and deployment choices. Splunk ITSI tends to be more expensive compared to some open-source solutions.
What needs improvement with Splunk ITSI (IT Service Intelligence)?
Splunk ITSI (IT Service Intelligence) can be improved in terms of the service management function, which is the only drawback, and there are some limitations in terms of event correlation, specific...
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Information Not Available
TransUnion, Cox Automotive, Carnival Cruises, Leidos, Econocom, National Ignition Factory, Entrust Datacard, Molina Healthcare, United States Census Bureau
Find out what your peers are saying about Cribl vs. Splunk ITSI (IT Service Intelligence) and other solutions. Updated: February 2026.
881,733 professionals have used our research since 2012.