Chronosphere vs Splunk Observability Cloud comparison

Chronosphere and Splunk are both solutions in the Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability category. Chronosphere is ranked #32 with an average rating of 9.0, while Splunk is ranked #8 with an average rating of 8.4. Chronosphere holds a 0.7% mindshare in APM, compared to Splunk’s 2.2% mindshare. Additionally, 100% of Chronosphere users are willing to recommend the solution, compared to 95% of Splunk users who would recommend it.

Chronosphere

Read 1 Chronosphere review

1,261 Views
933 Comparison Views

100% willing to recommend

Splunk Observability Cloud

Read 73 Splunk Observability Cloud reviews

7,605 Views
4,183 Comparison Views

95% willing to recommend

Chronosphere

Splunk Observability Cloud

Comparison Buyer's Guide

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Executive SummaryUpdated on Dec 28, 2025

Splunk Observability Cloud and Chronosphere are key players in the observability market. Chronosphere appears to lead in scalability and performance features, justifying its higher price, while Splunk offers competitive pricing and robust support.

Features: Splunk Observability Cloud provides seamless integration with Splunk environments, powerful data analysis tools, and effective alerting capabilities. Chronosphere offers real-time data processing, extensive metric ingestion, and a tailored approach to managing data at scale, making it ideal for large infrastructures.

Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: Splunk delivers a streamlined deployment process, comprehensive documentation, and broad customer service availability for easy adoption. Chronosphere emphasizes flexible deployment, customization, and personalized support, quickly adapting to complex enterprise requirements.

Pricing and ROI: Splunk Observability Cloud is valued for its transparent pricing and proven ROI through efficient resource management, offering a cost-effective choice for many. Chronosphere’s pricing reflects its premium features and scalability, requiring a larger initial investment but promising substantial ROI for advanced analytics and rapid processing needs.

To learn more, read our detailed Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability Report (Updated: January 2026).

Buyer's Guide

Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability

January 2026

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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

Chronosphere

Ranking in Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability

32nd

Average Rating

9.0

Reviews Sentiment

6.8

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

Log Management (30th), AIOps (18th)

Splunk Observability Cloud

Ranking in Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability

8th

Average Rating

8.2

Reviews Sentiment

7.0

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

Network Monitoring Software (6th), IT Infrastructure Monitoring (7th), Cloud Monitoring Software (6th), Container Management (6th), Digital Experience Monitoring (DEM) (2nd)

Mindshare comparison

As of January 2026, in the Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability category, the mindshare of Chronosphere is 0.7%, up from 0.3% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Splunk Observability Cloud is 2.2%, up from 1.4% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.

Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability Market Share Distribution
Product	Market Share (%)
Splunk Observability Cloud	2.2%
Chronosphere	0.7%
Other	97.1%

Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability

Featured Reviews

Arvind Pant

Senior Data Engineer at DoorDash, Inc.

Monitors pipelines with real-time alerts and good documentation

It isn't very easy. It's not easy for everyone. It would be much easier if there could be a simpler version, like a data number version or an SQL version. It's hard to debug if you don't know the syntax. Also, I saw the Slack alerts feature, which is pretty cool, but I cannot customize my messages on the Slack alerts. It would be great if it were possible to tag people in the alerts. At DoorDash, we have hundreds of pipelines, and if something fails, I want to tag specific people so they can start working on the issue immediately.

Read full review

Taiwo Ige

IT Operations Engineer at ABC Supply Co. Inc.

Alerting improves incident response across teams and enables faster awareness before customer impact

Splunk Observability Cloud could be improved in terms of integrations with more technical add-ons, such as Zoom. Although they have one with Zoom, it's not available in the cloud, so having that feature would be beneficial. Essentially, Splunk should continue expanding to create easier ways to ingest logs from different products. The out-of-the-box customizable dashboards in Splunk Observability Cloud are very effective in showcasing IT performance to business leaders. However, there are aspects that could be improved, such as linking dashboards to one another. While IT leaders may not drill down, it's crucial to create levels of dashboards for technical users to find root causes, making it effective for stakeholders.

Read full review

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"The alerting features are good"

"The best feature of this product is the latency and processing of all the telemetry that is being received, which gives full visibility at the right time."

"Splunk APM helps us to find errors immediately and resolve them."

"The most valuable features are troubleshooting and optimizing application performance."

"Great monitoring of network devices."

"Splunk has drawn our attention to how the network is running. If there are alarms on things that are not functioning, it gives us early warning on problems that could arise."

"Customer service and technical support respond very quickly."

"The product's deployment phase is good and very easy because it is done with OpenTelemetry for most of the parts."

"Initially, before Splunk, we had a long time to resolve issues; now, with Splunk Observability Cloud, we will be able to solve them quickly and know exactly where the issue is."

More Splunk Observability Cloud pros

Cons

"It's not easy for everyone."

"It would be useful if they provided some help pages. If you don't know too much about the tool, there should be more documentation readily available. It would be useful if they had a help button embedded in the solution so you could ask questions and get answers."

"A wide variety of logging makes log onboarding difficult."

"In the next release, I would like to see more integration with other solutions."

"The initial setup of Splunk Real User Monitoring (RUM) was easy. The solution is deployed on-premises."

"The licensing model is expensive. We need to monitor the amount of data ingested because the cost is based on the data collected."

"If a customer utilizes third-party tools and wants to forward data from Splunk Observability Cloud, seamless integration would be beneficial."

"They can improve the flow system and the keyword language. It has predefined keywords, but they can be improved."

"Splunk would be better if some tools were integrated to be able to take action on security or network concerns."

More Splunk Observability Cloud cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

Information not available

"Licensing cost is the biggest argument I get from those divesting from Splunk. There are those within our organization who say we are going to go to other tools since Splunk is too expensive."

"Splunk has been fairly expensive, but it has been predictable."

"Splunk APM is a very cost-efficient solution."

"Splunk APM is expensive."

"Splunk Observability Cloud is expensive."

"The pricing is based on several factors, including the scale of deployment."

"The pricing is reasonable."

"It appears to be expensive compared to competitors."

More Splunk Observability Cloud pricing and cost advice

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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Transportation Company

15%

Retailer

11%

Financial Services Firm

10%

Computer Software Company

10%

Financial Services Firm

13%

Computer Software Company

11%

Manufacturing Company

Retailer

Company Size

By reviewers

Large Enterprise

Midsize Enterprise

Small Business

No data available

By reviewers
Company Size	Count
Small Business	20
Midsize Enterprise	10
Large Enterprise	46

Questions from the Community

What needs improvement with Chronosphere?

See all answers

What is your primary use case for Chronosphere?

I work as a data engineer, and we have many streaming pipelines. We use Chronosphere to monitor various metrics, such as how much data our pipeline is processing in each batch, the volume of incomi...

See all answers

What advice do you have for others considering Chronosphere?

If you want to monitor pipelines and use something like Kafka or any streaming platform, Chronosphere is the best option for monitoring pipelines with real-time alerts. It is loosely coupled with y...

See all answers

What do you like most about SignalFx?

The most valuable feature is dashboard creation.

See all answers

What needs improvement with SignalFx?

Regarding dashboard customization, while Splunk has many dashboard building options, customers sometimes need to create specific dashboards, particularly for applicative metrics such as Java and pr...

See all answers

What is your primary use case for SignalFx?

The solution involves observability in general, such as Application Performance Monitoring, and generally addresses digital applications, web applications, sites, and mobile applications. I worked ...

See all answers

Comparisons

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Compared 21% of the time

Cribl vs Chronosphere

Compared 11% of the time

Grafana vs Chronosphere

Compared 11% of the time

Honeycomb Enterprise vs Chronosphere

Compared 9% of the time

Observe vs Chronosphere

Compared 7% of the time

More Chronosphere Competitors

Sentry vs Splunk Observability Cloud

Compared 3% of the time

Honeycomb Enterprise vs Splunk Observability Cloud

Compared 3% of the time

Observe vs Splunk Observability Cloud

Compared 3% of the time

Cribl vs Splunk Observability Cloud

Compared 3% of the time

Amazon OpenSearch Service vs Splunk Observability Cloud

Compared 2% of the time

More Splunk Observability Cloud Competitors

Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability

January 2026

Download Chronosphere product report

Buyer's Guide

Splunk Observability Cloud

December 2025

Download Splunk Observability Cloud product report

Also Known As

No data available

Splunk Infrastructure Monitoring, Splunk Real User Monitoring (RUM), Splunk Synthetic Monitoring

Overview

Chronosphere provides a robust platform for managing and monitoring cloud-native applications with features like real-time observability, incident management, and capacity planning. It offers scalable, detailed observability across complex systems, an intuitive interface, and cost-efficient resource management. Users report enhanced productivity, improved collaboration, and better decision-making, bolstering operational capabilities and organizational growth.

Chronosphere

Splunk Observability Cloud offers sophisticated log searching, data integration, and customizable dashboards. With rapid deployment and ease of use, this cloud service enhances monitoring capabilities across IT infrastructures for comprehensive end-to-end visibility.

Focused on enhancing performance management and security, Splunk Observability Cloud supports environments through its data visualization and analysis tools. Users appreciate its robust application performance monitoring and troubleshooting insights. However, improvements in integrations, interface customization, scalability, and automation are needed. Users find value in its capabilities for infrastructure and network monitoring, as well as log analytics, albeit cost considerations and better documentation are desired. Enhancements in real-time monitoring and network protection are also noted as areas for development.

What are the key features?

Log Searching: Efficiently search and analyze logs from various sources.
Data Integration: Seamlessly integrate with multiple environments.
Dashboard Customization: Tailor dashboards to specific monitoring needs.
Monitoring Capabilities: Provides comprehensive insights into application performance.
Security Features: Analyze and address security threats across systems.
Visualization Tools: Enhance data analysis and system performance optimization.

Why consider this for ROI?

Comprehensive Visibility: Gain complete insights into IT infrastructure.
Performance Optimization: Improve overall system performance and efficiency.
Rapid Deployment: Quick setup to meet organization demands swiftly.
Enhanced Security: Strengthen security measures through detailed analytics.

In industries, Splunk Observability Cloud is implemented for security management by analyzing logs from detection systems, offering real-time alerts and troubleshooting for cloud-native applications. It is leveraged for machine data analysis, improving infrastructure visibility and supporting network and application performance management efforts.

Splunk

Sample Customers

Information Not Available

Sunrun, Yelp, Onshape, Tapjoy, Symphony Commerce, Chairish, Clever, Grovo, Bazaar Voice, Zenefits, Avalara

Buyer's Guide

Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability

January 2026

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