Confluent vs Cribl comparison

The compared Confluent and Cribl solutions aren't in the same category. Confluent is ranked #3 in SA , with an average rating of 7.8, and holds a 8.5% mindshare in the category. Cribl is ranked #1 in OPS , with an average rating of 8.4, and holds a 44.6% mindshare. Additionally, 95% of Confluent users are willing to recommend the solution, compared to 96% of Cribl users who would recommend it.

Confluent

Read 25 Confluent reviews

5,083 Views
2,745 Comparison Views

95% willing to recommend

Cribl

Read 25 Cribl reviews

4,976 Views
1,344 Comparison Views

96% willing to recommend

Confluent

Cribl

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Executive SummaryUpdated on Jul 1, 2024

Confluent offers a cloud-native service for Apache Kafka, Kafka focuses on the movement and storage of large data streams, while Cribl Stream focuses on processing and enrichment of those streams for further analysis. Cribl Stream can be used to shape, filter, and enrich data before it is ingested into a Kafka stream managed by Confluent. This allows for optimized and more relevant data to be streamed in real-time.

Cribl Stream is a data pipeline solution focused on enabling observability, security, and data management. It allows to route, shape, and enrich data from various sources before sending it to multiple destinations.

Cribl Features: It can direct data to multiple destinations and apply transformations, It allows for selective data retention and filtering to reduce storage costs, and it supports integration with various observability and security tools, enhancing their capabilities.

Confluent offers a managed service for Apache Kafka, which is a distributed event streaming platform used for building real-time data pipelines and streaming applications. Confluent provides additional features and managed services on top of Apache Kafka.

Confluent Features: It excels at handling real-time data streams for high-throughput, low-latency use cases. It integrates with a wide range of data sources and sinks, making it suitable for data integration and ETL processes.

Both Cribl Stream and Confluent can handle data routing and transformation, though Cribl Stream is often more specialized in these areas with a focus on observability data. Both can integrate with a wide range of data sources, but the use cases might differ slightly based on their core strengths.

To learn more, read our detailed Confluent vs. Cribl Report (Updated: January 2025).

Buyer's Guide

Confluent vs. Cribl

January 2025

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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

Confluent

Average Rating

8.2

Reviews Sentiment

6.3

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

Streaming Analytics (3rd)

Cribl

Average Rating

8.6

Reviews Sentiment

6.7

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability (12th), Log Management (6th), Security Information and Event Management (SIEM) (10th), Observability Pipeline Software (1st)

Mindshare comparison

Confluent and Cribl aren’t in the same category and serve different purposes. Confluent is designed for Streaming Analytics and holds a mindshare of 8.5%, down 9.7% compared to last year.
Cribl, on the other hand, focuses on Observability Pipeline Software, holds 44.6% mindshare, down 47.7% since last year.

Streaming Analytics Market Share Distribution
Product	Market Share (%)
Confluent	8.5%
Apache Flink	14.8%
Databricks	12.5%
Other	64.2%

Streaming Analytics

Observability Pipeline Software Market Share Distribution
Product	Market Share (%)
Cribl	44.6%
DataBahn	15.0%
BindPlane OP	14.2%
Other	26.200000000000003%

Observability Pipeline Software

Featured Reviews

PavanManepalli

AVP - Sr Middleware Messaging Integration Engineer at Wells Fargo

Has supported streaming use cases across data centers and simplifies fraud analytics with SQL-based processing

I recommend that Confluent should improve its solution to keep up with competitors in the market, such as Solace and other upcoming tools such as NATS. Recently, there has been a lot of buzz about Confluent charging high fees while not offering features that match those of other tools. They need to improve in that direction by not only reducing costs but also providing better solutions for the problems customers face to avoid frustrations, whether through future enhancement requests or ensuring product stability. The cost should be worked on, and they should provide better solutions for customers. Solutions should focus on hierarchical topics; if a customer has different types of data and sources, they should be able to send them to the same place for analytics. Currently, Confluent requires everything to send to the same topic, which becomes very large and makes running analytics difficult. The hierarchy of topics should be improved. This part is available in MQ and other products such as Solace, but it is missing in Confluent, leading many in capital markets and trading to switch to Solace. In terms of stability, it is not the stability itself that needs improvement but rather the delivery semantics. Other products offer exactly-once delivery out of the box, whereas Confluent states it will offer this but lacks the knobs or levers for tuning configurations effectively. Confluent has hundreds of configurations that application teams must understand, which creates a gap. Users are often unaware of what values to set for better performance or to achieve exactly-once semantics, making it difficult to navigate through them. Delivery semantics also need to be worked on.

Read full review

Manoj Gowda J

Security Engineer at Tecplix

Helps reduce log ingestion cost by dropping unnecessary events and customizing pipelines

The best feature in Cribl, when getting logs from some custom application, is the ability to break up logs that pile up together and come as one event. 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. This is critical as this generally happens in CrowdStrike. This feature helps us significantly. When the ingestion is high from unwanted logs, logs not related to security purposes can be dropped by writing the parser function. By dropping events that are not required for security purpose monitoring, we can reduce the ingestion, which drastically reduces the cost as well. Cribl gives another option where I can store some logs, and when needed, I can pick them up from there. The interface is very handy and not very complicated, yet there are many functions you can perform. You can play around with numerous functions, parse there, and add UDMs to SecOps, which makes it really easy. To simplify the pipeline, when we go to the pipelines, there are vast options. We can make it specific requirements based on the customers. I would prefer a customized or simplified version. Cribl is a very good platform to work with, with lots of features that other platforms don't provide.

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Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"One of the best features of Confluent is that it's very easy to search and have a live status with Jira."

"I find Confluent's Kafka Connectors and Kafka Streams invaluable for my use cases because they simplify real-time data processing and ETL tasks by providing reliable, pre-packaged connectors and tools."

"A person with a good IT background and HTML will not have any trouble with Confluent."

"The client APIs are the most valuable feature."

"Kafka Connect framework is valuable for connecting to the various source systems where code doesn't need to be written."

"The design of the product is extremely well built and it is highly configurable."

"With Confluent Cloud we no longer need to handle the infrastructure and the plumbing, which is a concern for Confluent. The other advantage is that all portfolios have access to the data that is being shared."

"The features I find most useful in Confluent are the Multi-Region Cluster, MRC, and the Cluster Linking for replication."

More Confluent pros

"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."

"The features of Cribl that I appreciate the most are the vendor agnosticism and the ability to send data almost anywhere you want, regardless of the data type, the format, or the destination."

"Cribl search has affected us greatly, and it has optimized our operations teams' time and efficiency; they're able to troubleshoot and find issues for our customers in a minimal amount of time."

"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."

"The product's most valuable features include the internal management of events, coding perspective, data processing, and serialization."

"The features of Cribl that I appreciate the most are the vendor agnosticism and the ability to send data almost anywhere you want, regardless of the data type, the format, or the destination; it's very flexible, and we've been able to integrate it with the tools that we have used in the past and are planning to use in the future."

"I'd rate the solution ten out of ten."

More Cribl pros

Cons

"It requires some application specific connectors which are lacking. This needs to be added."

"there is room for improvement in the visualization."

"The Schema Registry service could be improved. I would like a bigger knowledge base of other use cases and more technical forums. It would be good to have more flexible monitoring features added to the next release as well."

"The formatting aspect within the page can be improved and more powerful."

"We continuously face issues, such as Kafka being down and slow responses from the support team."

"There is a limitation when it comes to seamlessly importing Microsoft documents into Confluent pages, which can be inconvenient for users who frequently work with Microsoft Office tools and need to transition their content to Confluent."

"Recently, there has been a lot of buzz about Confluent charging high fees while not offering features that match those of other tools."

"One area we've identified that could be improved is the governance and access control to the Kafka topics. We've found some limitations, like a threshold of 10,000 rules per cluster, that make it challenging to manage access at scale if we have many different data sources."

More Confluent cons

"When I explored the endpoint, I found myself wishing for clearer instructions presented in a sequential manner."

"There have been several administrative issues. Another point is that the browsing functions aren't very intuitive."

"There are opportunities for AI to be incorporated more tightly into Cribl to help build out those pipelines and apply some more complex logic to those transformations could be useful."

"Currently, Cribl Search is dedicated to one bucket at a time in the case of S3 buckets. The ability to search for multiple buckets would be awesome."

"Their documentation should be updated."

"Currently, Cribl Search is dedicated to one bucket at a time in the case of S3 buckets. The ability to search for multiple buckets would be awesome."

"There is room for improvement in the documentation and knowledge base, particularly regarding configurations like sources where logs are being ingested"

"Cribl could improve by offering easier integrations with enterprise products, similar to what Splunk provides."

More Cribl cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The solution is cheaper than other products."

"Confluent is an expensive solution as we went for a three contract and it was very costly for us."

"Confluence's pricing is quite reasonable, with a cost of around $10 per user that decreases as the number of users increases. Additionally, it's worth noting that for teams of up to 10 users, the solution is completely free."

"It comes with a high cost."

"Regarding pricing, I think Confluent is a premium product, but it's hard for me to say definitively if it's overly expensive. We're still trying to understand if the features and reduced maintenance complexity justify the cost, especially as we scale our platform use."

"Confluent is highly priced."

"On a scale from one to ten, where one is low pricing and ten is high pricing, I would rate Confluent's pricing at five. I have not encountered any additional costs."

"Confluent is expensive, I would prefer, Apache Kafka over Confluent because of the high cost of maintenance."

More Confluent pricing and cost advice

"The product pricing is reasonable compared to other solutions."

"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."

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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Financial Services Firm

17%

Computer Software Company

12%

Retailer

Manufacturing Company

Financial Services Firm

16%

Computer Software Company

Manufacturing Company

Healthcare Company

Company Size

By reviewers

Large Enterprise

Midsize Enterprise

Small Business

By reviewers
Company Size	Count
Small Business	6
Midsize Enterprise	4
Large Enterprise	16

By reviewers
Company Size	Count
Small Business	9
Midsize Enterprise	5
Large Enterprise	14

Questions from the Community

What do you like most about Confluent?

I find Confluent's Kafka Connectors and Kafka Streams invaluable for my use cases because they simplify real-time data processing and ETL tasks by providing reliable, pre-packaged connectors and to...

See all answers

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Confluent?

They charge a lot for scaling, which makes it expensive.

See all answers

What needs improvement with Confluent?

See all answers

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Cribl?

Cribl is very inexpensive, with enterprise pricing around 30 cents per GB, which is really decent. Organizations looking to ingest terabytes or petabytes of data each day find it quite an inexpensi...

See all answers

What needs improvement with Cribl?

The product is very good. They could add more AI-assisted pipeline development in the future release.

See all answers

What is your primary use case for Cribl?

My current use cases involve using it as a pipeline to process data, to route data from cloud logs to different repositories. Some data goes to Splunk and others go to different data lakes. I didn'...

See all answers

Comparisons

Amazon Kinesis vs Confluent

Compared 12% of the time

Apache Flink vs Confluent

Compared 12% of the time

Databricks vs Confluent

Compared 9% of the time

Amazon MSK vs Confluent

Compared 7% of the time

Aiven Platform vs Confluent

Compared 4% of the time

More Confluent Competitors

DataBahn vs Cribl

Compared 12% of the time

BindPlane OP vs Cribl

Compared 11% of the time

Onum vs Cribl

Compared 11% of the time

Splunk Enterprise Security vs Cribl

Compared 6% of the time

Graylog Enterprise vs Cribl

Compared 2% of the time

More Cribl Competitors

Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

Confluent

October 2025

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Buyer's Guide

Cribl

October 2025

Download Cribl product report

Overview

Confluent is an enterprise-ready, full-scale streaming platform that enhances Apache Kafka.

Confluent has integrated cutting-edge features that are designed to enhance these tasks:

Speed up application development and connectivity
Enable transformations through stream processing
Streamline business operations at scale
Adhere to strict architectural standards

Confluent is a more complete distribution of Kafka in that it enhances the integration possibilities of Kafka by introducing tools for managing and optimizing Kafka clusters while providing methods for making sure the streams are secure. Confluent supports publish-and-subscribe as well as the storing and processing of data within the streams. Kafka is easier to operate and build thanks to Confluent.

Confluent's software is available in three different varieties:

A free, open-source streaming platform that makes it simple to start using real-time data streams
An enterprise-grade version of the product with more administrative, ops, and monitoring tools
A premium cloud-based version.

Confluent Advantage Features

Confluent has many valuable key features. Some of the most useful ones include:

Multi-language
- Clients: C++, Python, Go, and .NET
- REST proxy: Can connect to Kafka from any connected network device
- Admin REST APIs: RESTful interface for performing administrator operations

Pre-built ecosystem
- Connectors: More than 100 supported connectors, including S3, Elastic, HDFS, JDBC
- MQTT proxy: Gain access to Kafka from MQTT gateways and devices
- Schema registry: Centralized database to guarantee data compatibility

Streaming database
- ksqlDB: Materialized views and real-time stream processing

GUI management
- Control panel: GUI for scalable Kafka management and monitoring
- Health+: Smart alerts and cloud-based control centers

DevOps automation that is flexible
- Confluent for Kubernetes: Complete API to deploy on Kubernetes
- Automated Ansible deployment on non-containerized environments

Dynamic performance
- Self-balancing clusters: Automated partition re-balancing across brokers in the cluster
- Tiered storage: Older Kafka data offloading to object storage with transparent access

Security that is enterprise-grade
- Role-based access control: Granular user/group access authorization
- Audit logs that are structured: Logs of user actions kept in dedicated Kafka topics
- Secret protection: Sensitive information is encrypted

Global resilience
- Linking clusters: A real-time, highly reliable, and consistent bridge across on-premises and cloud environments
- Multiple-region clusters: Single Kafka cluster with automated client failover distributed across multiple data centers
- Replicator: Asynchronous replication that is based on the Kafka Connect framework

Support
- Round the clock enterprise support from Kafka experts

Reviews from Real Users

Confluent stands out among its competitors for a number of reasons. Two major ones are its robust enterprise support and its open source option. PeerSpot users take note of the advantages of these features in their reviews:

Ravi B., a solutions architect at a tech services company, writes of the solution, “KSQL is a valuable feature, as is the Kafka Connect framework for connecting to the various source systems where you need not write the code. We get great support from Confluent because we're using the enterprise version and whenever there's a problem, they support us with fine-tuning and finding the root cause.”

Amit S., an IT consultant, notes, “The biggest benefit is that it is open source. You have the flexibility of opting or not opting for enterprise support, even though the tool itself is open source.” He adds, “The second benefit is it's very modern and built on Java and Scala. You can extend the features very well, and it doesn't take a lot of effort to do so.”

Confluent

Cribl offers advanced data transformation and routing with features such as data reduction, plugin configurations, and log collection within a user-friendly framework supporting various deployments, significantly reducing data volumes and costs.

Cribl is designed to streamline data management, offering real-time data transformation and efficient log management. It supports seamless SIEM migration, enabling organizations to optimize costs associated with platforms like Splunk through data trimming. The capability to handle multiple data destinations and compression eases log control. With flexibility across on-prem, cloud, or hybrid environments, Cribl provides an adaptable interface that facilitates quick data model replication. While it significantly reduces data volumes, enhancing overall efficiency, there are areas for improvement, including compatibility with legacy systems and integration with enterprise products. Organizations can enhance their operational capabilities through certification opportunities and explore added functionalities tailored towards specific industry needs.

What are Cribl's most important features?

Data Transformation: Real-time data routing and transformation for improved efficiency.
Data Reduction: Reduces data volumes, lowering storage and licensing costs.
Routing and Masking: Offers powerful data masking and easy plugin configurations.
Log Collection: Simplifies the log collection process across different environments.
Deployment Flexibility: Supports on-prem, cloud, or hybrid deployments.
Seamless Integration: Facilitates easy migration to SIEMs and various data destinations.

What benefits or ROI should users look for?

Cost Savings: Reduces licensing costs by trimming unnecessary data.
Enhanced Efficiency: Improves data handling through seamless integration and transformation.
Operational Flexibility: Provides multiple deployment options to suit organizational preferences.
Data Management: Enhances user control over logs with advanced data reduction and compression.
Certification Opportunities: Offers users chances to enhance skills and operational capabilities.

Cribl sees extensive use in industries prioritizing efficient data management and cost optimization. Organizations leverage its capabilities to connect between different data sources, including cloud environments, improving both data handling and storage efficiency. Its customization options appeal to firms needing specific industry compliance and operational enhancements.

Cribl

Sample Customers

ING, Priceline.com, Nordea, Target, RBC, Tivo, Capital One, Chartboost

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Buyer's Guide

Confluent vs. Cribl

January 2025

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