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Cribl vs Elastic Security comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Mar 9, 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
6.3
Cribl enhanced data management efficiency, delivering cost savings, improved processing speed, system performance, and operational flexibility for users.
Sentiment score
5.9
Elastic Security often delivers positive ROI within two years, though user satisfaction and views on cost-effectiveness vary.
It does not require hefty security budgets and can be deployed for enterprise security effectively.
 

Customer Service

Sentiment score
6.8
Cribl customer service is praised for prompt responses, effective support, and community assistance, with a high satisfaction rating.
Sentiment score
6.4
Elastic Security feedback is mixed; users praise community support, yet criticize inconsistent technical support and seek faster solutions.
The community, including the engineering and sales teams, is available on Slack and is very supportive.
Most of the time when my team encounters issues, they receive responses within 24 hours.
Support is prompt and helpful.
 

Scalability Issues

Sentiment score
7.9
Cribl is scalable and easily integrates with CI/CD pipelines, receiving praise for efficient deployment and seamless cloud management.
Sentiment score
7.3
Elastic Security is scalable and adaptable, suitable for diverse business needs, though skilled personnel are important for effective management.
It allows us to think about specific use cases, such as gathering malicious IPs in a single view and analyzing threats based on geolocation.
 

Stability Issues

Sentiment score
7.3
Cribl is generally rated 7-8 for stability, with minor bugs quickly addressed and continuous development enhancing reliability.
Sentiment score
7.7
Elastic Security is stable and reliable, though challenges arise with big data and real-time usage without proper configuration.
In terms of stability, I would rate Elastic a solid eight out of ten.
 

Room For Improvement

Cribl needs better legacy compatibility, intuitive logging, enhanced documentation, improved onboarding, and desktop server functionality for developers.
Elastic Security faces challenges in setup, AI integration, permissions management, user support, and requires improved dashboards and cost-efficiency.
Perhaps more flexibility in terms of metrics would be helpful.
CrowdStrike and Defender have more established threat intelligence integration due to having a larger client base.
My security testing team continuously reports vulnerabilities, and we have to fix and update the versions frequently.
Elastic Security consumes a lot of resources, requiring a substantial deployment setup.
 

Setup Cost

Cribl offers a cost-effective, scalable pricing model with up to 30% cost reductions, appealing to mid-level and large enterprises.
Elastic Security offers a free open-source option with enterprise features based on usage, making it cost-effective for enterprises.
The pricing is reasonable, especially for Small Medium Enterprises (SMEs), making it a viable option for businesses building their security infrastructure.
This is beneficial for SMEs as they do not need extensive budgets for security solutions.
Elastic Security is considered cost-effective, especially at lower EPS levels.
 

Valuable Features

Cribl streamlines real-time data transformation, log collection, and routing with user-friendly features, security, and extensive integration support.
Elastic Security is praised for fast search, scalability, machine learning, customization, integration, and user-friendly, cost-effective features.
The community on Slack is excellent for solving questions and getting ideas.
The platform provides more visibility and requires less effort in monitoring.
We require rapid processing speed for alerts and event data, and Elastic Security is very efficient at handling this level of data.
Elastic Security offers good insight regarding alerts, reports, and cases.
 

Categories and Ranking

Cribl
Ranking in Log Management
13th
Ranking in Security Information and Event Management (SIEM)
13th
Average Rating
8.4
Reviews Sentiment
7.1
Number of Reviews
10
Ranking in other categories
Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability (14th), Observability Pipeline Software (1st)
Elastic Security
Ranking in Log Management
7th
Ranking in Security Information and Event Management (SIEM)
5th
Average Rating
7.8
Reviews Sentiment
6.8
Number of Reviews
64
Ranking in other categories
Endpoint Detection and Response (EDR) (16th), Security Orchestration Automation and Response (SOAR) (6th), Extended Detection and Response (XDR) (8th)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of April 2025, in the Log Management category, the mindshare of Cribl is 1.5%, up from 0.3% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Elastic Security is 3.5%, down from 6.7% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Log Management
 

Featured Reviews

Phanindra Ponnada - PeerSpot reviewer
Provides good documentation and worth the investment
As of now, there are some environments where some organizations are still on legacy infrastructure, so they are still in virtual environments and are using old versions of devices. Some companies bought Splunk, while others bought Cribl for a very low-priced license. There are some protocols to connect from Cribl to Splunk. I understand Cribl has come into the market very recently, but the tool might have had a picture in its mind where organizations might also have some legacy infrastructure. In the future, with our protocols or our level of architecture, Cribl should not come and say that it is not compatible with them. If Cribl is the reason because I have to change my environment, then I will have to end up investing more. There are some organizations where the end machines have forwarders that forward the data to Cribl, and from it, the data is forwarded to Splunk. This is how general architecture works. There are two methods of connection between Cribl and Splunk. One is the S2S protocol, which collects logs from Cribl or sends data between Cribl and Splunk. There is another method called HTTP Event Collector (HEC) and HTTPS protocol. With Cribl, connecting to Splunk mostly uses the S2S protocol. The tool supports all the latest devices and platform devices, like all the latest operating systems. There are some organizations where there is legacy infrastructure or if they are still on the old platforms. Companies using old platforms have to consider HTTP Event Collector (HEC), and then they have to change their infrastructure setup in order to fulfill that setup. In order to have Google and Splunk set up in my organization, if I have to change my existing infrastructure connectivity or setup, that might incur more cost or more investment for me to have Cribl and Splunk. Cribl should provide compatibility, or else the tool's developers should speak to the people of such organizations and understand the challenges. Cribl could have developed some version that can give backward compatibility.
Gajewski Marek - PeerSpot reviewer
Provides good anomaly detection and connectivity reporting
We previously used Splunk but switched to Elastic Security because Splunk was more expensive. Feature-wise, both tools are pretty much the same. They have almost the same functions. Elastic Security has a much better AI assistant that allows you to ask questions like a normal person. With Elastic Security, I can also predict the price and how much it will cost. Splunks's pricing depends on how much data we use and the different add-ons I have to add. The pricing is much better with Elastic Security.
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
17%
Computer Software Company
11%
Healthcare Company
8%
Government
7%
Computer Software Company
17%
Government
10%
Financial Services Firm
9%
Comms Service Provider
7%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
 

Questions from the Community

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Cribl?
I am not aware of the pricing details, however, I know they use a credit format for billing.
What needs improvement with Cribl?
At the moment, I don't have specific feedback on what can be improved as I do not work with Cribl daily. Perhaps more flexibility in terms of metrics would be helpful.
What is your primary use case for Cribl?
I am using Cribl to have everything centralized in one tool in terms of data collection. We were working with different Splunk customers, and Cribl helps collect data and then send it to an S3 buck...
Datadog vs ELK: which one is good in terms of performance, cost and efficiency?
With Datadog, we have near-live visibility across our entire platform. We have seen APM metrics impacted several times lately using the dashboards we have created with Datadog; they are very good c...
What do you like most about Elastic Security?
Elastic provides the capability to index quickly due to the reverse indexes it offers. This data is crucial as it contains critical information. The reverse index allows fast data indexing because ...
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Elastic Security?
Elastic Security is considered cost-effective, especially at lower EPS levels. However, a direct comparison was not made due to different pricing structures.
 

Comparisons

 

Also Known As

No data available
Elastic SIEM, ELK Logstash
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Information Not Available
Texas A&M, U.S. Air Force, NuScale Power, Martin's Point Health Care
Find out what your peers are saying about Cribl vs. Elastic Security and other solutions. Updated: March 2025.
844,944 professionals have used our research since 2012.