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Cribl vs Grafana Loki comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Jun 15, 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
6th
Average Rating
8.4
Reviews Sentiment
6.5
Number of Reviews
20
Ranking in other categories
Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability (12th), Security Information and Event Management (SIEM) (10th), Observability Pipeline Software (1st)
Grafana Loki
Ranking in Log Management
3rd
Average Rating
8.2
Reviews Sentiment
7.8
Number of Reviews
18
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
 

Mindshare comparison

As of October 2025, in the Log Management category, the mindshare of Cribl is 2.5%, up from 0.7% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Grafana Loki is 7.9%, up from 6.5% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Log Management Market Share Distribution
ProductMarket Share (%)
Grafana Loki7.9%
Cribl2.5%
Other89.6%
Log Management
 

Featured Reviews

Manoj Gowda J - PeerSpot reviewer
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.
Volodymyr Bondarchuk - PeerSpot reviewer
Integrations enhance monitoring but problem-solving proves challenging
Different types of integrations with various sources are the most helpful and useful features of Grafana Loki that I found for myself. As part of Kubernetes technology, I noticed benefits from using this product such as availability, configuration balancing, high availability solutions for high performance, and failover clustering. It provides a clear picture about the state of the system and gives needed information for taking action and quickly fixing problems.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"Our experience with Cribl has been very smooth; everything runs seamlessly, there are no delays or sluggishness, which I really appreciate."
"The support team was very helpful and managed to get everything production-ready."
"Cribl is specifically designed to reduce the data costs associated with the destination platform, which is one of its core offerings."
"Cribl is a very good platform to work with, with lots of features that other platforms don't provide."
"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 capability to reduce logs in a user-friendly manner is a standout feature. Cribl allows us to view logs live as they are being processed, giving us quick feedback on the changes made."
"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 definitely helps with the complexity because you don't have to push for deployment—they provide the interface where you can mimic what the output will look like, and you can see that in real time when setting up the Cribl configuration, which definitely helps considerably."
"The product's most valuable features are ease of installation, management, and reporting. It has an efficient ability to set thresholds for alerts, as well."
"The solution's stability has never been a problem. Stability-wise, I rate the solution a nine to ten out of ten."
"The most valuable feature of Grafana Loki is the dashboards which are really simple to create."
"The effectiveness of filters is pivotal for optimizing the search process and extracting the specific information we need from the extensive log data."
"The most valuable features of the solution stem from the fact that it is an open-source tool that is stable and flexible."
"Loki also utilizes the same service discovery mechanism as used by Prometheus. So, whatever labeled metadata you see in Prometheus, you have the exact same metadata in the Loki system. Given this level of intricacy and the attempt to address these challenges, I firmly believe that Loki deserves praise for the work."
"I appreciate the capability to process logs from microservices and seamlessly integrate them into Grafana."
"The best feature of Grafana Loki is that it integrates well with our other tool."
 

Cons

"Cribl should consider adding more features that are applicable to smaller firms, allowing broader access to their data migration through Cribl."
"The deployment itself is a bit complicated and the documentation is not very clear."
"Cribl doesn't have as many packs available"
"Their documentation should be updated."
"There is no alerting mechanism for the leader/worker nodes status."
"Cribl could improve by offering easier integrations with enterprise products, similar to what Splunk provides."
"Cribl could have developed some version that can give backward compatibility."
"There is room for improvement in the documentation and knowledge base, particularly regarding configurations like sources where logs are being ingested"
"The solution has shortcomings regarding security monitoring-oriented features that need improvement."
"The Docker container partition feature needs improvement as they do not reuse the space and goes into a pending state."
"The solution's scalability depends on the team managing the Grafana instance."
"The correlation of requests is not simple in Grafana Loki and can be improved."
"In Grafana Loki, the creation of metrics is not so easy, making it an area that could be made easier."
"It would be beneficial if Loki could directly access Windows Server logs or events directly from the servers."
"Enhancing speed could be a game-changer, and while it might vary depending on the application, it's a factor worth exploring."
"I do not see any areas for improvement at the moment."
 

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."
"Since we are using the open-source version of Grafana Loki, we are not paying anything for the solution."
"My company doesn't need to pay for the licensing cost of the solution."
"You can use the free version of Grafana Loki on-premises."
"Grafana Loki is a free, open-source solution."
"The cost is less than other paid services like CloudWatch."
"The pricing structure varies based on the number of users; there might be specific taxes to pay for it."
"I find the licensing structure quite reasonable, as the free license effectively meets my requirements."
"Grafana Loki is an open-source solution."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
16%
Computer Software Company
8%
Manufacturing Company
8%
Healthcare Company
7%
Computer Software Company
16%
Comms Service Provider
10%
Financial Services Firm
10%
Manufacturing Company
9%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business9
Midsize Enterprise5
Large Enterprise14
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business7
Midsize Enterprise8
Large Enterprise3
 

Questions from the Community

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...
What needs improvement with Cribl?
They've already done many good things with the product, but perhaps they could implement a temporary SIEM solution where we could store logs and display them as a SIEM, though I think that's not th...
What is your primary use case for Cribl?
Our main use case for Cribl was SIEM migration, where we merged multiple SIEM solutions to a single SIEM solution. SIEM migration was the most major use case we were looking for. The second use cas...
What do you like most about Grafana Loki?
We are using Grafana Loki as a database for real-time metrics.
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Grafana Loki?
Since it is an open source tool, there are no charges or fees.
What needs improvement with Grafana Loki?
I have no ideas at this moment about what could be improved in Grafana Loki.
 

Comparisons

 

Overview

Find out what your peers are saying about Cribl vs. Grafana Loki and other solutions. Updated: September 2025.
869,883 professionals have used our research since 2012.