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Cribl vs Microsoft Sentinel comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive Summary

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
7.2
Microsoft Sentinel enhances security and efficiency, offering cost savings and quick returns through automation and advanced analytics.
If a customer is already using Microsoft’s ecosystem, the ROI can be positive due to seamless integration.
Microsoft Azure was not fitting for short-term cost savings but promised a better ROI over three to five years for medium to large companies.
 

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
6.7
Users mostly praise Microsoft's responsive Sentinel support but note delays and access issues for advanced technical assistance.
The community, including the engineering and sales teams, is available on Slack and is very supportive.
Their solutions' integration simplifies resolving issues compared to those caused by third-party products.
When my team needs to escalate issues to Microsoft, especially for Microsoft Sentinel, the response is fast through their French entity.
Working with a Sentinel engineer helped us tune settings effectively.
 

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
8.0
Microsoft Sentinel provides scalable, flexible security solutions with cloud-based efficiency, praised for cost-effective data integration and workload management.
Office 365 and Exchange are running on it, covering about 35,000 users efficiently.
Being a SaaS solution, the scalability of Microsoft Sentinel is robust.
As our organization uses Microsoft Azure and Defender, everything grows together, and we can integrate various features seamlessly.
 

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
7.8
Microsoft Sentinel offers reliable performance with minimal downtime, efficiently managed maintenance, and occasional issues during extensive customization.
I need to be aware of deprecated connectors as they may disconnect, but the data continues to be sent with a need for quick adaptation.
In the past two years, our team hasn't encountered any issues with the stability of Microsoft Sentinel from an operations perspective.
So far, we have not experienced any issues, and it has been stable from the beginning.
 

Room For Improvement

Cribl needs better legacy compatibility, intuitive logging, enhanced documentation, improved onboarding, and desktop server functionality for developers.
Microsoft Sentinel needs better user-friendliness, integration, documentation, and cost-efficiency to enhance usability, scalability, and adoption.
Perhaps more flexibility in terms of metrics would be helpful.
We have some tools, such as our off-site Meraki firewalls, that have not fully integrated with Sentinel.
There are complexities in calculating the right pricing tier for different customers, which makes it difficult for me as a consultant during upfront pricing.
Currently, we are happy to have a way in the middle with not so much cost, but it would be nice to have the ability to enhance the automation of workflows based on learned incidents.
 

Setup Cost

Cribl offers a cost-effective, scalable pricing model with up to 30% cost reductions, appealing to mid-level and large enterprises.
Microsoft Sentinel's pay-as-you-go model suits enterprises on Microsoft but raises cost concerns for others, especially with data ingestion.
Microsoft Sentinel offers more capabilities than Bastion, with a more intuitive experience.
Setting up the right cost model for customers is intricate, requiring careful consideration of various components and licensing tiers.
We already had the necessary licensing for Sentinel, so we didn't need to spend extra money.
 

Valuable Features

Cribl streamlines real-time data transformation, log collection, and routing with user-friendly features, security, and extensive integration support.
Microsoft Sentinel excels with SOAR playbooks, AI automation, and integration, enhancing threat detection and response in a unified interface.
The community on Slack is excellent for solving questions and getting ideas.
Custom workbooks are valuable. It is one of the crucial points in dealing with potential security threats in an automated way without requiring too much manpower.
The ability of Microsoft Sentinel to correlate data from multiple sources enhances threat detection capabilities.
The most valuable features for us include threat collection, threat detection, response, and the knowledge base for investigation.
 

Categories and Ranking

Cribl
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), Log Management (13th), Observability Pipeline Software (1st)
Microsoft Sentinel
Ranking in Security Information and Event Management (SIEM)
3rd
Average Rating
8.2
Reviews Sentiment
7.1
Number of Reviews
91
Ranking in other categories
Security Orchestration Automation and Response (SOAR) (1st), Microsoft Security Suite (6th), AI-Powered Cybersecurity Platforms (5th)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of April 2025, in the Security Information and Event Management (SIEM) category, the mindshare of Cribl is 0.5%, up from 0.1% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Microsoft Sentinel is 7.4%, down from 9.2% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Security Information and Event Management (SIEM)
 

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.
KrishnanKartik - PeerSpot reviewer
Every rule enriched at triggering stage, easing the job of SOC analyst
It's a Big Data security analytics platform. Among the unique features is the fact that it has built-in UEBA and analytical capabilities. It allows you to use the out-of-the-box machine learning and AI capabilities, but it also allows you to bring your own AI/ML, by bringing in your own IPs and allowing the platform to accept them and run that on top of it. In addition, the SOAR component is a pay-per-use model. Compared to any other product, where customization is not available, you can fine-tune the SOAR and you'll be charged only when your playbooks are triggered. That is the beauty of the solution because the SOAR is the costliest component in the market today. Other vendors charge heavily for the SOAR, but with Sentinel it is upside-down: the SOAR is the lowest-hanging fruit. It's the least costly and it delivers more value to the customer. The SOAR engine also uniquely helps us to automate most of the incidents with automated enrichment and that cuts out the L1 analyst work. And combining M365 with Sentinel, if you want to call it integration, takes just a few clicks: "next, next finish." If it is all M365-native, it is a maximum of three or four steps and you'll be able to ingest all the logs into Sentinel. That is true even with AWS or GCP because most of the connectors are already available out-of-the-box. You just click, put in your subscription details, include your IAM, and you are finished. Within five to six steps, you can integrate AWS workloads and the logs can be ingested into Sentinel. When it comes to a third party specifically, such as log sources in a data center or on-premises, we need a log collector so that the logs can be forwarded to the Sentinel platform. And when it comes to servers or something where there is an agent for Windows or Linux, the agent can collect the logs and ship them to the Sentinel platform. I don't see any difficulties in integrating any of the log sources, even to the extent of collecting IoT log sources. Microsoft Defender for Cloud has multiple components such as Defender for Servers, Defender for PaaS, and Defender for databases. For customers in Azure, there are a lot of use cases specific to protecting workloads and PaaS and SaaS in Azure and beyond Azure, if a customer also has on-premises locations. There is EDR for Windows and Linux servers, and it even protects different kinds of containers. With Defender for Cloud, all these sources can be seamlessly integrated and you can then track the security incidents in Microsoft's XDR platform. That means you have one more workspace, under Azure, not Defender for Cloud, where you can see the security incidents. In addition, it can be integrated with Sentinel for EDR deep-dive analytics. It can also protect workloads in AWS. We have customers for whom we are protecting their AWS workloads. Even EKS, Elastic Kubernetes Service, on AWS can be integrated, as can the GKE (Google Kubernetes Engine). And with Defender for Cloud, security alert ingestion is free
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
18%
Computer Software Company
10%
Healthcare Company
8%
Government
7%
Computer Software Company
16%
Financial Services Firm
11%
Manufacturing Company
8%
Government
8%
 

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...
Is there a common threat intelligence tool that aggregates multiple threat intelligence sources?
Yes, Azure Sentinel is a SIEM on the Cloud. Multiple data sources can be uploaded and analyzed with Azure Sentinel and its Threat Hunting functionality with AI available as templates or customized ...
What is a better choice, Splunk or Azure Sentinel?
It would really depend on (1) which logs you need to ingest and (2) what are your use cases Splunk is easy for ingestion of anything, but the charge per GB/Day Indexed and it gets expensive as log ...
Which is better - Azure Sentinel or AWS Security Hub?
We like that Azure Sentinel does not require as much maintenance as legacy SIEMs that are on-premises. Azure Sentinel is auto-scaling - you will not have to worry about performance impact, you will...
 

Comparisons

 

Also Known As

No data available
Azure Sentinel
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Information Not Available
Microsoft Sentinel is trusted by companies of all sizes including ABM, ASOS, Uniper, First West Credit Union, Avanade, and more.
Find out what your peers are saying about Cribl vs. Microsoft Sentinel and other solutions. Updated: February 2025.
846,617 professionals have used our research since 2012.