Bronto vs. Cribl
Teams adopt Cribl to filter, sample and route telemetry so downstream bills stay manageable. With Bronto, you can keep all of your logs & traces at full fidelity, with sub-second search and 12 months of hot retention, without an extra pipeline layer.
Why Teams are
Choosing Bronto
High-level comparison across what matters most.
Data Fidelity
Keep Every Log
Bronto stores every log, trace, and metric in full, with no sampling. You never have to guess which data you'll need during an incident.
Built to Reduce Data
Cribl's core use case is filtering, sampling, and trimming data before it reaches a paid destination. Every reduction rule is a bet that you won't need that data later.
Query Speed
Fast Search at Scale
Bronto is designed to technically ensure fast search across TBs of data, whether it's from last week or last year. Query more instead of waiting.
Fast Search Only on Cached Data
Cribl's fast search runs on a Lakehouse cache you size by daily ingest, with 30 days of retention by default. Searches outside the cache run at standard speed and bill by CPU hour.
Retention
12 Month Always Hot Retention
Retain a larger dataset to ensure that your root cause analysis has rich context. No archiving or rehydrating logs, traces, or metrics to find what matters.
Hot and Cold Tiers to Manage
Cribl Lake stores data cheaply in object storage, but only what's cached in a Lakehouse is fast to search. Teams have to decide which datasets earn the fast tier, and for how long.
Cost of Ownership
Transparent & Predictable Pricing
No surprise bills. Choose the Bronto plan that is right for you and see how accessible fully-managed logs, traces, & metrics can be for your applications.
Four Products, Four Meters
Cribl bills pipeline ingest, worker infrastructure, search compute, and lake storage separately. That sits on top of the destination you send data to, which makes total cost hard to forecast.
One platform for all of your data
Logs
Filter with smart SQL autocomplete and keyboard-driven shortcuts. Results return in seconds — even across terabytes. Drill into any attribute, view raw logs, or jump straight into traces from the log table.
Loved by teams
around the world
“The combination of long-term retention, lightning-fast search, and AI-powered insights means we catch issues much earlier, often before customers notice them.”
Paul Griffin
Head of Platform Engineering
“We can access data with sub-second search, whether it's from last week or last year. For AI-powered analysis of our logs, data availability is key — it's just not possible with only a few days of retention.”
John Fitzpatrick
CTO
“Tasks that used to take 15 minutes are now almost instant. With a year's worth of data retention instead of just 90 days, I can now identify annual trends and patterns I couldn't see before.”
Brian Elliott
Senior Engineering Manager
“It's a night and day difference to our previous logging provider. Bronto typically returns results in seconds, while our old vendor took over 30 minutes and frequently failed to render visualizations.”
Jaymin Patel
Team Lead
“Bronto helped us cut costs and centralize our multi-cloud application logging. Troubleshooting is now significantly faster, and having all our logs correlate properly in one place has been a game-changer.”
Joaquín Sargiotto
DevOps Team Lead
“The TCO reduction is significant — we're saving hundreds of thousands annually. But the real value is in new and significantly enhanced capabilities. A significant reduction in time to root cause, investigating issues from months ago, having logs actually available during incidents — these aren't just improvements, they're game-changers. Our SysOps team now get to work on platform innovation instead of keeping Graylog alive.”
Aodh O'Mahony
Engineering Manager
“The combination of long-term retention, lightning-fast search, and AI-powered insights means we catch issues much earlier, often before customers notice them.”
Paul Griffin
Head of Platform Engineering
“We can access data with sub-second search, whether it's from last week or last year. For AI-powered analysis of our logs, data availability is key — it's just not possible with only a few days of retention.”
John Fitzpatrick
CTO
“Tasks that used to take 15 minutes are now almost instant. With a year's worth of data retention instead of just 90 days, I can now identify annual trends and patterns I couldn't see before.”
Brian Elliott
Senior Engineering Manager
“It's a night and day difference to our previous logging provider. Bronto typically returns results in seconds, while our old vendor took over 30 minutes and frequently failed to render visualizations.”
Jaymin Patel
Team Lead
“Bronto helped us cut costs and centralize our multi-cloud application logging. Troubleshooting is now significantly faster, and having all our logs correlate properly in one place has been a game-changer.”
Joaquín Sargiotto
DevOps Team Lead
“The TCO reduction is significant — we're saving hundreds of thousands annually. But the real value is in new and significantly enhanced capabilities. A significant reduction in time to root cause, investigating issues from months ago, having logs actually available during incidents — these aren't just improvements, they're game-changers. Our SysOps team now get to work on platform innovation instead of keeping Graylog alive.”
Aodh O'Mahony
Engineering Manager
“The combination of long-term retention, lightning-fast search, and AI-powered insights means we catch issues much earlier, often before customers notice them.”
Paul Griffin
Head of Platform Engineering
“We can access data with sub-second search, whether it's from last week or last year. For AI-powered analysis of our logs, data availability is key — it's just not possible with only a few days of retention.”
John Fitzpatrick
CTO
“Tasks that used to take 15 minutes are now almost instant. With a year's worth of data retention instead of just 90 days, I can now identify annual trends and patterns I couldn't see before.”
Brian Elliott
Senior Engineering Manager
“It's a night and day difference to our previous logging provider. Bronto typically returns results in seconds, while our old vendor took over 30 minutes and frequently failed to render visualizations.”
Jaymin Patel
Team Lead
“Bronto helped us cut costs and centralize our multi-cloud application logging. Troubleshooting is now significantly faster, and having all our logs correlate properly in one place has been a game-changer.”
Joaquín Sargiotto
DevOps Team Lead
“The TCO reduction is significant — we're saving hundreds of thousands annually. But the real value is in new and significantly enhanced capabilities. A significant reduction in time to root cause, investigating issues from months ago, having logs actually available during incidents — these aren't just improvements, they're game-changers. Our SysOps team now get to work on platform innovation instead of keeping Graylog alive.”
Aodh O'Mahony
Engineering Manager
Run a parallel POC with your own data and see what it costs to keep everything, always hot, at one predictable price.
Feature comparison
| Feature | Bronto | Cribl |
|---|---|---|
| Hot log retention | 12 months included | Lakehouse cache, 30 days by default, sized and billed separately |
| Search cost | 20x to 100x tiered search | Billed per CPU hour outside the Lakehouse cache |
| Time to first value | Minutes via OTel / Fluent Bit | Pipelines, routes, and worker groups to build first |
| Bill predictability | One monthly price | Separate credits for ingest, infrastructure, search, and storage |
Full fidelity, always hot, fully managed data
Always Hot Data
Every byte of telemetry is instantly queryable — no rehydration, no cold tiers, no waiting.
Long-Term Retention
12 months of retention included out of the box. Keep your data as long as you need it.
Full Fidelity, Full Coverage
No sampling, no aggregation, no data loss. Every log, trace, and metric stored exactly as received.
Transparent Usage & Controls
See exactly what you're ingesting and what it costs. Set quotas, alerts, and exclusion filters in seconds.
Fast at Large Scales
Sub-second queries across petabytes of data. Purpose-built indexing that scales with your growth.
Always Parsed & Searchable
At ingestion, Bronto parses your logs using known formats or AI — so every field is structured and instantly searchable.
