The Stack Migration Report
A team receives a Splunk renewal quote and evaluates Cribl with Snowflake. In this illustrative example, observability spend falls by half within two quarters, and the SRE team's data lands in the warehouse it already pays for. We examine twelve named migration paths across 232,000+ organizations and 174,000+ deployment case studies. The diagrams show patterns and direction, not measured migration volumes.
Three signals before migration.
Three signals recur before every named migration examined here. They appear in deployment narratives 18 to 36 months before the incumbent reports a quarter that confirms the change. This is an observed pattern in the corpus, not a prediction.
- 01The incumbent’s product stops moving.
- 02The challenger wins net-new projects.
- 03The economics invert.
The incumbent is not losing because the insurgent is better. The incumbent is losing because the category rewrote itself around them.
Twelve named migration paths.
These twelve legacy-to-modern paths recur most often in the registry. Bars represent editorial weight in the corpus, not a measured ranking. Each reason code identifies the dominant driver we read across deployment narratives.
Why teams moved
Ten reason codes recur as primary drivers across 174,000+ deployment case studies. Bars show editorial weight, not precise percentages.
Bill shock is the most prominent single driver. Together, the next three codes (AI-era capability gap, OSS leverage, and architect preference) carry substantially more editorial weight than price alone. The corpus suggests that incumbents need to respond to changes in how customers work, alongside the cost of their current software.
The corpus suggests that two migrations are accelerating into Q3 within the same engineering organizations: path 04, from legacy editors to Cursor and editor-native agents, and path 11, from legacy enterprise search to Glean and retrieval tools. Their renewal windows overlap. When both reach the CFO in one quarter, teams may review the broader workflow and open another migration path. These twelve paths provide a starting point for conversations with peers in the registry.
Airframe reports editorial patterns when independent deployment artifacts repeatedly show directional movement. To discuss the underlying registry, contact hello@airframe.ai.
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