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Elastic Security vs Graylog comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Jan 12, 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

Elastic Security
Ranking in Log Management
7th
Average Rating
7.6
Reviews Sentiment
6.7
Number of Reviews
63
Ranking in other categories
Security Information and Event Management (SIEM) (5th), Endpoint Detection and Response (EDR) (16th), Security Orchestration Automation and Response (SOAR) (6th), Extended Detection and Response (XDR) (8th)
Graylog
Ranking in Log Management
16th
Average Rating
8.0
Reviews Sentiment
6.7
Number of Reviews
19
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
 

Mindshare comparison

As of February 2025, in the Log Management category, the mindshare of Elastic Security is 3.9%, down from 7.1% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Graylog is 6.2%, up from 5.6% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Log Management
 

Featured Reviews

Nikhil-Kumar - PeerSpot reviewer
Customizable with great dashboards but the premium support is poor
The initial setup can be complex if you don't have technical knowledge. However, once it is deployed, it works well. I'm not sure how long it took to deploy. I wasn't there when it was set up and configured. We have an internal team that handles deployment and maintenance. It doesn't require too many people to deploy. Five or six people would be enough. However, for 24/7 monitoring, you need to have someone always on it.
Andrey Mostovykh - PeerSpot reviewer
Real-time analysis, easy setup, and open source
We stopped using it for analytics because of its price, and at the moment, we are using it mostly for log centralization. If you use it with high traffic for analytical purposes, as well as for the logs, the infrastructure costs are unbelievable. Graylog is a great product backed by Elasticsearch as the storage and query engine. It is just an interface on top of Elasticsearch and some Elasticsearch management. The indexes that are kept in Elasticsearch are managed by Graylog software. Elasticsearch is a decent product, but it's very infrastructure-heavy. It requires lots of resources, and if you make a mistake with provisioning, you are likely to not get a cluster back. We had a couple of outages like that, and we hated that. So, we ended up over-provisioning resources just to avoid such situations from happening. If you have a whole team trying to fix the Graylog instance for two days, that's a bit too much. That may be my Norwegian take on it, but the engineering resources are expensive. It's better to just provision the infrastructure. Overall, the product is great, and the features are just fine, but the infrastructure cost is what is killing it. The infrastructure cost is the main issue. I like the rest. If the infrastructure costs could be lower, it would be fantastic. I'm not sure if they can improve the infrastructure cost with the way Elasticsearch is. If they keep using Elasticsearch, maybe there are some opportunities there, or they can support other backends with cheaper storage. They could have a different backend to replace Elasticsearch or do some tweaks to Elasticsearch to reduce the costs. There could be partial parsing of logs or parsing on demand so that when you write data through Graylog to Elasticsearch, it doesn't need to crunch in every detail requiring that much CPU.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"I can look at events from more than one source across multiple different locations and find patterns or anomalies. The machine learning capabilities are helpful, and I can create rules for notifications to be more proactive rather than responding after something has gone wrong."
"It can handle millions of loads at a time, and you can always use the filters to find exactly what you are looking for and detect errors in every log message you are searching for, basically."
"ELK is open-source, and it will give you the framework you need to build everything from scratch."
"The visualization is very good."
"It's a good platform and the very best in the current market. We looked at the Forester report from December 2022 where it was said to be a leader."
"I use the stack every morning to check the errors and it's just so clear. I don't see any disadvantage to using Logstash."
"The most valuable feature is the search function, which allows me to go directly to the target to see the specific line a customer is searching for."
"The tool's functionality is good for overall security and incident response times."
"Graylog is very handy."
"UDP is a fast and lightweight protocol, perfect for sending large volumes of logs with minimal overhead."
"I like the correlation and the alerting."
"Open source and user friendly."
"Allowing us to set up alerts and integrate with platforms we already use, such as Slack and OpsGenie to alert users of these errors proactively, is also a very useful feature."
"We run a containerized microservices environment. Being able to set up streams and search for errors and anomalies across hundreds of containers is why a log aggregation platform like Graylog is valuable to us."
"Graylog's search functionality, alerting functionality, user management, and dashboards are useful."
"Message forwarding through the in-built module."
 

Cons

"I would like the process of retrieving archived data and viewing it in Kibana to be simplified."
"The interface could be more user friendly because it is sometimes hard to deal with."
"Better integration with third-party APMs would be really good."
"I would like more ways to manage permissions and restrict access to certain users."
"Authentication is not a default in Kibana. We need to have another tool to have authentication and authorization. These two should be part of Kibana."
"It is difficult to anticipate and understand the space utilization, so more clarity there would be great."
"Email notification should be done the same way as Logentries does it."
"Elastic Security consumes a lot of resources, requiring a substantial deployment setup."
"There should be some user groups and an auto sign-in feature.​"
"Graylog can improve the index rotation as it's quite a complex solution."
"I hope to see improvements in Graylog for more interactivity, user-friendliness, and creating alerts. The initial setup is complex."
"Since container orchestration systems are popular and Graylog fits the niche well, perhaps they could officially support running in docker containers on Kubernetes as a StatefulSet as a use case. That way, the declarative nature of Kubernetes config files would document their best case deployment scenario-"
"Graylog could improve the process of creating rules. We have to create them manually by doing parses and applying them. Other SIEM solutions have basic rules and you can create and get more events of interest."
"With technical support, you are on your own without an enterprise license."
"Elasticsearch recommendations for tuning could be better. Graylog doesn't have direct support for running the system inside of Kubernetes, so it can be challenging to fill in the gaps and set up containers in a way that is both performant and stable."
"Graylog needs to improve their authentication. Also, the fact that Graylog displays logs from the top down is just ridiculous."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"Elastic Security is free to use."
"This is an open-source product, so there are no costs."
"The solution is free."
"The solution is not expensive and costs around ten dollars a month."
"Affordable but with additional costs"
"The price is reasonable. It probably costs the same as ArcSight and LogRhythm SIEM. FortiSIEM might cost less than Elastic Security. There are no hidden or additional costs."
"We are using the free, open-source version of this solution."
"The pricing is in the middle. I think it is not an expensive experience if we compare it with big names, for example, QRadar, and also Oxide. I think Elastic Security is quite cheap. I would rate the pricing of this solution a five out of ten."
"It's an open-source solution that can be used free of charge."
"Having paid official support is wise for projects."
"We are using the free version of the product. However, the paid version is expensive."
"We're using the Community edition."
"I am using a community edition. I have not looked at the enterprise offering from Graylog."
"Graylog is a free open-source solution. The free version has a capacity limitation of 2 GB daily, if you want to go above this you have to purchase a license."
"I use the free version of Graylog."
"Consider Enterprise support if you have atypical needs or setup requirements.​"
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Computer Software Company
16%
Government
10%
Financial Services Firm
10%
University
7%
Computer Software Company
17%
Comms Service Provider
10%
Government
8%
Educational Organization
7%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
 

Questions from the Community

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.
What do you like most about Graylog?
The product is scalable. The solution is stable.
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Graylog?
We are using the free version of the product. However, the paid version is expensive.
What needs improvement with Graylog?
When it comes to configuring the processing pipeline, writing the rules can be very tedious, especially since the documentation isn't extensive on how the functions provided for these rules work. P...
 

Also Known As

Elastic SIEM, ELK Logstash
Graylog2
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Texas A&M, U.S. Air Force, NuScale Power, Martin's Point Health Care
Blue Cross Blue Shield, eBay, Cisco, LinkedIn, SAP, King.com, Twilio, Deutsche Presse-Agentur
Find out what your peers are saying about Elastic Security vs. Graylog and other solutions. Updated: January 2025.
838,640 professionals have used our research since 2012.