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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
5th
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
18th
Average Rating
8.0
Reviews Sentiment
7.0
Number of Reviews
18
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
 

Mindshare comparison

As of January 2025, in the Log Management category, the mindshare of Elastic Security is 4.5%, down from 7.5% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Graylog is 6.6%, up from 5.7% 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

"The most valuable features are the speed, detail, and visualization. It has the latest standards."
"The tool's functionality is good for overall security and incident response times."
"Elastic Security is very customizable, and the dashboards are very easy to build."
"Elastic Security offers advanced features such as machine learning and integration with ChatGPT."
"The visualization is very good."
"Elastic has a lot of beats, such as Winlogbeat and Filebeat. Beats are the agents that have to be installed on the terminals to send the data. When we install beats or Elastic agents on every terminal, they don't overload the terminals. In other SIEM solutions such as Splunk or QRadar, when beats or agents are installed on endpoints, they are very heavy for the terminals. They consume a lot of power of the terminals, whereas Elastic agents hardly consume any power and don't overload the terminals."
"The cost is reasonable. It's not overly pricey."
"I like the indexing of the logs."
"The product is scalable. The solution is stable."
"I am very proud of how very stable the solution is."
"Everything stands out as valuable, including the fact that I can quantify and qualify the logs, create pipelines and process the logs in any way I like, and create charts or data maps."
"I like the correlation and the alerting."
"This had increased productivity for the dev and support teams, because we are directly notifying them."
"The build is stable and requires little maintenance, even compared to some extremely expensive products."
"The best feature of Graylog is the Elasticsearch integration. We can integrate and we can run filters, such as an event of interest, and those logs we can send to any SIEM tool or as an analytic. Additionally, there are clear and well-documented implementation instructions on their website to follow if needed."
"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."
 

Cons

"The tool should improve its scalability."
"Elastic Security could improve the documentation. It would help if they were more simple and clean."
"There are connectors to gather logs for Windows PCs and Linux PCs, but if we have to get the logs from Syslog then we have to do it manually, and this should be automated."
"We had issues with scalability. Logstash was not scaling and aggregation was getting delayed. We moved to Fluentd making our stack from ELK to EFK."
"Upgrades currently released as stacks when it should be a plugin or an extension to save removal and reinstallation."
"There isn't really a very good user experience. You need a lot of training."
"If the documentation were improved and made more clear for beginners, or even professionals, then we would be more attracted to this solution."
"It could use maybe a little more on the Linux side."
"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."
"It would be great if Graylog could provide a better Python package in order to make it easier to use for the Python community."
"The infrastructure cost is the main issue. I like the rest. If the infrastructure costs could be lower, it would be fantastic."
"Graylog can improve the index rotation as it's quite a complex solution."
"Graylog needs to improve their authentication. Also, the fact that Graylog displays logs from the top down is just ridiculous."
"The biggest problem is the collector application, as we wanted to avoid using Graylog Collector Sidecar due to its architecture."
"I hope to see improvements in Graylog for more interactivity, user-friendliness, and creating alerts. The initial setup is complex."
"With technical support, you are on your own without an enterprise license."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"We use the open-source version, so there is no charge for this solution."
"It's a monthly cost with Elastic SIEM, but I am not sure of the exact cost."
"Its price is fine. Its licensing works on a yearly basis. We have to renew the license every year. I also have a good experience with Darktrace. When we buy Darktrace, we get training free of cost, which is not there in Elastic. We have to pay extra for training. There is certainly room for improvement."
"The tool's pricing is flexible and comes at unit cost. You don't have to pay for everything."
"Elastic Stack is an open-source tool. You don't have to pay anything for the components."
"The base product is open-source but if you need advanced security features then you need to pay for the subscription. Elastic Security's price is reasonable in some cases and in other cases it's not."
"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."
"The licensing cost of Elastic Security is based on the daily ingestion rate. I can't recall the exact figure, but for 10GB of log action daily, it would cost around $20,000."
"It's an open-source solution that can be used free of charge."
"Having paid official support is wise for projects."
"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."
"If you want something that works and do not have the money for Splunk or QRadar, take Graylog.​​"
"I am using a community edition. I have not looked at the enterprise offering from Graylog."
"I use the free version of Graylog."
"We are using the free version of the product. However, the paid version is expensive."
"​You get a lot out-of-the-box with the non-enterprise version, so give it a try first."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Computer Software Company
16%
Government
10%
Financial Services Firm
9%
University
7%
Computer Software Company
17%
Comms Service Provider
9%
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?
Since it's a free tool, I don't have much to say. Troubleshooting is important to me. The initial setup is complex. I hope to see improvements in Graylog for more interactivity, user-friendliness, ...
 

Also Known As

Elastic SIEM, ELK Logstash
Graylog2
 

Learn More

 

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.
831,158 professionals have used our research since 2012.