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Elastic Security vs Graylog Enterprise comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Dec 14, 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
8th
Average Rating
7.8
Reviews Sentiment
6.8
Number of Reviews
66
Ranking in other categories
Security Information and Event Management (SIEM) (5th), Endpoint Detection and Response (EDR) (15th), Security Orchestration Automation and Response (SOAR) (5th), Extended Detection and Response (XDR) (8th)
Graylog Enterprise
Ranking in Log Management
9th
Average Rating
8.0
Reviews Sentiment
6.1
Number of Reviews
22
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
 

Mindshare comparison

As of January 2026, in the Log Management category, the mindshare of Elastic Security is 2.9%, down from 4.1% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Graylog Enterprise is 5.0%, down from 6.2% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Log Management Market Share Distribution
ProductMarket Share (%)
Elastic Security2.9%
Graylog Enterprise5.0%
Other92.1%
Log Management
 

Featured Reviews

Laurentiu Popescu - PeerSpot reviewer
Chief Product Officer at ClusterPower
Has improved threat detection with deep log analysis and streamlined investigation workflows
The most useful features I find in Elastic Security are the forensic ones that allow us to carry deeper analysis into the logs for in-depth investigations, and the dashboards, with the reporting dashboard being quite user-friendly. Elastic Security is quite good at identifying threats, as it is part of the deep investigation tool that I mentioned before. Unless we need to look further into a certain log, we can carry out a deeper analysis and forensics on those particular logs. I can assess the impact of Elastic Security's real-time data analysis on our threat response efficiency as working pretty good. We are looking for real-time analysis because we have a continuous inflow of logs from different sources: from our cloud, from Active Directory, from our network. So it works pretty well.
reviewer2704128 - PeerSpot reviewer
Head of Cyber Security & CTO at a tech services company with 51-200 employees
Robust event correlation enhances operations, yet integration scope can broaden for seamless data handling
The features and capabilities of Graylog that we have found most valuable are related to its basis on open search, which was ElasticSearch. We appreciate being able to integrate custom feeds and do custom parsers, and to be able to do some of the correlation on it. That all works effectively. The Graylog features that have proven to be most beneficial for our data analysis in particular are that we tend to use it as a big data store, so we have the correlation rules that, if something matches under certain conditions, it raises an alarm. We use it for investigating problems and problem management. We throw all the information at it, we have it alerting for certain conditions, but generally we use it for deep diving into issues as needed.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"ELK Logstash is easy and fast, at least for the initial setup with the out of box uses."
"Elastic Security actually has a very good cost-benefit ratio compared to other vendors in the market."
"ELK is open-source, and it will give you the framework you need to build everything from scratch."
"The solution has a good community surrounding it for lots of helpful documentation for troubleshooting purposes."
"The visualization is very good."
"The most valuable thing is that this solution is widely used for work management and research. It's easy to jump into the security use case with the same technology."
"The most valuable features are the speed, detail, and visualization. It has the latest standards."
"The product has huge integration varieties available."
"Graylog's search functionality, alerting functionality, user management, and dashboards are useful."
"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."
"This had increased productivity for the dev and support teams, because we are directly notifying them."
"Storing logs in Elasticsearch means log retrieval is extremely fast, and full text search is available by default."
"The ability to write custom alerts is key to information security and compliance."
"The build is stable and requires little maintenance, even compared to some extremely expensive products."
"It has data adapters and lookup tables that utilize HTTP calls to APIs."
"Message forwarding through the in-built module."
 

Cons

"I do not have any specific recommendations for improvements in Elastic Security, but I feel that the AI module should get more mature."
"If the documentation were improved and made more clear for beginners, or even professionals, then we would be more attracted to this solution."
"The interface could be more user friendly because it is sometimes hard to deal with."
"Elastic Security could improve the documentation. It would help if they were more simple and clean."
"The setup process is complex. You need a solid working knowledge of networking, operating systems, and a little programming."
"The process of designing dashboards is a little cumbersome in Kibana. Unless you are an expert, you will not be able to use it. The process should be pretty straightforward. The authentication feature is what we are looking for. We would love to have a central authentication system in the open-source edition without the need for a license or an enterprise license. If they can give at least a simple authentication system within a company. In a large organization, authentication is very essential for security because logs can contain a lot of confidential data. Therefore, an authentication feature for who accesses it should be there."
"It's a little bit of a learning curve to understand the logic of searching for things and trying to find what you're looking for in Elastic Security."
"We set up a cron job to delete old logs so that we wouldn't hit a disk space issue. Such a feature should be available in the UI, where old logs can be deleted automatically. (Don’t know if this feature is already there)."
"I would like to see a date and time in the Graylog Grok patterns so that I can save time when searching for a log. I like how the streams and the search query work, but adding a date and time will allow me to pull out a log in a milli-second."
"I would like to see some kind of visualization included in Graylog."
"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."
"Its scalability gets complicated when we have to update or edit multiple nodes."
"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."
"Over six months, I had two similar issues where searches were performed on field "messages". It exhausted all the memory of the ES node causing an ES crash and a Graylog halt."
"The infrastructure cost is the main issue. I like the rest. If the infrastructure costs could be lower, it would be fantastic."
"We ran into problems with Elasticsearch throwing a circuit-breaking exception due to field data size being too large. It turned out that the heap size directly impacted this size in a high-throughput environment, causing unexplained instability in Graylog. We were able to troubleshoot on the Elasticsearch size, but we should have been able to reference some minimum requirements for Graylog to know that our settings weren't sufficient."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"It is easy to deploy, easy to use, and you get everything you need to become operational with it, and have nothing further to pay unless you want the OLED plugin."
"When compared to other products, the price is average or on the low side."
"The tool's pricing is flexible and comes at unit cost. You don't have to pay for everything."
"The product offers an amazing pricing structure. Price-wise, the product is very competitive."
"We are using the free, open-source version of this solution."
"Elastic Stack is an open-source tool. You don't have to pay anything for the components."
"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."
"The solution is free."
"It's open source and free. They have a paid version, but we never looked into that because we never needed the features of the paid version."
"Having paid official support is wise for projects."
"If you want something that works and do not have the money for Splunk or QRadar, take Graylog.​​"
"I use the free version of Graylog."
"We're using the Community edition."
"It's an open-source solution that can be used free of charge."
"​You get a lot out-of-the-box with the non-enterprise version, so give it a try first."
"I am using a community edition. I have not looked at the enterprise offering from Graylog."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Computer Software Company
13%
Government
9%
Comms Service Provider
8%
Manufacturing Company
7%
Computer Software Company
15%
Comms Service Provider
10%
University
8%
Government
8%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business40
Midsize Enterprise11
Large Enterprise15
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business9
Midsize Enterprise5
Large Enterprise8
 

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?
I am satisfied with the pricing, setup cost, and licensing cost. It is a pure 10.
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?
I am not familiar with the pricing details of Graylog, as I was not responsible for that aspect. It was determined that we didn't need an enterprise plan, which is more suited for clients with less...
What needs improvement with Graylog?
An improvement I would suggest is in Graylog's user interface, such as allowing for font size adjustments. A potential enhancement could be the integration with Ollama to run large language models ...
 

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 Enterprise and other solutions. Updated: December 2025.
879,455 professionals have used our research since 2012.