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Elastic Security vs Graylog vs LogRhythm SIEM comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive Summary

Review summaries and opinions

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

Mindshare comparison

As of April 2025, in the Log Management category, the mindshare of Elastic Security is 3.5%, down from 6.7% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Graylog is 6.6%, up from 5.7% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of LogRhythm SIEM is 2.2%, down from 3.4% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Log Management
 

Featured Reviews

SyedAli17 - PeerSpot reviewer
Centralized monitoring improves security posture through rapid data processing
The processing part of Elastic Security ( /products/elastic-security-reviews ) is very interesting for us since we handle almost 7,000 to 8,000 alerts per minute. We require rapid processing speed for alerts and event data, and Elastic Security is very efficient at handling this level of data. Additionally, Elastic Security helps improve the security posture of Pakistan through centralized visibility and real-time processing.
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.
Mokhammad Rakhman - PeerSpot reviewer
User-friendly dashboard and machine learning capabilities improve threat hunting efficiency
LogRhythm SIEM has strong machine-learning capabilities with behavioral rules and analysis. The seamless integration for case management, along with a user-friendly dashboard user interface, makes tasks like threat hunting more efficient. Analytics and behavioral analysis help me save time with rule creation. Its scalability allows me to add components as needed. Overall, LogRhythm SIEM offers end-to-end visibility with a reasonable price.

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 feature is the search function, which allows me to go directly to the target to see the specific line a customer is searching for."
"It is very quick to react. I can set it to check anomalies or suspicious behavior every 30 seconds. It is very fast."
"The indexes allow you to get your results quickly. The filtering and log passing is the advantage of Logstash."
"We chose the product based on the ability to scan for malware using a malware behavioral model as opposed to just a traditional hash-based antivirus. Therefore, it's not as intensive."
"Elastic Security offers advanced features such as machine learning and integration with ChatGPT."
"Elastic Security is cost-effective compared to Defender and CrowdStrike."
"The visualization is very good."
"The performance is good and it is faster than IBM QRadar."
"The solution's most valuable feature is its new interface."
"Storing logs in Elasticsearch means log retrieval is extremely fast, and full text search is available by default."
"Graylog's search functionality, alerting functionality, user management, and dashboards are useful."
"The product is scalable. The solution is stable."
"Real-time UDP/GELF logging and full text-based searching."
"I am very proud of how very stable the solution is."
"This had increased productivity for the dev and support teams, because we are directly notifying them."
"Message forwarding through the in-built module."
"The Web Console is my favorite. It enables me, at a glance, to see the health of the environments."
"We take in around 750 million logs a day. We have a lot of products and that would be a lot of different panes of glass that we would have to look through otherwise. By centralizing, we can triage and take steps much more quickly than if we tried to man that many interfaces that come with the products."
"It's very easy to create the correlation rules with LogRhythm, and there are some advanced features like SIEM and UEBA, which are also very valuable."
"The dashboards in the LogRhythm SIEM really help us as a starting point. It gives us a starting point we can go to every day. We walk through several dashboards to see anomalous activity for further investigation."
"LogRhythm NextGen SIEM covers all our primary security analysis needs. It makes it easier for us to analyze threats and improves our response times. It's a versatile platform that performs queries fast compared to other SIEM solutions."
"LogRhythm does a very good job of helping SOCs manage their workflows."
"Technical support is very helpful and responsive."
"This solution has improved our organization in many different ways. The biggest benefit is being able to view all information in one dashboard instead of having to look at several different applications and dashboards. I can see information across our entire environment and every aspect of our network."
 

Cons

"The solution's query building is not that intuitive compared to other solutions."
"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."
"Their visuals and graphs need to be better."
"The biggest challenge has been related to the implementation."
"In terms of what could be improved with Elastic, in some use cases, especially on the advanced level, they are not ready made, so you'll have to write some scripts."
"Elastic Security can be a bit difficult to use if a person only has experience in SMBs with tools like Zoho. The product can also be difficult for those who have never dealt with query language."
"Continuous upgrades can be quite inconvenient. My security testing team continuously reports vulnerabilities, and we have to fix and update the versions frequently."
"The interface could be more user friendly because it is sometimes hard to deal with."
"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 a default dashboard widget that shows the topology of the clusters defined for the graylog install."
"More customization is always useful."
"More complex visualizations and the ability to execute custom Elasticsearch queries would be great."
"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."
"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-"
"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."
"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."
"The log storage capacity should be increased."
"We have run into problems with stability going through upgrade processes. Recently, we have been on the front edge of the upgrade path. When that happens we tend to run into issues either with certain functionality not working after the upgrades or stability issues because of the upgrades."
"I would really love to be able to take some of the data and not have to export it to a CSV file, so I can pull it into Excel to turn it into some other kind of graph."
"I would like to see case management become more independent from LogRhythm itself."
"One thing we have mentioned to them before is that we'd like to be able to do searches, or drill-downs, directly from an alarm. When you click it and the Inspector tab slides out, that might be a good place to be able to click the host to search for the last 24 hours. I know the search is right there but it would be even nicer to just click that and then have an option to search something there."
"NextGen SIEM has separate rules for AI, advanced intelligence, and MP rules - it would be better to have a centralized way to write the rules and create alarms."
"The initial setup is not so easy because it is quite a process."
"It should have some more message monitoring features. It can also have some free message monitoring tools."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"I can say that the product is cheaply priced."
"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 solution is not expensive and costs around ten dollars a month."
"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."
"The solution is free."
"It's a monthly cost with Elastic SIEM, but I am not sure of the exact cost."
"Compared to other products such as Dynatrace, this is one of the cheaper options."
"When compared to other products, the price is average or on the low side."
"Consider Enterprise support if you have atypical needs or setup requirements.​"
"There is an open source version and an enterprise version. I wouldn't recommend the enterprise version, but as an open source solution, it is solid and works really well."
"I use the free version of Graylog."
"I am using a community edition. I have not looked at the enterprise offering from Graylog."
"Having paid official support is wise for projects."
"We're using the Community edition."
"We are using the free version of the product. However, the paid version is expensive."
"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 don't have your staff, absolutely look into the co-pilot and factor that into your cost evaluation."
"LogRhythm's pricing and licensing is extremely competitive and it's one of the top three reasons we continue to invest in the platform."
"The support which allows more customized to the environment when we are deploying new systems is called Professional Service and is very expensive. The technical annual support and there is an annual fee."
"We did a five-year agreement. We pay close to a quarter of a million dollars for our solution."
"I would recommend that whatever sales quotes to them upfront, they will probably go up. Because they are probably going to outgrow that very quickly or once they start getting everything into it, they are going to have to move up anyway."
"We work with French-speaking African countries, and it costs more than the average SIEM solution. Also, the pricing isn't too flexible. AlienVault, Splunk, and IBM QRadar are more suitable for customers on a tight budget."
"The license cost is around $10 per MPS."
"It is a very cost-effective solution."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Computer Software Company
17%
Government
10%
Financial Services Firm
9%
Comms Service Provider
7%
Computer Software Company
18%
Comms Service Provider
10%
Government
8%
Educational Organization
7%
Educational Organization
40%
Computer Software Company
9%
Financial Services Firm
7%
Government
6%
 

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 time...
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 con...
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Elastic Security?
Since Elastic Security is community-based, it does not require significant costs. This is beneficial for SMEs as they...
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 doc...
What is the difference between log management and SIEM?
Rony, Daniel's answer is right on the money. There are many solutions for each in the market, a lot depends upon you...
What needs improvement with LogRhythm NextGen SIEM?
The SOAR capabilities need improvements as they currently require programming knowledge. A more user-friendly user in...
What do you like most about LogRhythm SIEM?
I find LogRhythm's log management capabilities to be beneficial.
 

Also Known As

Elastic SIEM, ELK Logstash
Graylog2
LogRhythm NextGen SIEM, LogRhythm, LogRhythm Threat Lifecycle Management, LogRhythm TLM
 

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
Macy's, NASA, Fujitsu, US Air Force, EY, Abbott, HD Supply, SAB Miller, UCLA, Raytheon, Amtrak, Cargill
Find out what your peers are saying about Wazuh, Splunk, Datadog and others in Log Management. Updated: March 2025.
848,716 professionals have used our research since 2012.