Elastic Stack vs Graylog comparison

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Elastic Stack

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Executive SummaryUpdated on Oct 9, 2024

Graylog and Elastic Stack compete in the data analysis and IT infrastructure management sector. Elastic Stack appears to have the upper hand due to its scalability and adaptability, making it a more comprehensive solution for extensive data analysis needs.

Features:Graylog provides real-time alerting, straightforward configuration, and intuitive navigation, which cater to smaller-scale deployments effectively. Elastic Stack offers comprehensive search capabilities, extensive visualization options, and scalability that enable detailed insights into larger data sets.

Room for Improvement:Graylog users suggest enhancing its data visualization tools, integrations with third-party applications, and expanding its feature set to accommodate larger deployments. Elastic Stack could improve by streamlining its complex setup process, reducing the steep learning curve, and offering better documentation to simplify user onboarding.

Ease of Deployment and Customer Service:Graylog is highly regarded for quick setup times and effective support services. Elastic Stack, although challenging to deploy due to complexity, benefits from an active community and extensive resources, partially offsetting limited direct customer service.

Pricing and ROI:Graylog offers a cost-effective solution with lower setup costs, providing satisfactory ROI for its core functionalities. Elastic Stack, priced at a premium, delivers higher returns for enterprises when fully utilizing its advanced analytics and visualization features.

To learn more, read our detailed Elastic Stack vs. Graylog Report (Updated: January 2025).

Elastic Stack vs. Graylog

January 2025

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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 Stack

Ranking in Log Management

12th

Average Rating

7.8

Reviews Sentiment

6.0

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

No ranking in other categories

Graylog

Ranking in Log Management

16th

Average Rating

8.0

Reviews Sentiment

6.7

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

No ranking in other categories

Mindshare comparison

As of February 2025, in the Log Management category, the mindshare of Elastic Stack is 4.5%, up from 0.5% 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

Mahesh Ramichetty

Senior Solution Architect at a consultancy with 11-50 employees

A stable product that can be fine-tuned easily

Elastic Stack provides all sorts of things, so it provides Elasticsearch for the transformations into a specific format, and pipelines can be defined for distributed applications along with the logs that come in the JSON format, which is clean. It's only the enhancements or the security that the product lacks and needs to be enhanced. I don't think further enhancement of the features needs to be added to the solution because it is already equivalent to a monitoring or alerting system, like Dynatrace and other tools. Some developments in the area of AI, which Elastic Stack is currently working on, should be fine in terms of the enhancements. Whenever some critical issue happens, there should be some kind of a co-pilot that helps resolve the issue. The tool should learn from its own previous issues. If you take Databricks, you see that it provides a co-pilot for Python, so a similar kind of development in Elastic Stack would be a real asset for it. AI would be considered a good way to enable the tool further for more in 2024, and even a beta launch would be helpful. If you take any sort of cloud-native monitoring product, like Azure Monitor or AWS CloudWatch, you see that such products don't provide much of the insights. If you go with Azure Monitor for any sort of ML models to be there, Sentinel needs to be used from Azure, which is very costly. AI-enablement would be a big improvement in Elastic Stack. Everyone in the monitoring space, including Dynatrace and New Relic, has lately been discussing AI, but it doesn't seem to be coming out. If there is room for an ML model in Elastic Stack, then it would be good.

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Andrey Mostovykh

Senior Data Architect at a non-tech company with 201-500 employees

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.

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Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"The tool is huge, and it performs brilliantly. I tested it for malware, and within two weeks of launching, the product alerted me about a network intrusion. This was a tough test for it, but it performed admirably. The alerting system is excellent, and searching through logs is incredibly efficient. What's impressive is that all three products or options are integrated into one solution. This means I don't need separate logging, monitoring, or antivirus solutions."

"It is a very scalable solution...I didn't face any problem with this scalability part of the solution since we only have a few pieces of equipment in our company."

"The machine learning capabilities are valuable."

"The detection rules in Elastic Stack are the most valuable feature. The search capabilities are excellent and fast. As we collect logs from workstations and devices, the detection rules run on top of the logs and detect any suspicious activity, raising alerts accordingly. Integration with Elastic Stack depends on the specific integration. Elastic provides some bridging integrations that make it easy, but require custom integration. Most integrations are simple, but customization can be challenging because we need to do some parsing. There's something called Elastic Common Schema, and we need to parse the source logs to match this schema, which can be a bit challenging."

"Elastic Stack is mainly used to monitor servers and APIs. It helps ensure the software's availability and sends notifications at the right time so the system is not down for a long time. The tool's stability and advanced features, such as anomaly detection, are the most valuable features. The benefit of using it is real-time monitoring."

"We can group a lot of alarms into one automation alarm supervision. The alarm supervision allows us to put the alarm under the same. It's quite helpful for us. We used that to suppress our alarms. Elastic already provides the agent. It is easy to integrate Elastic Stack with other devices and vendors."

"I have experienced a return on investment from the use of the solution."

"I think the ecosystem is well supported, and for logs, it was faster compared to our previous previous log management."

More Elastic Stack pros

"The ability to write custom alerts is key to information security and compliance."

"The product is scalable. The solution is stable."

"It has data adapters and lookup tables that utilize HTTP calls to APIs."

"We have scaled from a single machine installation (a VM with a Graylog + ES + MongoDB) to (2 Graylog + 2 ES + 3 MongoDB). This was done smoothly with a minimal impact on logging."

"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."

"UDP is a fast and lightweight protocol, perfect for sending large volumes of logs with minimal overhead."

"Storing logs in Elasticsearch means log retrieval is extremely fast, and full text search is available by default."

"Graylog is very handy."

More Graylog pros

Cons

"It should facilitate easier manual integration."

"AI-enablement would be a big improvement in Elastic Stack...If there is room for an ML model in Elastic Stack, then it would be good."

"The stability of the solution is rated as three or four out of ten as we frequently encounter issues."

"Elastic Stack's search capabilities can be challenging, especially when searching for precise data from past years, such as two or ten years ago. Its indexing performance for exact data retrieval may decrease as the data volume grows. Therefore, I believe there is room for improvement in the product's search functionality. It needs to improve its pricing as well."

"Improvements are needed in the solution in areas like SOAR and TIP, where there are certain shortcomings."

"There could be better documentation."

"The main issue related to Elastic Stack is in the area of its licensing."

"Support could be improved. The error code is not helpful. We have to ask for it or pass it on to community forums."

More Elastic Stack cons

"More customization is always useful."

"I would like to see some kind of visualization included in Graylog."

"It would be great if Graylog could provide a better Python package in order to make it easier to use for the Python community."

"Lacks sufficient documentation."

"There should be some user groups and an auto sign-in feature."

"More complex visualizations and the ability to execute custom Elasticsearch queries would be great."

"The infrastructure cost is the main issue. I like the rest. If the infrastructure costs could be lower, it would be fantastic."

"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."

More Graylog cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The product is expensive."

"Ultimately, the pricing depends upon the capacity planning that the enterprise architect does."

"I rate the solution's pricing a six out of ten."

"The pricing is reasonable."

"We are using the open-source community version of the product."

"It depends on the specifics, but generally, Elastic is economical for certain use cases."

"I used the open-source version of Elastic Stack, because of which I did not have to pay anything."

"If I compare Elastic Stack to the other products in the market, I would say that the tool is available at a competitive price."

"Having paid official support is wise for projects."

"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."

"It's an open-source solution that can be used free of charge."

"We're using the Community edition."

"You get a lot out-of-the-box with the non-enterprise version, so give it a try first."

"We are using the free version of the product. However, the paid version is expensive."

"I use the free version of Graylog."

"Consider Enterprise support if you have atypical needs or setup requirements."

More Graylog pricing and cost advice

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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Computer Software Company

14%

Financial Services Firm

12%

Comms Service Provider

Manufacturing Company

Computer Software Company

17%

Comms Service Provider

10%

Government

Educational Organization

Company Size

By reviewers

Large Enterprise

Midsize Enterprise

Small Business

Questions from the Community

What do you like most about Elastic Stack?

The tool is huge, and it performs brilliantly. I tested it for malware, and within two weeks of launching, the product alerted me about a network intrusion. This was a tough test for it, but it per...

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Elastic Stack?

We use Elastic Stack's open source version, so it is free for us.

What needs improvement with Elastic Stack?

Elastic Stack needs more features similar to other SIEM tools such as Sentinel or the ability to create automations. Additionally, it should facilitate easier manual integration.

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, ...

Security Onion vs Elastic Stack

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Compared 4% of the time

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Compared 44% of the time

Wazuh vs Graylog

Compared 22% of the time

syslog-ng vs Graylog

Compared 10% of the time

Security Onion vs Graylog

Compared 4% of the time

Fortinet FortiAnalyzer vs Graylog

Compared 3% of the time

More Graylog Competitors

Product Reports

Download Elastic Stack product report

Elastic Stack

February 2025

Download Graylog product report

January 2025

Also Known As

No data available

Graylog2

Overview

Elastic Stack is a comprehensive tool for log management, observability, indexing, and security, widely adopted for managing logs, alert creation, SIEM, SOC, and threat analysis. It integrates with CloudStrike and Endpoint Security, enhancing search capabilities and Application Performance Monitoring.

Elastic Stack offers powerful solutions for logging, data storage, and visualization with Kibana. It allows MSSPs to efficiently manage security and assists companies with data analysis. It's known for its easy implementation, scalability, real-time monitoring, and extensive integrations. The open-source nature and community support add significant value, making it a popular choice across industries. While highly capable, there is a need for enhancement in dashboard implementation, data integration, and certain advanced features. Licensing, compatibility, and cost-related improvements can further elevate its efficacy.

What are the key features of Elastic Stack?

Powerful Search Capabilities: Offers robust, efficient searching across vast datasets
Scalability: Easily handles large volumes of data
Anomaly Detection: Identifies irregular patterns in data
Machine Learning: Enhances data analysis with intelligent insights
Real-Time Monitoring: Provides up-to-date monitoring of applications and systems
Extensive Integration: Supports diverse tools and solutions

What benefits should users consider?

Ease of Implementation: Quick setup and integration into existing systems
Robust Security: Comprehensive monitoring and analysis capabilities
Community Support: Ongoing improvements and guidance from a dedicated community
Hybrid Deployment: Flexibility in using both cloud and on-premise solutions

In healthcare, Elastic Stack enhances database search capabilities, aiding in patient record management and data retrieval. Managed Security Service Providers use it for comprehensive security management, integrating it with tools like firewalls and authentication systems. Companies benefit from its application in Application Performance Monitoring and its flexibility in adapting to hybrid environments.

Elastic

Graylog is purpose-built to deliver the best log collection, storage, enrichment, and analysis. Graylog is:

Considerably faster analysis speeds.
More robust and easier-to-use analysis platform.
Simpler administration and infrastructure management.
Lower cost than alternatives.
Full-scale customer service.
No expensive training or tool experts required.

Sample Customers

Information Not Available

Blue Cross Blue Shield, eBay, Cisco, LinkedIn, SAP, King.com, Twilio, Deutsche Presse-Agentur