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Elastic Stack vs syslog-ng comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Nov 18, 2024

Review summaries and opinions

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

Customer Service

No sentiment score available
Elastic Stack's customer service is mixed, with valued expertise but slow responses, prompting reliance on community and forums.
No sentiment score available
 

Room For Improvement

No sentiment score available
Elastic Stack struggles with dashboard implementation, integration issues, licensing concerns, and needs improvements in search, AI, and documentation.
No sentiment score available
Syslog-ng in a SIEM context needs better filtering, skilled users, improved logging, Kafka integration, and enhanced observability.
Elastic Stack needs more features similar to other SIEM tools such as Sentinel.
 

Scalability Issues

Sentiment score
4.0
Elastic Stack is praised for scalability and log handling, though manual setup and performance vary across teams.
No sentiment score available
The scalability is rated as four out of ten as it lacks auto detect and auto deploy features.
 

Setup Cost

No sentiment score available
Elastic Stack offers varied pricing with free and licensed options, considered competitive against IBM QRadar SIEM and others.
No sentiment score available
We use Elastic Stack's open source version, so it is free for us.
 

Stability Issues

Sentiment score
5.0
Elastic Stack's stability receives mixed reviews, influenced by server quality and company size, with ratings ranging from three to nine.
No sentiment score available
Users praise syslog-ng for stable, high-capacity performance, rating it nine out of ten despite external storage issues.
The stability of the solution is rated as three or four out of ten.
 

Valuable Features

No sentiment score available
Elastic Stack offers seamless deployment, real-time monitoring, robust search, security, machine learning, and easy integration for diverse systems.
No sentiment score available
Syslog-ng enhances log management with extraction, storage, real-time monitoring, alerts, and compound search, aiding efficient incident tracking.
 

Categories and Ranking

Elastic Stack
Ranking in Log Management
12th
Average Rating
7.8
Reviews Sentiment
6.0
Number of Reviews
15
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
syslog-ng
Ranking in Log Management
14th
Average Rating
8.6
Reviews Sentiment
6.3
Number of Reviews
5
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
 

Mindshare comparison

As of November 2024, in the Log Management category, the mindshare of Elastic Stack is 3.5%, up from 0.2% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of syslog-ng is 3.0%, up from 2.1% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Log Management
 

Featured Reviews

Mahesh Ramichetty - PeerSpot reviewer
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.
RyanVargas - PeerSpot reviewer
It's a user-friendly open-source solution that can replace or augment a commercial product in some cases
I rate syslog-ng 10 out of 10. It's free and easy to use. It has built-in tools that help us index the various logs sent to it. It's a solid log product. If you're looking for a SIEM solution, syslog-ng will work as a stopgap measure at beginning of the project. It can also work as an injector for a true SIEM solution. You can send all the logs to syslog-ng and forward all the data to the SIEM solution after you've cleaned up the data and got the pertinent information. It's a good front end for a commercial SIEM solution, which becomes more expensive as you load more data into it. I would highly recommend syslog-ng for that use case. However, if you lack the expertise, you might need to go with a cloud-based SIEM instead. You need some in-house expertise or an outside consultant to manage it and set it up.
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Computer Software Company
14%
Financial Services Firm
12%
Government
9%
Comms Service Provider
9%
Computer Software Company
14%
Government
13%
Financial Services Firm
8%
University
7%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
No data available
 

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?
I rate the product’s pricing as five out of ten, where one is cheap, and ten is expensive.
What needs improvement with Elastic Stack?
There could be better documentation. They should improve to capture more data because we have to migrate to another vendor called Wazuh, which provides a full-fledged capability compared to Elastic.
What do you like most about syslog-ng?
For us, the most valuable feature is the use of compound search for searching logs at a specific time, by a specific user, or specific behavior.
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for syslog-ng?
The pricing is in the middle. I would rate the pricing a six out of ten, with one being expensive and ten being cheap.
What needs improvement with syslog-ng?
There is room for improvement in terms of observability. Additionally, a possible new feature could be Kafka integration.
 

Comparisons

 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Information Not Available
Tecnocom, University of Victoria, University of Exeter, Datapath
Find out what your peers are saying about Elastic Stack vs. syslog-ng and other solutions. Updated: October 2024.
816,406 professionals have used our research since 2012.