Try our new research platform with insights from 80,000+ expert users

Fortinet FortiAnalyzer 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

Fortinet FortiAnalyzer
Ranking in Log Management
8th
Average Rating
8.0
Reviews Sentiment
7.6
Number of Reviews
93
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
19
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
 

Mindshare comparison

As of April 2025, in the Log Management category, the mindshare of Fortinet FortiAnalyzer is 2.0%, down from 3.1% 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

Boaz Katabazi - PeerSpot reviewer
Enables flexible and comprehensive reporting across all syslog-enabled devices
I mainly use it for reporting. It also integrates other security solutions around. It can report onto anything that has a syslog on the network. It doesn't have to be a Fortinet product. It integrates within FortiGate and you can find the reports there. It's a very flexible and rich tool, providing custom reports along with default reports.
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

"Initial setup is ok."
"The solution is very easy to deploy."
"FortiAnalyzer's best feature is centralized log analysis. It's based on SQL database, so I can fully customize my report, chart-wise and log-wise, and can create as many reports as I want without any limit."
"This makes it easy to configure and use. I would recommend it to anyone."
"This solution offers one view of incident management which has been the most valuable feature."
"FortiAnalyzer has a robust ability to find a compromised host on your network, and when you identify a compromised host, you can address it."
"FortiAnalyzer provides a very suitable solution for FortiGate firewall since they come from the same vendor, so the integration is very strong."
"Log collection is the most valuable. The UI looks great. It has a very good look and feel. We don't have the need to use solid state drives. We use mechanic drives, and we don't see any performance issues, so basically, it is doing fine."
"This had increased productivity for the dev and support teams, because we are directly notifying them."
"I like the correlation and the alerting."
"It is used as a log manager/SIEM. It provides visibility into the infrastructure and security related events."
"We run a containerized microservices environment. Being able to set up streams and search for errors and anomalies across hundreds of containers is why a log aggregation platform like Graylog is valuable to us."
"I am very proud of how very stable the solution is."
"Graylog's search functionality, alerting functionality, user management, and dashboards are useful."
"One of the most valuable features is that you are able to do a very detailed search through the log messages in the overview."
"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."
 

Cons

"The product should be integrated with other third-party solutions for context exchange."
"Fortinet FortiAnalyzer needs to improve its pricing flexibility."
"The user interface could be a bit more user-friendly."
"Fortinet FortiAnalyzer could improve by having better integration with other vendors."
"The support could be better for Fortinet FortiAnalyzer here in Mexico."
"The technical support is not very reliable."
"Fortinet FortiAnalyzer could improve the user interface, and the experience of users receiving the reports and tracking could be better."
"From my point of view, at this time, the solution isn't lacking any features or functionalities."
"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-"
"There should be some user groups and an auto sign-in feature.​"
"Dashboards, stream alerts and parsing could be improved."
"I hope to see improvements in Graylog for more interactivity, user-friendliness, and creating alerts. The initial setup is complex."
"It would be great if Graylog could provide a better Python package in order to make it easier to use for the Python community."
"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."
"More customization is always useful."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"When you compare with other firewall vendors, FortiAnalyzer is quite competitive in pricing."
"The program is expensive."
"The hardware has a one-time cost and maintenance is paid by annual subscription."
"The number of licenses required directly corresponds with the number of devices connected."
"We pay approximately $11,000 for a three-year license to use Fortinet FortiAnalyzer. When we compared the price of this solution to others it is not expensive. Palo Alto is a more expensive solution."
"I rate Fortinet FortiAnalyzer's pricing as five out of ten."
"Its price is okay for us. Fortinet products are cheaper than other solutions."
"The cost of the license is high."
"I am using a community edition. I have not looked at the enterprise offering from Graylog."
"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."
"​You get a lot out-of-the-box with the non-enterprise version, so give it a try first."
"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."
"I use the free version of Graylog."
"It's an open-source solution that can be used free of charge."
"Consider Enterprise support if you have atypical needs or setup requirements.​"
"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."
report
Use our free recommendation engine to learn which Log Management solutions are best for your needs.
844,944 professionals have used our research since 2012.
 

Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Computer Software Company
17%
Financial Services Firm
8%
Government
8%
Manufacturing Company
8%
Computer Software Company
17%
Comms Service Provider
10%
Government
8%
University
7%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
 

Questions from the Community

What do you like most about Fortinet FortiAnalyzer?
The reporting features, which offer customization, real-time insights, and compliance support, are particularly noteworthy aspects.
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Fortinet FortiAnalyzer?
I am a technical engineer, so I am not privy to pricing details.
What needs improvement with Fortinet FortiAnalyzer?
Sometimes, there is a problem with CPU consumption, where one process consumes 100%, and I need to restart FortiAnalyzer to fix this. I am not familiar with the processes of scalability.
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 documentation isn't extensive on how the functions provided for these rules work. P...
 

Also Known As

No data available
Graylog2
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

General Directorate of Information Technology
Blue Cross Blue Shield, eBay, Cisco, LinkedIn, SAP, King.com, Twilio, Deutsche Presse-Agentur
Find out what your peers are saying about Fortinet FortiAnalyzer vs. Graylog and other solutions. Updated: March 2025.
844,944 professionals have used our research since 2012.