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Grafana Loki vs Graylog comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Apr 20, 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

Grafana Loki
Ranking in Log Management
4th
Average Rating
8.2
Reviews Sentiment
8.0
Number of Reviews
17
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
Graylog
Ranking in Log Management
16th
Average Rating
8.0
Reviews Sentiment
6.9
Number of Reviews
20
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
 

Mindshare comparison

As of April 2025, in the Log Management category, the mindshare of Grafana Loki is 8.5%, up from 3.0% 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

CarlosPimentel - PeerSpot reviewer
Efficient log filtering enhances quick network troubleshooting
We use Grafana Loki for various verticals including manufacturing, finance, health, and aerospatial sectors. It primarily helps in monitoring security and access to devices. Grafana dashboards are used to track access success and failure and audit commands issued on devices Loki significantly…
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

"The most valuable feature is the capability to set up alerts, which becomes necessary when we need to receive notifications for specific events."
"Loki significantly saves time in troubleshooting by quickly pinpointing network issues."
"The tool can be used in multi-cluster environments."
"The most valuable feature of Grafana Loki is the dashboards which are really simple to create."
"The log collection feature is good and the solution is easily understandable. v"
"The most valuable features of the solution stem from the fact that it is an open-source tool that is stable and flexible."
"Grafana agent is very lightweight and does not cost significant resources of our cluster."
"The most valuable feature of the solution is the tool's GUI. The solution's GUI is very user-friendly."
"It is used as a log manager/SIEM. It provides visibility into the infrastructure and security related events."
"The build is stable and requires little maintenance, even compared to some extremely expensive products."
"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."
"Graylog is valuable because it bridges technical knowledge to non-technical teams, presenting complex backend processes in a simple timeline."
"The product is scalable. The solution is stable."
"One of the most valuable features is that you are able to do a very detailed search through the log messages in the overview."
"Graylog's search functionality, alerting functionality, user management, and dashboards are useful."
"Graylog is very handy."
 

Cons

"We encountered certain limitations when it came to alerting, particularly when dealing with specific data sources."
"In Grafana Loki, the creation of metrics is not so easy, making it an area that could be made easier."
"The platform's stability needs improvement."
"My main concern is the recommended production-grade setup. They suggest using tools like Tanka or Jsonnet. They should simplify the process to increase adoption."
"The Docker container partition feature needs improvement as they do not reuse the space and goes into a pending state."
"The correlation of requests is not simple in Grafana Loki and can be improved."
"I do not see any areas for improvement at the moment."
"The solution has shortcomings regarding security monitoring-oriented features that need improvement."
"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."
"Graylog can improve the index rotation as it's quite a complex solution."
"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 complex visualizations and the ability to execute custom Elasticsearch queries would be great."
"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."
"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."
"Lacks sufficient documentation."
"More customization is always useful."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The solution is open source."
"We use a free version."
"My company doesn't need to pay for the licensing cost of the solution."
"Since we are using the open-source version of Grafana Loki, we are not paying anything for the solution."
"You can use the free version of Grafana Loki on-premises."
"Grafana Loki is an open-source solution."
"I use the open-source version of the product."
"Grafana Loki is a free, open-source solution."
"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."
"I am using a community edition. I have not looked at the enterprise offering from Graylog."
"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."
"We're using the Community edition."
"If you want something that works and do not have the money for Splunk or QRadar, take Graylog.​​"
"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 use the free version of Graylog."
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Top Industries

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

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
 

Questions from the Community

What do you like most about Grafana Loki?
We are using Grafana Loki as a database for real-time metrics.
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Grafana Loki?
We use the open-source version of Loki. The cloud version is competitively priced compared to other market solutions.
What needs improvement with Grafana Loki?
It would be beneficial if Loki could directly access Windows Server logs or events directly from the servers.
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...
 

Comparisons

 

Also Known As

No data available
Graylog2
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Information Not Available
Blue Cross Blue Shield, eBay, Cisco, LinkedIn, SAP, King.com, Twilio, Deutsche Presse-Agentur
Find out what your peers are saying about Grafana Loki vs. Graylog and other solutions. Updated: April 2025.
849,190 professionals have used our research since 2012.