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Grafana Loki 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

Grafana Loki
Ranking in Log Management
5th
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
6.7
Number of Reviews
19
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
 

Mindshare comparison

As of February 2025, in the Log Management category, the mindshare of Grafana Loki is 7.9%, up from 2.1% 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

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 of the solution is the tool's GUI. The solution's GUI is very user-friendly."
"The effectiveness of filters is pivotal for optimizing the search process and extracting the specific information we need from the extensive log data."
"There are new features like that pilot code and things like that for profiling."
"The most valuable feature of Grafana Loki is the dashboards which are really simple to create."
"I appreciate the capability to process logs from microservices and seamlessly integrate them into Grafana."
"The solution's stability has never been a problem. Stability-wise, I rate the solution a nine to ten out of ten."
"The tool can be used in multi-cluster environments."
"The best feature of Grafana Loki is that it integrates well with our other tool."
"Graylog is very handy."
"Open source and user friendly."
"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."
"Allowing us to set up alerts and integrate with platforms we already use, such as Slack and OpsGenie to alert users of these errors proactively, is also a very useful feature."
"I am very proud of how very stable the solution is."
"UDP is a fast and lightweight protocol, perfect for sending large volumes of logs with minimal overhead."
"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."
"It is used as a log manager/SIEM. It provides visibility into the infrastructure and security related events."
 

Cons

"The solution has shortcomings regarding security monitoring-oriented features that need improvement."
"The solution's scalability depends on the team managing the Grafana instance."
"It's not intended for proprietary services, so you have to struggle with configuration a lot."
"Enhancing speed could be a game-changer, and while it might vary depending on the application, it's a factor worth exploring."
"In Grafana Loki, the creation of metrics is not so easy, making it an area that could be made easier."
"The product must improve its UI."
"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 platform's stability needs improvement."
"More complex visualizations and the ability to execute custom Elasticsearch queries would be great."
"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."
"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."
"I would like to see a default dashboard widget that shows the topology of the clusters defined for the graylog install."
"With technical support, you are on your own without an enterprise license."
"The biggest problem is the collector application, as we wanted to avoid using Graylog Collector Sidecar due to its architecture."
"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."
"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."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The pricing structure varies based on the number of users; there might be specific taxes to pay for it."
"I use the solution's open-source version. Grafana Loki is a completely free solution for me."
"My company doesn't need to pay for the licensing cost of the solution."
"We use a free version."
"You can use the free version of Grafana Loki on-premises."
"I use the open-source version of the product."
"Grafana Loki is a free, open-source solution."
"Since we are using the open-source version of Grafana Loki, we are not paying anything for the solution."
"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."
"Having paid official support is wise for projects."
"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."
"We're using the Community edition."
"I am using a community edition. I have not looked at the enterprise offering from Graylog."
"We are using the free version of the product. However, the paid version is expensive."
"I use the free version of Graylog."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Computer Software Company
18%
Comms Service Provider
9%
Financial Services Firm
9%
Manufacturing Company
8%
Computer Software Company
17%
Comms Service Provider
10%
Government
8%
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?
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, ...
 

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: January 2025.
832,340 professionals have used our research since 2012.