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Graylog vs LogRhythm SIEM 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

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
LogRhythm SIEM
Ranking in Log Management
11th
Average Rating
8.4
Reviews Sentiment
6.7
Number of Reviews
173
Ranking in other categories
Security Information and Event Management (SIEM) (7th)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of March 2025, in the Log Management category, the mindshare of Graylog is 6.4%, up from 5.6% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of LogRhythm SIEM is 2.2%, down from 3.5% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Log Management
 

Featured Reviews

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.
Mokhammad Rakhman - PeerSpot reviewer
User-friendly dashboard and machine learning capabilities improve threat hunting efficiency
LogRhythm SIEM has strong machine-learning capabilities with behavioral rules and analysis. The seamless integration for case management, along with a user-friendly dashboard user interface, makes tasks like threat hunting more efficient. Analytics and behavioral analysis help me save time with rule creation. Its scalability allows me to add components as needed. Overall, LogRhythm SIEM offers end-to-end visibility with a reasonable price.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"The product is scalable. The solution is stable."
"UDP is a fast and lightweight protocol, perfect for sending large volumes of logs with minimal overhead."
"It has data adapters and lookup tables that utilize HTTP calls to APIs."
"I like the correlation and the alerting."
"Storing logs in Elasticsearch means log retrieval is extremely fast, and full text search is available by default."
"I am very proud of how very stable the solution is."
"The ability to write custom alerts is key to information security and compliance."
"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."
"The initial setup process is very user-friendly."
"The Web Console is my favorite. It enables me, at a glance, to see the health of the environments."
"The ability for me to go into the Web UI, and just learn what's going on in my environment."
"The most useful feature that I've found so far is the search function. I like all the different ways you're able to search through metadata and the different ways you're able to correlate or search through logs to find out what's going on."
"We now have a central point of monitoring for all potential threats."
"Our clients enjoy having one dashboard to monitor their environments in real time."
"LogRhythm SIEM has some valuable features, including its ability to maintain backups of events and manage alerts separately through an engine that handles content and administration tasks."
"In terms of security, LogRhythm NextGen SIEM is great."
 

Cons

"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."
"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."
"Elasticsearch recommendations for tuning could be better. Graylog doesn't have direct support for running the system inside of Kubernetes, so it can be challenging to fill in the gaps and set up containers in a way that is both performant and stable."
"There should be some user groups and an auto sign-in feature.​"
"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."
"It would be great if Graylog could provide a better Python package in order to make it easier to use for the Python community."
"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."
"The web and on-premise console interface should be the same instead of having a separate engine for each."
"When we originally got LogRhythm, their tech support was fantastic, and I loved them. Now, we don't quite get as quick of a response. I've been disappointed in the more recent tech support. When you call in, they'll say that they will get you somebody, and you'll finally get someone who will contact you back a day or so later. Whereas before, I would get help right away."
"In the next release, I would certainly like to see more HIPAA compliance. I would also like to see more integration with Palo Alto Networks, particularly their Traps, which is their endpoint solution."
"Parsing is totally controlled by LogRhythm and they do not allow any partner or any third-party to handle this part and this is a key challenge on my end."
"We would like to see more things out of the console into the web UI. I guess this is what they are doing in 7.4."
"Sometimes the Platform Manager crashes because it's built around Windows."
"Technical support could use a little work in the terms of responding back. The feedback that we received is they do need a little more staff."
"One area for improvement in LogRhythm NextGen SIEM is that it's a Windows-based tool, and I feel it should be on the Linux operating system instead. Another area for improvement in the tool is the UI. There should be minor changes in the UI to make it better, though I like the dashboards in LogRhythm NextGen SIEM."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"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."
"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 are using the free version of the product. However, the paid version is expensive."
"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."
"Having paid official support is wise for projects."
"I use the free version of Graylog."
"​You get a lot out-of-the-box with the non-enterprise version, so give it a try first."
"On a scale of one to ten, where one is low, and ten is high, I rate the pricing between six and seven."
"We did a five-year agreement. We pay close to a quarter of a million dollars for our solution."
"I would recommend talking to the rep. That's the biggest thing because they will know what questions to ask."
"Look for whatever will give you the most value. That's the main point. It is not one size fits all."
"The pricing is very reasonable and accessible compared to other products in the market but I am not very sure about the exact licensing cost per year for our company."
"On a scale of one to ten, I'd rate the pricing of this solution as a seven - not too expensive but not cheap either. Regarding licensing costs, it varies depending on factors like being a partner or an end user, but there are no additional costs aside from standard licensing fees for the basic SIEM solution."
"I would rate the tool's pricing around eight out of ten."
"I would recommend that whatever sales quotes to them upfront, they will probably go up. Because they are probably going to outgrow that very quickly or once they start getting everything into it, they are going to have to move up anyway."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Computer Software Company
17%
Comms Service Provider
10%
Government
8%
University
7%
Educational Organization
45%
Computer Software Company
9%
Financial Services Firm
6%
Government
6%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
 

Questions from the Community

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...
What is the difference between log management and SIEM?
Rony, Daniel's answer is right on the money. There are many solutions for each in the market, a lot depends upon your ability to manage such tools and your budget. A small operation may be best s...
What needs improvement with LogRhythm NextGen SIEM?
The SOAR capabilities need improvements as they currently require programming knowledge. A more user-friendly user interface with drag-and-drop features, similar to key competitors like Splunk, wou...
What do you like most about LogRhythm SIEM?
I find LogRhythm's log management capabilities to be beneficial.
 

Comparisons

 

Also Known As

Graylog2
LogRhythm NextGen SIEM, LogRhythm, LogRhythm Threat Lifecycle Management, LogRhythm TLM
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Blue Cross Blue Shield, eBay, Cisco, LinkedIn, SAP, King.com, Twilio, Deutsche Presse-Agentur
Macy's, NASA, Fujitsu, US Air Force, EY, Abbott, HD Supply, SAB Miller, UCLA, Raytheon, Amtrak, Cargill
Find out what your peers are saying about Graylog vs. LogRhythm SIEM and other solutions. Updated: March 2025.
842,592 professionals have used our research since 2012.