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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
7.8
Number of Reviews
18
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
Graylog
Ranking in Log Management
15th
Average Rating
8.0
Reviews Sentiment
7.2
Number of Reviews
21
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
 

Mindshare comparison

As of July 2025, in the Log Management category, the mindshare of Grafana Loki is 8.6%, up from 4.9% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Graylog is 6.5%, up from 5.9% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Log Management
 

Featured Reviews

Volodymyr Bondarchuk - PeerSpot reviewer
Integrations enhance monitoring but problem-solving proves challenging
Different types of integrations with various sources are the most helpful and useful features of Grafana Loki that I found for myself. As part of Kubernetes technology, I noticed benefits from using this product such as availability, configuration balancing, high availability solutions for high performance, and failover clustering. It provides a clear picture about the state of the system and gives needed information for taking action and quickly fixing problems.
Ivan Kokalovic - PeerSpot reviewer
Facilitates backend service monitoring with efficient log retrieval and API flexibility
Graylog is valuable because it bridges technical knowledge to non-technical teams, presenting complex backend processes in a simple timeline. It boosts the knowledge of sales and customer support teams by allowing them to see the backend operations without needing to read the code. Its API is flexible for visualization, and its powerful search engine efficiently handles large volumes of log data. Moreover, its stability, fast search capabilities, and compatibility with languages like ANSI SQL enhance its utility in IT infrastructure.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"The tool can be used in multi-cluster environments."
"The product's most valuable features are ease of installation, management, and reporting. It has an efficient ability to set thresholds for alerts, as well."
"The most valuable features of the solution stem from the fact that it is an open-source tool that is stable and flexible."
"The effectiveness of filters is pivotal for optimizing the search process and extracting the specific information we need from the extensive log data."
"The best feature of Grafana Loki is that it integrates well with our other tool."
"The most valuable feature of the solution is the tool's GUI. The solution's GUI is very user-friendly."
"Grafana agent is very lightweight and does not cost significant resources of our cluster."
"We are using Grafana Loki as a database for real-time metrics."
"I am very proud of how very stable the solution is."
"This had increased productivity for the dev and support teams, because we are directly notifying them."
"Message forwarding through the in-built module."
"The build is stable and requires little maintenance, even compared to some extremely expensive products."
"Open source and user friendly."
"Graylog is very handy."
"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."
 

Cons

"Visualization-wise, Grafana Loki's dashboard looks a little outdated compared to other open-source visualization tools like Chronograf."
"Enhancing speed could be a game-changer, and while it might vary depending on the application, it's a factor worth exploring."
"The platform's stability needs improvement."
"We encountered certain limitations when it came to alerting, particularly when dealing with specific data sources."
"It's not intended for proprietary services, so you have to struggle with configuration a lot."
"The correlation of requests is not simple in Grafana Loki and can be improved."
"The Docker container partition feature needs improvement as they do not reuse the space and goes into a pending state."
"We had a well-structured dashboard with a functional query. However, an issue arose when the Kubernetes pod restarted. The statistics from our Grafana query would reset, dropping to zero and starting anew. This was particularly noticeable with linear graphs, which are expected to show consistent growth."
"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."
"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."
"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 complex visualizations and the ability to execute custom Elasticsearch queries would be great."
"Graylog needs to improve their authentication. Also, the fact that Graylog displays logs from the top down is just ridiculous."
"With technical support, you are on your own without an enterprise license."
"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."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"You can use the free version of Grafana Loki on-premises."
"The solution is open source."
"The cost is less than other paid services like CloudWatch."
"I find the licensing structure quite reasonable, as the free license effectively meets my requirements."
"My company doesn't need to pay for the licensing cost of the solution."
"The pricing structure varies based on the number of users; there might be specific taxes to pay for it."
"Grafana Loki is a free, open-source solution."
"I use the solution's open-source version. Grafana Loki is a completely free solution for me."
"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."
"Consider Enterprise support if you have atypical needs or setup requirements.​"
"I use the free version of Graylog."
"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."
"Having paid official support is wise for projects."
"We are using the free version of the product. However, the paid version is expensive."
"​You get a lot out-of-the-box with the non-enterprise version, so give it a try first."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Computer Software Company
17%
Financial Services Firm
10%
Comms Service Provider
9%
Manufacturing Company
8%
Computer Software Company
17%
Comms Service Provider
10%
University
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?
Since it is an open source tool, there are no charges or fees.
What needs improvement with Grafana Loki?
I have no ideas at this moment about what could be improved in Grafana Loki.
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?
I am not familiar with the pricing details of Graylog, as I was not responsible for that aspect. It was determined that we didn't need an enterprise plan, which is more suited for clients with less...
What needs improvement with Graylog?
An improvement I would suggest is in Graylog's user interface, such as allowing for font size adjustments. A potential enhancement could be the integration with Ollama to run large language models ...
 

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: June 2025.
860,592 professionals have used our research since 2012.