Graylog vs syslog-ng comparison

Graylog and One Identity are both solutions in the Log Management category. Graylog is ranked #15 with an average rating of 7.0, while One Identity is ranked #17 with an average rating of 10.0. Graylog holds a 6.5% mindshare in Log Management, compared to One Identity’s 2.5% mindshare. Additionally, 95% of Graylog users are willing to recommend the solution, compared to 100% of One Identity users who would recommend it.

Graylog

Read 21 Graylog reviews

9,223 Views
5,549 Comparison Views

95% willing to recommend

syslog-ng

Read 7 syslog-ng reviews

4,298 Views
3,134 Comparison Views

100% willing to recommend

Graylog

syslog-ng

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Executive SummaryUpdated on Oct 9, 2024

Graylog and syslog-ng are key players in the log management solutions category. While Graylog stands out for integration and scalability, syslog-ng has the upper hand with advanced filtering and protocol options.

Features: Graylog offers flexibility, scalability, and easy integration with third-party tools. Syslog-ng provides comprehensive protocol support, advanced log filtering, and extensive protocol options.

Room for Improvement: Graylog could benefit from faster search speeds, enhanced reporting features, and more intuitive navigation. Syslog-ng users want a more intuitive configuration process, better documentation, and a simplified user interface.

Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: Graylog is known for straightforward deployment and responsive support. Syslog-ng, despite a more complex setup, offers strong community backing and comprehensive support materials.

Pricing and ROI: Graylog provides cost-effective options with excellent value. Syslog-ng, while more expensive, delivers significant ROI with its robust features. Graylog's pricing is manageable, while syslog-ng's higher price is justified by its capabilities.

To learn more, read our detailed Graylog vs. syslog-ng Report (Updated: June 2025).

Buyer's Guide

Graylog vs. syslog-ng

June 2025

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Helped 860,592 peers since 2012

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

15th

Average Rating

8.0

Reviews Sentiment

7.2

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

No ranking in other categories

syslog-ng

Ranking in Log Management

17th

Average Rating

8.8

Reviews Sentiment

2.8

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

No ranking in other categories

Mindshare comparison

As of July 2025, in the Log Management category, the mindshare of Graylog is 6.5%, up from 5.9% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of syslog-ng is 2.5%, down from 2.8% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.

Log Management

Featured Reviews

Ivan Kokalovic

DevOps Engineer at Proton Technologies

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.

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RyanVargas

Senior Director and Senior Systems Engineer (Dual Role), IT Infrastructure and Security at a financial services firm with 51-200 employees

It's a user-friendly open-source solution that can replace or augment a commercial product in some cases

I rate syslog-ng 10 out of 10. It's free and easy to use. It has built-in tools that help us index the various logs sent to it. It's a solid log product. If you're looking for a SIEM solution, syslog-ng will work as a stopgap measure at beginning of the project. It can also work as an injector for a true SIEM solution. You can send all the logs to syslog-ng and forward all the data to the SIEM solution after you've cleaned up the data and got the pertinent information. It's a good front end for a commercial SIEM solution, which becomes more expensive as you load more data into it. I would highly recommend syslog-ng for that use case. However, if you lack the expertise, you might need to go with a cloud-based SIEM instead. You need some in-house expertise or an outside consultant to manage it and set it up.

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Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"We're using the Community edition, but I know that it has really good dashboarding and alerts."

"The build is stable and requires little maintenance, even compared to some extremely expensive products."

"Real-time UDP/GELF logging and full text-based searching."

"This had increased productivity for the dev and support teams, because we are directly notifying them."

"What I like about Graylog is that it's real-time and you have access to the raw data. So, you ingest it, and you have access to every message and every data item you ingest. You can then build analytics on top of that. You can look at the raw data, and you can do some volumetric estimations, such as how big traffic you have, how many messages of data of a type you have, etc."

"The solution's most valuable feature is its new interface."

"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."

"Storing logs in Elasticsearch means log retrieval is extremely fast, and full text search is available by default."

More Graylog pros

"For us, the most valuable feature is the use of compound search for searching logs at a specific time, by a specific user, or specific behavior."

"The ability to extract and store the logs is the most valuable feature of syslog-ng."

"Syslog-ng has a separate config file in addition to the core configuration."

"Syslog-ng provides easy access to all my logs. It helps me show managers and other clients precisely where an incident occurred. I also like it because you can integrate syslog-ng with multiple solutions to allow real-time monitoring."

"Syslog-ng has built-in features that we can use to create alerts for a SIEM solution. It isn't a true SIEM solution, but it's sufficient for the time being."

Cons

"I would like to see a default dashboard widget that shows the topology of the clusters defined for the graylog install."

"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."

"More complex visualizations and the ability to execute custom Elasticsearch queries would be great."

"Lacks sufficient documentation."

"I would like to see some kind of visualization included in Graylog."

"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."

"Dashboards, stream alerts and parsing could be improved."

"The infrastructure cost is the main issue. I like the rest. If the infrastructure costs could be lower, it would be fantastic."

More Graylog cons

"There is always the potential for additional integration and protocol extensions."

"The filtering has room for improvement."

"Syslog-ng has built-in features that we can use to create alerts for a SIEM solution. It isn't a true SIEM solution, but it's sufficient for the time being."

"There is room for improvement in terms of observability."

"It's hard to find people who know how to use syslog-ng. I often find problems with configurations, and solutions aren't integrated correctly with syslog-ng. For example, there might be data with extra decimals, or the collector agents are incorrectly named. It isn't a problem with the solution; it's a lack of professionals."

Pricing and Cost Advice

"Consider Enterprise support if you have atypical needs or setup requirements."

"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."

"If you want something that works and do not have the money for Splunk or QRadar, take Graylog."

"We are using the free version of the product. However, the paid version is expensive."

"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 use the free version of Graylog."

More Graylog pricing and cost advice

"Syslog-ng is open-source."

"Syslog-ng is a free open-source solution."

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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Computer Software Company

17%

Comms Service Provider

10%

University

Educational Organization

Government

13%

Computer Software Company

12%

Financial Services Firm

Manufacturing Company

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.

See all answers

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...

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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 ...

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What do you like most about syslog-ng?

For us, the most valuable feature is the use of compound search for searching logs at a specific time, by a specific user, or specific behavior.

See all answers

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for syslog-ng?

The pricing is in the middle. I would rate the pricing a six out of ten, with one being expensive and ten being cheap.

See all answers

What needs improvement with syslog-ng?

There is room for improvement in terms of observability. Additionally, a possible new feature could be Kafka integration.

See all answers

Comparisons

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Compared 36% of the time

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Compared 25% of the time

Security Onion vs Graylog

Compared 6% of the time

Fortinet FortiAnalyzer vs Graylog

Compared 3% of the time

Seq vs Graylog

Compared 3% of the time

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SolarWinds Kiwi Syslog Server vs syslog-ng

Compared 24% of the time

Grafana Loki vs syslog-ng

Compared 11% of the time

Elastic Stack vs syslog-ng

Compared 5% of the time

Cribl vs syslog-ng

Compared 5% of the time

Logstash vs syslog-ng

Compared 4% of the time

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Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

Graylog

June 2025

Download Graylog product report

Buyer's Guide

Log Management

May 2025

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Also Known As

Graylog2

No data available

Overview

Graylog is purpose-built to deliver the best log collection, storage, enrichment, and analysis. Graylog is:

Considerably faster analysis speeds.
More robust and easier-to-use analysis platform.
Simpler administration and infrastructure management.
Lower cost than alternatives.
Full-scale customer service.
No expensive training or tool experts required.

Graylog

Optimizing SIEM
syslog-ng is the log management solution that improves the performance of your SIEM solution by reducing the amount and improving the quality of data feeding your SIEM.

Rapid search and troubleshooting
With syslog-ng Store Box, you can find the answer. Search billions of logs in seconds using full text queries with Boolean operators to pinpoint critical logs.

Meeting compliance requirements
syslog-ng Store Box provides secure, tamper-proof storage and custom reporting to demonstrate compliance.

Big data ingestion
syslog-ng can deliver data from a wide variety of sources to Hadoop, Elasticsearch, MongoDB, and Kafka as well as many others.

Universal log collection and routing
syslog-ng flexibly routes log data from X sources to Y destinations. Instead of deploying multiple agents on hosts, organizations can unify their log data collection and management.

Secure data archive
syslog-ng Store Box provides automated archiving, tamper-proof encrypted storage, granular access controls to protect log data. The largest appliance can store up to 10TB of raw logs.

One Identity

Sample Customers

Blue Cross Blue Shield, eBay, Cisco, LinkedIn, SAP, King.com, Twilio, Deutsche Presse-Agentur

Tecnocom, University of Victoria, University of Exeter, Datapath

Buyer's Guide

Graylog vs. syslog-ng

June 2025

Free Report: Graylog vs. syslog-ng

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