Elastic Beats vs Graylog Enterprise comparison

Elastic and Graylog are both solutions in the Log Management category. Additionally, 75% of Elastic users are willing to recommend the solution, compared to 95% of Graylog users who would recommend it.

Elastic Beats

Read 2 Elastic Beats reviews

75% willing to recommend

Graylog Enterprise

Read 24 Graylog Enterprise reviews

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7,856 Comparison Views

95% willing to recommend

Elastic Beats

Graylog Enterprise

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Executive SummaryUpdated on Sep 8, 2025

Graylog Enterprise and Elastic Beats compete in data monitoring and analytics. Graylog Enterprise seems to have the upper hand with comprehensive log management and direct support options, essential for structured support needs.

Features: Graylog Enterprise offers extensive log management, real-time user monitoring, and flexible data visualization. Elastic Beats provides lightweight data shippers, seamless Elasticsearch integration, and efficient data capture.

Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: Graylog Enterprise is noted for its simple setup and reliable support services, making deployment smoother. Elastic Beats benefits from easy configuration and strong community support, though direct support is limited.

Pricing and ROI: Graylog Enterprise incurs initial costs but provides substantial ROI with comprehensive features. Elastic Beats is free and open source, reducing upfront costs, but additional ELK stack components may increase expenses.

To learn more, read our detailed Log Management Report (Updated: January 2026).

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Log Management

January 2026

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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

Elastic Beats

Average Rating

8.0

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

No ranking in other categories

Graylog Enterprise

Average Rating

8.0

Reviews Sentiment

5.4

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

Log Management (8th)

Featured Reviews

it_user1269834

I.T. Manager at a healthcare company with 51-200 employees

A great addition to our security monitoring system

We haven't to this point had to scale very large, we want to continue to evolve, but it's a slow process for us. From what I've used so far, and my reading on it, I don't think we're going to have any problems scaling to really whatever size we need.

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NicolaeCIornii

Security Officer at JSC "Moldtelecom" S.A.

Log analysis has become clearer and faster but visualization and extensibility still need work

The problem was with the complexity and the cost to add extensions. We found this very expensive to buy another version with additional features. I think that Graylog Enterprise does not have customizable dashboards. I did not see them in Graylog Enterprise because most of the time we used the open source free version, which is limited. I think Graylog Enterprise should improve some things that they have in the paid version and perhaps provide users with a menu that gives examples of parsing logs and draws graphics so that people do not need to improve another system such as Grafana. This would be interesting. When it comes to functionalities, I found the log management in Graylog Enterprise acceptable. It is very simple to use and to collect logs. It has support for different protocols and different ports, and the sidecar is easy to use. However, in visualization, I think it needs to be much better.

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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

"The security aspects in general have been very useful to use."

"There's a whole spectrum of features on the solution that users can take advantage of. It's a very robust product."

"I like the correlation and the alerting."

"The Graylog features that have proven to be most beneficial for our data analysis in particular are that we tend to use it as a big data store, so we have the correlation rules that, if something matches under certain conditions, it raises an alarm."

"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."

"The product is scalable. The solution is stable."

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

"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."

"The best feature of Graylog is the Elasticsearch integration. We can integrate and we can run filters, such as an event of interest, and those logs we can send to any SIEM tool or as an analytic. Additionally, there are clear and well-documented implementation instructions on their website to follow if needed."

"Message forwarding through the in-built module."

More Graylog Enterprise pros

Cons

"At some level, the documentation, the information as far as the components, it's sometimes a little difficult to find the information necessary to implement aspects."

"The dashboard is not user-friendly. The solution, in general, isn't great from a user's perspective."

"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."

"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."

"There should be some user groups and an auto sign-in feature."

"Since container orchestration systems are popular and Graylog fits the niche well, perhaps they could officially support running in docker containers on Kubernetes as a StatefulSet as a use case. That way, the declarative nature of Kubernetes config files would document their best case deployment scenario-"

"With technical support, you are on your own without an enterprise license."

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

More Graylog Enterprise cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

"It wasn't cheap, but it was cost-effective compared to many of the other solutions."

"I am using a community edition. I have not looked at the enterprise offering from Graylog."

"It's an open-source solution that can be used free of charge."

"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 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."

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

"You get a lot out-of-the-box with the non-enterprise version, so give it a try first."

"Having paid official support is wise for projects."

More Graylog Enterprise pricing and cost advice

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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

No data available

Computer Software Company

14%

Comms Service Provider

11%

University

Government

Company Size

By reviewers

Large Enterprise

Midsize Enterprise

Small Business

No data available

By reviewers
Company Size	Count
Small Business	10
Midsize Enterprise	5
Large Enterprise	9

Questions from the Community

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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?

I do not have any specific examples or numbers, such as time saved or incidents to share. Currently, I have no suggestions for how Graylog Enterprise can be improved, as there are no pain points or...

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What is your primary use case for Graylog?

Graylog Enterprise is the logging and management tool we initially used, but later we stopped using it and switched to Loki, Grafana Loki for the logs. Eventually, we moved back to Graylog Enterpri...

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Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

Log Management

January 2026

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Buyer's Guide

Graylog Enterprise

January 2026

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Also Known As

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Overview

Beats is the platform for single-purpose data shippers. They install as lightweight agents and send data from hundreds or thousands of machines to Logstash or Elasticsearch.

Elastic

Graylog Enterprise, recognized for log collection, real-time search, and enriched data handling, offers an open-source framework that integrates seamlessly with Elasticsearch. Its user-centric interface streamlines data correlation and log aggregation, supporting both backend services and comprehensive monitoring needs.

Graylog Enterprise stands out for its stability and powerful log management capabilities, facilitating efficient log aggregation, real-time updates, and data analytics. Users benefit from its plugin-based alerting, user-friendly interface, and support for microservices, including Docker integration. The ability to search in detail, flexible API integration, and data enrichment features are highly valued. Challenges include collector application issues, desired visualization enhancements, and authentication integration improvements. Users seek advancements in UI customization, backup functions, and easier rule creation.

What are Graylog Enterprise's most important features?

Log Collection: Efficiently aggregates and handles diverse logs.
Real-Time Search: Provides immediate log data access.
Custom Alerts: Plugin-based alerting for tailored notifications.
Dashboard Enhancements: Improved visualization for data insights.
Data Enrichment: Adds value through detailed log analysis.

What benefits and ROI can users expect?

Audit Trail Support: Essential for compliance in financial sectors.
Security Event Correlation: Enables incident analysis and response.
Faster Issue Identification: Speeds up troubleshooting with detailed visualization.
API Flexibility: Seamless integration across systems and environments.
Comprehensive Monitoring: Centralized log management enhances oversight.

In industrial use, Graylog Enterprise is crucial for audit trailing in financial sectors, facilitating security event identification and error monitoring. Backend teams leverage real-time analytics for swift issue resolution, while developers appreciate the comprehensive log visualization enabled by Docker integration for microservice management.

Graylog

Sample Customers

Sprint

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

Find out what your peers are saying about Wazuh, Splunk, Datadog and others in Log Management. Updated: January 2026.

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