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Elastic Observability vs Grafana Loki comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Oct 9, 2024

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 Observability
Ranking in Log Management
16th
Average Rating
8.0
Reviews Sentiment
6.8
Number of Reviews
27
Ranking in other categories
Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability (7th), IT Infrastructure Monitoring (10th), Container Monitoring (4th), Cloud Monitoring Software (6th)
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
 

Mindshare comparison

As of August 2025, in the Log Management category, the mindshare of Elastic Observability is 1.3%, down from 2.1% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Grafana Loki is 8.4%, up from 5.5% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Log Management
 

Featured Reviews

Adelina Craciun - PeerSpot reviewer
Customization enables tailored monitoring and alerting across departments
The possibility to customize it has been quite useful. Whatever the other departments want to dream up, we implement. Whatever they want to monitor, the granularity of it, the changes in the threshold, and the anomalies that they want reported all require some development. So far, every single request has been fulfilled.
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.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"I found Elk to be excellent for log analytics, security analytics, application code-level analytics, collaboration with DevOps teams, CI/CD, microservices, and Kubernetes, specifically cloud-native or cloud-specific tasks."
"The Elastic User Interface framework lets us do custom development when needed. You need to have some Javascript knowledge. We need that knowledge to develop new custom tests."
"I have built a mini business intelligence system based on Elastic Observability."
"The most valuable feature of Elastic Observability is the text search."
"It has always been a stable solution."
"The tool's most valuable feature is centralized logging. Elastic Common Search helps us to search for the logs across the organization."
"Machine learning is the most valuable feature of this solution."
"I recommend Elastic Observability for its completeness of vision and wide ecosystem."
"The log collection feature is good and the solution is easily understandable. v"
"Grafana Loki is easy to monitor and detect errors."
"The tool can be used in multi-cluster environments."
"Loki also utilizes the same service discovery mechanism as used by Prometheus. So, whatever labeled metadata you see in Prometheus, you have the exact same metadata in the Loki system. Given this level of intricacy and the attempt to address these challenges, I firmly believe that Loki deserves praise for the work."
"The most valuable features of the solution stem from the fact that it is an open-source tool that is stable and flexible."
"I appreciate the capability to process logs from microservices and seamlessly integrate them into Grafana."
"The effectiveness of filters is pivotal for optimizing the search process and extracting the specific information we need from the extensive log data."
"The most valuable feature of the solution is the tool's GUI. The solution's GUI is very user-friendly."
 

Cons

"More web features could be added to the product."
"The price is the only issue in the solution. It can be made better and cheaper."
"It lacked some capabilities when handling on-prem devices, like network observability, package flow analysis, and device performance data on the infrastructure side."
"The cost must be made more transparent."
"There could be more low-code features included in the product."
"Elastic Observability needs to improve the retrieval of logs and metrics from all the instances."
"The auto-discovery isn't nearly as good. That's a big portion of it. When you drop the agent onto the JVM and you're trying to figure things out, having to go through and manually do all that is cumbersome."
"Simplifying the parsing of logs and manual efforts would also be beneficial."
"Visualization-wise, Grafana Loki's dashboard looks a little outdated compared to other open-source visualization tools like Chronograf."
"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."
"It's not intended for proprietary services, so you have to struggle with configuration a lot."
"The solution's scalability depends on the team managing the Grafana instance."
"The Docker container partition feature needs improvement as they do not reuse the space and goes into a pending state."
"The platform's stability needs improvement."
"There is a need for some change in the alerting types of the product. In short, a few changes in the alert area are needed due to minor shortcomings."
"I do not see any areas for improvement at the moment."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"There are two types: cloud and SaaS. They charge based on data ingestion, ingest rate, hard retention, and warm retention. I believe it costs around $25,000 annually to ingest 30GB of data daily. That is the SaaS version. There is also a self-managed license where the customer manages their own infrastructure on-prem. In such cases, there are three license tiers that respectively cost $5,000 annually per node, $7,000 per node, and $12,500 per node."
"One needs to pay for the licenses, and it is an annual subscription model right now."
"Elastic Observability's pricing could be better for small-scale users."
"Pricing is one of those situations where the more you use it, the more you pay."
"The price of Elastic Observability is expensive."
"Since we are a huge company, Elastic Observability is an affordable solution for us."
"The product is not that cheap."
"Users have to pay for some features, like the alerts on different channels, because they are unavailable in different source versions."
"Since we are using the open-source version of Grafana Loki, we are not paying anything for the solution."
"I find the licensing structure quite reasonable, as the free license effectively meets my requirements."
"Grafana Loki is a free, open-source solution."
"We use a free version."
"You can use the free version of Grafana Loki on-premises."
"The pricing structure varies based on the number of users; there might be specific taxes to pay for it."
"The solution is open source."
"My company doesn't need to pay for the licensing cost of the solution."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
18%
Computer Software Company
15%
Manufacturing Company
8%
Government
6%
Computer Software Company
17%
Financial Services Firm
10%
Comms Service Provider
10%
Manufacturing Company
8%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
 

Questions from the Community

What do you like most about Elastic Observability?
Elastic Observability significantly improves incident response time by providing quick access to logs and data across various sources. For instance, searching for specific keywords in logs spanning...
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Elastic Observability?
The license for Elastic Observability is the same as for other uses; you pay for Elastic, and you can use it for various cases. Observability is actually cheaper compared to logs because you're not...
What needs improvement with Elastic Observability?
I think they are working on the AI-based features, which are currently in technical preview. The only challenging aspect for new users is often writing the query language. Basic searching is very e...
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.
 

Comparisons

 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

PSCU, Entel, VITAS, Mimecast, Barrett Steel, Butterfield Bank
Information Not Available
Find out what your peers are saying about Elastic Observability vs. Grafana Loki and other solutions. Updated: July 2025.
864,155 professionals have used our research since 2012.