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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
6.7
Number of Reviews
28
Ranking in other categories
Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability (7th), IT Infrastructure Monitoring (11th), 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 September 2025, in the Log Management category, the mindshare of Elastic Observability is 1.3%, down from 2.0% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Grafana Loki is 8.1%, up from 6.1% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Log Management Market Share Distribution
ProductMarket Share (%)
Grafana Loki8.1%
Elastic Observability1.3%
Other90.6%
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

"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 over a month from multiple data sources can be completed within seconds."
"It is scalable and supports multitenancy, which is beneficial for MSPs."
"The solution has been stable in our usage."
"The architecture and system's stability are simple."
"We use AppDynamics and Elastic. The reason why we're using Elastic APM is because of the license count. It's very favorable compared to AppDynamics. It's inexpensive; it's economical."
"The ability to ensure that the data is searchable and maintainable is highly valuable for our purposes."
"I think Elastic Observability is already in very good shape."
"The most valuable feature of Elastic Observability is the text search."
"The best feature of Grafana Loki is that it integrates well with our other tool."
"Different types of integrations with various sources are the most helpful and useful features of Grafana Loki that I found for myself."
"Loki significantly saves time in troubleshooting by quickly pinpointing network issues."
"The most valuable part of Loki is the ability to filter logs by keywords and devices."
"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."
"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."
"Grafana agent is very lightweight and does not cost significant resources of our cluster."
"The solution's stability has never been a problem. Stability-wise, I rate the solution a nine to ten out of ten."
 

Cons

"Elastic APM's visualization is not that great compared to other tools. It's number of metrics is very low."
"Improving code insight related to infrastructure and network, particularly focusing on aspects such as firewalls, switches, routers, and testing would be beneficial."
"When opening tickets, we cannot use our team mailbox."
"Simplifying the parsing of logs and manual efforts would also be beneficial."
"If we had some pre-defined templates for observability that we could start using right away after deploying it – instead of having to build or to change some of the dashboards – that would be helpful."
"It lacked some capabilities when handling on-prem devices, like network observability, package flow analysis, and device performance data on the infrastructure side."
"One example is the inability to monitor very old databases with the newest version."
"The cost must be made more transparent."
"The Docker container partition feature needs improvement as they do not reuse the space and goes into a pending state."
"We face some bugs when we install the latest version of Grafana Loki."
"The product must improve its UI."
"We encountered certain limitations when it came to alerting, particularly when dealing with specific data sources."
"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."
"The solution's scalability depends on the team managing the Grafana instance."
"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."
"The correlation of requests is not simple in Grafana Loki and can be improved."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The price of Elastic Observability is expensive."
"We have been using the open-source version."
"The product’s pricing needs improvement."
"So far, there are just the standard licensing fees. Several of the components are embedded in the license or are even open source. They're even free depending on what you use, which makes it even more appealing to someone that is discussing pricing of the solution."
"One needs to pay for the licenses, and it is an annual subscription model right now."
"The product is not that cheap."
"Elastic Observability is cheaper than other similar solutions, such as Dynatrace. Its license calculation is based on various factors like data volume and physical infrastructure, particularly related to RAM capacity."
"Since we are a huge company, Elastic Observability is an affordable solution for us."
"The pricing structure varies based on the number of users; there might be specific taxes to pay for it."
"I use the open-source version of the product."
"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."
"Grafana Loki is an open-source solution."
"Grafana Loki is a free, open-source solution."
"You can use the free version of Grafana Loki on-premises."
"Since we are using the open-source version of Grafana Loki, we are not paying anything for the solution."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
17%
Computer Software Company
15%
Manufacturing Company
8%
Government
6%
Computer Software Company
16%
Comms Service Provider
10%
Financial Services Firm
10%
Manufacturing Company
9%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business8
Midsize Enterprise4
Large Enterprise16
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business7
Midsize Enterprise8
Large Enterprise3
 

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.
 

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: September 2025.
867,370 professionals have used our research since 2012.