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Elastic Security 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 Security
Ranking in Log Management
7th
Average Rating
7.8
Reviews Sentiment
6.8
Number of Reviews
64
Ranking in other categories
Security Information and Event Management (SIEM) (5th), Endpoint Detection and Response (EDR) (15th), Security Orchestration Automation and Response (SOAR) (6th), Extended Detection and Response (XDR) (8th)
Grafana Loki
Ranking in Log Management
4th
Average Rating
8.2
Reviews Sentiment
8.0
Number of Reviews
17
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
 

Mindshare comparison

As of May 2025, in the Log Management category, the mindshare of Elastic Security is 3.3%, down from 6.6% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Grafana Loki is 8.7%, up from 3.7% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Log Management
 

Featured Reviews

SyedAli17 - PeerSpot reviewer
Centralized monitoring improves security posture through rapid data processing
The processing part of Elastic Security ( /products/elastic-security-reviews ) is very interesting for us since we handle almost 7,000 to 8,000 alerts per minute. We require rapid processing speed for alerts and event data, and Elastic Security is very efficient at handling this level of data. Additionally, Elastic Security helps improve the security posture of Pakistan through centralized visibility and real-time processing.
CarlosPimentel - PeerSpot reviewer
Efficient log filtering enhances quick network troubleshooting
We use Grafana Loki for various verticals including manufacturing, finance, health, and aerospatial sectors. It primarily helps in monitoring security and access to devices. Grafana dashboards are used to track access success and failure and audit commands issued on devices Loki significantly…

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"The solution has a good community surrounding it for lots of helpful documentation for troubleshooting purposes."
"It is the best open-source product for people working in SO, managing and analyzing logs."
"Elastic Security is cost-effective compared to Defender and CrowdStrike."
"It's simple and easy to use."
"It's a good platform and the very best in the current market. We looked at the Forester report from December 2022 where it was said to be a leader."
"The cost is reasonable. It's not overly pricey."
"Elastic is straightforward, easy to integrate, and highly customizable."
"The visualization is very good."
"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 significantly saves time in troubleshooting by quickly pinpointing network issues."
"Grafana Loki is easy to monitor and detect errors."
"The most valuable feature of the solution is the tool's GUI. The solution's GUI is very user-friendly."
"The tool can be used in multi-cluster environments."
"The most valuable feature is the capability to set up alerts, which becomes necessary when we need to receive notifications for specific events."
"There are new features like that pilot code and things like that for profiling."
 

Cons

"This solution cannot do predictive maintenance, so we have to build our own modules for doing it."
"Elastic Security can be a bit difficult to use if a person only has experience in SMBs with tools like Zoho. The product can also be difficult for those who have never dealt with query language."
"Their visuals and graphs need to be better."
"We'd like to see some more artificial intelligence capabilities."
"They don't provide user authentication and authorisation features (Shield) as a part of their open-source version."
"The solution should generate an automatic product that integrates with ELK Stack to use artificial intelligence."
"Better integration with third-party APMs would be really good."
"This solution is very hard to implement."
"The correlation of requests is not simple in Grafana Loki and can be improved."
"The solution has shortcomings regarding security monitoring-oriented features that need improvement."
"It would be beneficial if Loki could directly access Windows Server logs or events directly from the servers."
"Enhancing speed could be a game-changer, and while it might vary depending on the application, it's a factor worth exploring."
"Visualization-wise, Grafana Loki's dashboard looks a little outdated compared to other open-source visualization tools like Chronograf."
"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 product must improve its UI."
"The platform's stability needs improvement."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The base product is open-source but if you need advanced security features then you need to pay for the subscription. Elastic Security's price is reasonable in some cases and in other cases it's not."
"Affordable but with additional costs"
"The price is reasonable. It probably costs the same as ArcSight and LogRhythm SIEM. FortiSIEM might cost less than Elastic Security. There are no hidden or additional costs."
"Elastic Stack is an open-source tool. You don't have to pay anything for the components."
"The tool's pricing is flexible and comes at unit cost. You don't have to pay for everything."
"I find it better than Splunk in terms of cost-effectiveness. For cost-effectiveness, I would rate it a nine out of 10."
"It is easy to deploy, easy to use, and you get everything you need to become operational with it, and have nothing further to pay unless you want the OLED plugin."
"Compared to other tools, Elastic Security is a cheaper solution."
"We use a free version."
"The cost is less than other paid services like CloudWatch."
"I use the open-source version of the product."
"My company doesn't need to pay for the licensing cost of the solution."
"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."
"You can use the free version of Grafana Loki on-premises."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Computer Software Company
16%
Government
10%
Financial Services Firm
9%
Comms Service Provider
7%
Computer Software Company
18%
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

Datadog vs ELK: which one is good in terms of performance, cost and efficiency?
With Datadog, we have near-live visibility across our entire platform. We have seen APM metrics impacted several times lately using the dashboards we have created with Datadog; they are very good c...
What do you like most about Elastic Security?
Elastic provides the capability to index quickly due to the reverse indexes it offers. This data is crucial as it contains critical information. The reverse index allows fast data indexing because ...
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Elastic Security?
Since Elastic Security is community-based, it does not require significant costs. This is beneficial for SMEs as they do not need extensive budgets for security solutions.
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?
We use the open-source version of Loki. The cloud version is competitively priced compared to other market solutions.
What needs improvement with Grafana Loki?
It would be beneficial if Loki could directly access Windows Server logs or events directly from the servers.
 

Also Known As

Elastic SIEM, ELK Logstash
No data available
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Texas A&M, U.S. Air Force, NuScale Power, Martin's Point Health Care
Information Not Available
Find out what your peers are saying about Elastic Security vs. Grafana Loki and other solutions. Updated: April 2025.
851,451 professionals have used our research since 2012.