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Elastic Security vs Graylog comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Apr 20, 2025

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) (16th), Security Orchestration Automation and Response (SOAR) (6th), Extended Detection and Response (XDR) (8th)
Graylog
Ranking in Log Management
16th
Average Rating
8.0
Reviews Sentiment
6.9
Number of Reviews
20
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
 

Mindshare comparison

As of April 2025, in the Log Management category, the mindshare of Elastic Security is 3.5%, down from 6.7% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Graylog is 6.6%, up from 5.7% 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.
Ivan Kokalovic - PeerSpot reviewer
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.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"It's simple and easy to use."
"It's open-source and free to use."
"I can look at events from more than one source across multiple different locations and find patterns or anomalies. The machine learning capabilities are helpful, and I can create rules for notifications to be more proactive rather than responding after something has gone wrong."
"ELK is open-source, and it will give you the framework you need to build everything from scratch."
"The solution's most valuable features are anomaly detection and connectivity reporting."
"What customers found most valuable in Elastic Security feature-wise is the search capability, in particular, the way of writing the search query and the speed of searching for results."
"The most valuable feature for me is Discover."
"The cost is reasonable. It's not overly pricey."
"Real-time UDP/GELF logging and full text-based searching."
"Message forwarding through the in-built module."
"I like the correlation and the alerting."
"Graylog's search functionality, alerting functionality, user management, and dashboards are useful."
"We're using the Community edition, but I know that it has really good dashboarding and alerts."
"We run a containerized microservices environment. Being able to set up streams and search for errors and anomalies across hundreds of containers is why a log aggregation platform like Graylog is valuable to us."
"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."
"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."
 

Cons

"We set up a cron job to delete old logs so that we wouldn't hit a disk space issue. Such a feature should be available in the UI, where old logs can be deleted automatically. (Don’t know if this feature is already there)."
"Elastic has one problem. In the past, Elastic Security was free. Now, they currently only offer the basic license or a certain period of time."
"I would like the process of retrieving archived data and viewing it in Kibana to be simplified."
"The price of this product could be improved, especially the additional costs. I would also like to see better-quality graphics."
"An area for improvement in Elastic Security is the pricing. It could be better. Right now, when you increase the volume of logs to be collected, the price also increases a lot."
"The solution's query building is not that intuitive compared to other solutions."
"The training that is offered for Elastic is in need of improvement because there is no depth to it."
"Elastic Security consumes a lot of resources, requiring a substantial deployment setup."
"More complex visualizations and the ability to execute custom Elasticsearch queries would be great."
"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-"
"Dashboards, stream alerts and parsing could be improved."
"Graylog needs to improve their authentication. Also, the fact that Graylog displays logs from the top down is just ridiculous."
"Lacks sufficient documentation."
"It would be great if Graylog could provide a better Python package in order to make it easier to use for the Python community."
"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."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"Affordable but with additional costs"
"The tool's pricing is flexible and comes at unit cost. You don't have to pay for everything."
"This is an open-source product, so there are no costs."
"The solution is free."
"We use the open-source version, so there is no charge for this solution."
"Compared to other tools, Elastic Security is a cheaper solution."
"The licensing cost of Elastic Security is based on the daily ingestion rate. I can't recall the exact figure, but for 10GB of log action daily, it would cost around $20,000."
"The product offers an amazing pricing structure. Price-wise, the product is very competitive."
"I use the free version of Graylog."
"We are using the free version of the product. However, the paid version is expensive."
"There is an open source version and an enterprise version. I wouldn't recommend the enterprise version, but as an open source solution, it is solid and works really well."
"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."
"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."
"Having paid official support is wise for projects."
"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."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Computer Software Company
17%
Government
10%
Financial Services Firm
9%
Comms Service Provider
7%
Computer Software Company
18%
Comms Service Provider
10%
Educational Organization
7%
Government
7%
 

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 Graylog?
The product is scalable. The solution is stable.
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Graylog?
We are using the free version of the product. However, the paid version is expensive.
What needs improvement with Graylog?
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. P...
 

Also Known As

Elastic SIEM, ELK Logstash
Graylog2
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Texas A&M, U.S. Air Force, NuScale Power, Martin's Point Health Care
Blue Cross Blue Shield, eBay, Cisco, LinkedIn, SAP, King.com, Twilio, Deutsche Presse-Agentur
Find out what your peers are saying about Elastic Security vs. Graylog and other solutions. Updated: April 2025.
849,686 professionals have used our research since 2012.