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Fortinet FortiAnalyzer 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

Fortinet FortiAnalyzer
Ranking in Log Management
8th
Average Rating
8.0
Reviews Sentiment
7.6
Number of Reviews
104
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
Graylog
Ranking in Log Management
15th
Average Rating
8.0
Reviews Sentiment
7.2
Number of Reviews
21
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
 

Mindshare comparison

As of June 2025, in the Log Management category, the mindshare of Fortinet FortiAnalyzer is 1.9%, down from 2.8% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Graylog is 6.7%, up from 5.9% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Log Management
 

Featured Reviews

Manikandan Kannan - PeerSpot reviewer
Simplifying log management by displaying detailed access information
The most valuable feature of Fortinet FortiAnalyzer is its ability to simplify and display logs clearly, providing details like which IPs are accessing the system, the destination, and the policies applied. This visualization and detail make managing logs more straightforward. In conjunction with our VMware setup, Fortinet FortiAnalyzer enhances organizational efficiency, meeting the standard log retention period for up to a year.
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

"Fortinet FortiAnalyzer comes with a lot of prebuilt reports out of the box, making it easy for our team to generate necessary reports without much struggle."
"Our use case for Fortinet FortiAnalyzer is analyzing traffic. We use it to investigate complaints about account access, check if something is blocked or working, and understand what's happening inside them."
"We have the most data visibility."
"The most valuable feature of FortiAnalyzer is its visibility, especially in network investigations."
"The initial setup is straightforward."
"The solution is quite easy to deploy."
"The scalability is good. It is also good in the cluster nodes. You can make multiple FortiAnalyzer clusters groups, and you can distribute the logs between these FortiAnalyzer nodes. In other words, you can expand the scale."
"The most valuable feature of the solution is reporting."
"We're using the Community edition, but I know that it has really good dashboarding and alerts."
"The product is scalable. The solution is stable."
"Real-time UDP/GELF logging and full text-based searching."
"The solution's most valuable feature is its new interface."
"Graylog is valuable because it bridges technical knowledge to non-technical teams, presenting complex backend processes in a simple timeline."
"What I like about Graylog is that it's real-time and you have access to the raw data. So, you ingest it, and you have access to every message and every data item you ingest. You can then build analytics on top of that. You can look at the raw data, and you can do some volumetric estimations, such as how big traffic you have, how many messages of data of a type you have, etc."
"Storing logs in Elasticsearch means log retrieval is extremely fast, and full text search is available by default."
"The build is stable and requires little maintenance, even compared to some extremely expensive products."
 

Cons

"Pricing-wise, it not affordable for the normal customer. Most of the people want to see different types of reporting, but FortiAnalyzer's fee is a little bit difficult."
"Fortinet FortiAnalyzer needs to have more out-of-the-box connectors for integration with other solutions."
"The UI could use some improvement. It can be tough for a beginner to navigate because you don't know what to do even if you read the guide. I've talked to some users who said that they couldn't figure out what to do even after looking at the documentation."
"A possible improvement for FortiAnalyzer could be in threat intelligence. This feature might be enhanced to provide better insights and more efficient operations."
"When somebody is new to the system they find it difficult to perform certain operations, like backups, and to see where the reports are."
"The upgradation process is slow"
"Their in-house technical support is extremely slow to respond. We have our own in-house team to manage issues so clients don't have to wait over two weeks for a response to issues."
"Pricing should be about 10-20% lower."
"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."
"More complex visualizations and the ability to execute custom Elasticsearch queries would be great."
"The area in Graylog that needs to be improved or enhanced would be the integrations."
"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."
"I would like to see a default dashboard widget that shows the topology of the clusters defined for the graylog install."
"The biggest problem is the collector application, as we wanted to avoid using Graylog Collector Sidecar due to its architecture."
"Graylog could improve the process of creating rules. We have to create them manually by doing parses and applying them. Other SIEM solutions have basic rules and you can create and get more events of interest."
"Its scalability gets complicated when we have to update or edit multiple nodes."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"We pay for an annual license."
"I won't say the solution is too costly since it is available at a fair price."
"It is not very expensive when customers understand the value of this product and the importance of the information that it provides for security."
"The enterprise version of this solution is costly. We have considered FortiAuthenticator for network control, but the pricing was focused on the larger companies and didn't suit our needs as a smaller business."
"The pricing of this solution is fair, and it is based on what you can manage."
"Its price is okay for us. Fortinet products are cheaper than other solutions."
"The number of licenses required directly corresponds with the number of devices connected."
"It is expensive for small business customers. It is only available for customers with a high number of firewalls to manage or to report. If a customer has only five boxes of FortiGate, the price of FortiAnalyzer can be more than the five boxes. So, we can't easily put this solution for small business customers."
"​You get a lot out-of-the-box with the non-enterprise version, so give it a try first."
"We are using the free version of the product. However, the paid version is expensive."
"It's an open-source solution that can be used free of charge."
"I use the free version of Graylog."
"We're using the Community edition."
"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."
"Consider Enterprise support if you have atypical needs or setup requirements.​"
"I am using a community edition. I have not looked at the enterprise offering from Graylog."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Computer Software Company
16%
Government
8%
Manufacturing Company
7%
Financial Services Firm
7%
Computer Software Company
17%
Comms Service Provider
10%
Educational Organization
7%
Government
7%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
 

Questions from the Community

What do you like most about Fortinet FortiAnalyzer?
The reporting features, which offer customization, real-time insights, and compliance support, are particularly noteworthy aspects.
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Fortinet FortiAnalyzer?
There are no extra expenses included aside from the licensing fee for Fortinet FortiAnalyzer, which I am paying annually.
What needs improvement with Fortinet FortiAnalyzer?
There are some downsides and areas that require improvement in Fortinet FortiAnalyzer. Fortinet FortiAnalyzer needs to improve in its utilization of AI to enhance its security log analysis.
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?
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...
What needs improvement with Graylog?
An improvement I would suggest is in Graylog's user interface, such as allowing for font size adjustments. A potential enhancement could be the integration with Ollama to run large language models ...
 

Also Known As

No data available
Graylog2
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

General Directorate of Information Technology
Blue Cross Blue Shield, eBay, Cisco, LinkedIn, SAP, King.com, Twilio, Deutsche Presse-Agentur
Find out what your peers are saying about Fortinet FortiAnalyzer vs. Graylog and other solutions. Updated: June 2025.
856,873 professionals have used our research since 2012.