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Grafana Loki vs Graylog comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Jul 27, 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

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
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 July 2025, in the Log Management category, the mindshare of Grafana Loki is 8.6%, up from 4.9% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Graylog is 6.5%, up from 5.9% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Log Management
 

Featured Reviews

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.
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

"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 product's most valuable features are ease of installation, management, and reporting. It has an efficient ability to set thresholds for alerts, as well."
"There are new features like that pilot code and things like that for profiling."
"The most valuable feature is the capability to set up alerts, which becomes necessary when we need to receive notifications for specific events."
"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 features of the solution stem from the fact that it is an open-source tool that is stable and flexible."
"The solution's stability has never been a problem. Stability-wise, I rate the solution a nine to ten out of ten."
"The product is scalable. The solution is stable."
"UDP is a fast and lightweight protocol, perfect for sending large volumes of logs with minimal overhead."
"Open source and user friendly."
"The Graylog features that have proven to be most beneficial for our data analysis in particular are that we tend to use it as a big data store, so we have the correlation rules that, if something matches under certain conditions, it raises an alarm."
"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."
"We're using the Community edition, but I know that it has really good dashboarding and alerts."
"We have scaled from a single machine installation (a VM with a Graylog + ES + MongoDB) to (2 Graylog + 2 ES + 3 MongoDB). This was done smoothly with a minimal impact on logging."
"Everything stands out as valuable, including the fact that I can quantify and qualify the logs, create pipelines and process the logs in any way I like, and create charts or data maps."
 

Cons

"We face some bugs when we install the latest version of Grafana Loki."
"In Grafana Loki, the creation of metrics is not so easy, making it an area that could be made easier."
"I would rate Grafana Loki a seven out of ten because it is open source, and sometimes there can be problems that are difficult to fix without official support."
"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."
"Enhancing speed could be a game-changer, and while it might vary depending on the application, it's a factor worth exploring."
"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."
"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 biggest problem is the collector application, as we wanted to avoid using Graylog Collector Sidecar due to its architecture."
"Graylog needs to improve their authentication. Also, the fact that Graylog displays logs from the top down is just ridiculous."
"The area in Graylog that needs to be improved or enhanced would be the integrations."
"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-"
"Graylog can improve the index rotation as it's quite a complex solution."
"More complex visualizations and the ability to execute custom Elasticsearch queries would be great."
"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."
"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."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"We use a free version."
"I use the open-source version of the product."
"I find the licensing structure quite reasonable, as the free license effectively meets my requirements."
"You can use the free version of Grafana Loki on-premises."
"The cost is less than other paid services like CloudWatch."
"Grafana Loki is an open-source solution."
"Since we are using the open-source version of Grafana Loki, we are not paying anything for the solution."
"The solution is open source."
"I use the free version of Graylog."
"Having paid official support is wise for projects."
"We're using the Community edition."
"Consider Enterprise support if you have atypical needs or setup requirements.​"
"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."
"We are using the free version of the product. However, the paid version is expensive."
"I am using a community edition. I have not looked at the enterprise offering from Graylog."
"If you want something that works and do not have the money for Splunk or QRadar, take Graylog.​​"
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Computer Software Company
17%
Financial Services Firm
10%
Comms Service Provider
10%
Manufacturing Company
8%
Computer Software Company
16%
Comms Service Provider
11%
Government
8%
University
7%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
 

Questions from the Community

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.
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 ...
 

Comparisons

 

Also Known As

No data available
Graylog2
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Information Not Available
Blue Cross Blue Shield, eBay, Cisco, LinkedIn, SAP, King.com, Twilio, Deutsche Presse-Agentur
Find out what your peers are saying about Grafana Loki vs. Graylog and other solutions. Updated: July 2025.
864,053 professionals have used our research since 2012.