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Grafana Loki vs Logstash comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive Summary

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
Logstash
Ranking in Log Management
25th
Average Rating
9.0
Reviews Sentiment
5.6
Number of Reviews
5
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 Logstash is 0.6%, up from 0.4% 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.
PRANIL CHANDARKAR - PeerSpot reviewer
Open-source accessibility and ease of implementation empower adaptable log management
As both a customer and an integrator, I think the best features in Logstash are that people prefer it because it is open to all, as it is an open-source version. The functionality of Logstash is quite easy to implement. I can say that the plugin ecosystem of Logstash is great. I have used some plugins for shell script monitoring and for SQL monitoring, and these are all working well with Logstash. The real-time processing capabilities of Logstash are also pretty fine with the tool. When I use the community edition, I have to do many things manually. If I am using enterprise Elastic, then that is taken care of by the Elastic native machine learning.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"The most valuable feature of the solution is the tool's GUI. The solution's GUI is very user-friendly."
"The effectiveness of filters is pivotal for optimizing the search process and extracting the specific information we need from the extensive log data."
"The tool can be used in multi-cluster environments."
"The solution's stability has never been a problem. Stability-wise, I rate the solution a nine to ten out of ten."
"Grafana agent is very lightweight and does not cost significant resources of our cluster."
"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."
"The most valuable part of Loki is the ability to filter logs by keywords and devices."
"The transformation means we ship the logs in the way that we want them to be presented in Kibana, which is the main function we use Logstash for."
"I can collect logs from various data sources, including hardware."
"Logstash has numerous plugins for inputs and outputs, allowing it to work well in environments that do not contain other Elastic components."
"We have three or four Logstash servers for high availability."
"Everything aligns well with improving our organization."
 

Cons

"The solution has shortcomings regarding security monitoring-oriented features that need improvement."
"We encountered certain limitations when it came to alerting, particularly when dealing with specific data sources."
"We face some bugs when we install the latest version of Grafana Loki."
"Visualization-wise, Grafana Loki's dashboard looks a little outdated compared to other open-source visualization tools like Chronograf."
"It would be beneficial if Loki could directly access Windows Server logs or events directly from the servers."
"The product must improve its UI."
"The Docker container partition feature needs improvement as they do not reuse the space and goes into a pending state."
"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."
"An enhancement we could implement is the ability to cluster Logstash to exist in more than one node."
"There can be a UI to implement with Logstash. Currently, I have to work with config files and everything."
"We still have a problem with importing the log system."
"Almost all the research can be very bad. We still have a problem with importing the log system."
"The product needs to improve its compatibility."
"Elastic does not provide proper support for Logstash worldwide, and I rate their technical support as one out of ten."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The cost is less than other paid services like CloudWatch."
"The solution is open source."
"I use the solution's open-source version. Grafana Loki is a completely free solution for me."
"We use a free version."
"Grafana Loki is an open-source solution."
"Grafana Loki is a free, open-source solution."
"The pricing structure varies based on the number of users; there might be specific taxes to pay for it."
"My company doesn't need to pay for the licensing cost of the solution."
Information not available
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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%
Financial Services Firm
17%
Computer Software Company
12%
Government
9%
Educational Organization
6%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
No data available
 

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 Logstash?
I can collect logs from various data sources, including hardware.
What needs improvement with Logstash?
An enhancement we could implement is the ability to cluster Logstash to exist in more than one node.
What is your primary use case for Logstash?
A use case for using Logstash that we have involves integration servers that log in files in a non-transformed way. We have more than four servers that log in files, and when we have an issue, we c...
 

Comparisons

 

Overview

Find out what your peers are saying about Grafana Loki vs. Logstash and other solutions. Updated: July 2025.
864,053 professionals have used our research since 2012.