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Grafana Loki vs Graylog
Loki indexes only labels to keep storage cheap inside a Grafana/Prometheus stack; Graylog indexes full log content and gives you a dedicated search UI.
Side by side
| Grafana Loki | Graylog | |||||||||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Vendor | Grafana Labs | Graylog, Inc. | ||||||||||||
| Pricing model | Free tier + paid plans | Free tier + paid plans | ||||||||||||
| Free tier | Yes | Yes | ||||||||||||
| Deployment | Cloud, Self-hosted | Cloud, Self-hosted | ||||||||||||
| Open source | Yes (AGPL-3.0) | Yes (SSPL (Graylog Open); proprietary (Enterprise/Security)) | ||||||||||||
| Best for | Teams already on Grafana/Prometheus who want cheap log storage without full-text indexing overhead. | Teams wanting a free, self-hosted log management core with a clear upgrade path to SIEM features. | ||||||||||||
| Pricing | Free to self-host; Grafana Cloud's Pro tier charges a small platform fee plus per-GB rates for processing, writing and retaining logs.
Prices read from the vendor's own page on September 21, 2026. Vendors change prices; check the source before you budget. | Graylog Open is free with no volume cap; Enterprise and Security editions are licensed annually by daily processed-data volume (GB/day) or prepaid consumption units (GCU).
Prices read from the vendor's own page on September 21, 2026. Vendors change prices; check the source before you budget. | ||||||||||||
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Verdict
Both are open-source, self-hostable log platforms with a free tier good enough to run in production, but they index data differently, and that decides how each one feels to use. Grafana Loki indexes only a small set of metadata labels, the way Prometheus indexes metrics, and leaves the log content itself unindexed. That keeps ingestion and storage costs low, but ad hoc full-text search across log bodies is slower than in a platform that indexes everything. Graylog is built on Elasticsearch/OpenSearch underneath, so it indexes full log content and gives you fast free-text search through its own web UI, at the storage and indexing cost that comes with indexing everything.
The other real difference is where each tool fits into your existing stack. Loki is designed to run alongside Grafana and Prometheus/Mimir, sharing dashboards and a query language (LogQL mirrors PromQL) with your metrics stack. Graylog is a standalone log management product with its own UI, not dependent on Grafana, and its free "Open" edition has no volume cap, with a clear paid upgrade path to Enterprise or Security (SIEM) editions licensed by daily ingest volume.
Choose Grafana Loki if
- You already run Grafana and Prometheus and want logs to live in the same dashboards and query language as your metrics.
- Your queries are mostly "show me logs matching these labels" rather than free-text search across log bodies, and you want to minimize indexing cost.
- You are comfortable self-hosting or paying Grafana Cloud's per-GB rates for logs.
Choose Graylog if
- You want fast full-text search across log content without designing a label strategy first.
- You want a dedicated log management UI rather than folding logs into a broader dashboarding tool.
- You may need to grow into SIEM-style detection later — Graylog Security sits on the same platform as a paid upgrade.
What they share
Both are self-hostable at no license cost, both have a straightforward path to a vendor-hosted cloud option, and neither locks you into a proprietary query language you can't inspect — LogQL and Graylog's search syntax are both documented and portable in spirit, even if not identical. See data observability.
Last reviewed September 22, 2026