Grafana Loki alternatives

3 tools to consider instead of Grafana Loki, shown against it.

Grafana Loki Graylog OpenSearch Better Stack
Vendor Grafana Labs Graylog, Inc. OpenSearch Software Foundation (originated at Amazon) Better Stack, Inc.
Pricing model Free tier + paid plans Free tier + paid plans Open source + paid options Usage-based
Free tier Yes Yes Yes Yes
Deployment Cloud, Self-hosted Cloud, Self-hosted Cloud, Self-hosted Cloud
Open source Yes (AGPL-3.0) Yes (SSPL (Graylog Open); proprietary (Enterprise/Security)) Yes (Apache-2.0) No
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. Teams that want an Elasticsearch-compatible, fully open-source log analytics stack without license-model risk. Smaller engineering teams wanting straightforward log search plus uptime/on-call in one tool with published pricing.
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.

Free (Grafana Cloud) $0
Pro (Grafana Cloud) $19/month platform fee + usage
Enterprise from $25,000/year

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).

Graylog Open Free
Graylog Enterprise from $15,000/year
Graylog Security from $18,000/year

Prices read from the vendor's own page on September 21, 2026. Vendors change prices; check the source before you budget.

The software is free under Apache-2.0; cost is entirely the compute/storage of self-hosting or a managed service like Amazon OpenSearch Service.

Pricing has not been verified yet — see the vendor's site.

Free tier includes 3GB/month logs and 10 uptime monitors; paid usage bills per-GB ingested/retained for logs and per-responder for incident management.

Free $0
Logs ingestion $0.10-$0.35/GB
Logs retention $0.05-$0.18/GB/month
Incident management responder $9/responder/month

Prices read from the vendor's own page on September 21, 2026. Vendors change prices; check the source before you budget.

Features
  • Label-based indexing instead of full-text indexing
  • LogQL query language aligned with PromQL
  • Native integration with Grafana dashboards and alerting
  • Multi-tenant, horizontally scalable architecture
  • Object-storage-backed retention (S3/GCS/Azure Blob)
  • Promtail/Grafana Alloy agents for log shipping
  • Centralized log collection, parsing and search
  • Custom dashboards and alert definitions
  • Data tiering between hot/warm storage
  • Archiving and compliance reporting (Enterprise)
  • Anomaly detection and correlation rules (Security)
  • Self-hosted or Graylog-managed cloud deployment
  • Distributed search and log analytics on a Lucene-based engine
  • OpenSearch Dashboards for visualization
  • Security Analytics plugin for detection rules
  • k-NN vector search
  • Index lifecycle management for hot/warm/cold tiering
  • Fully open-source, forkable under Apache-2.0
  • ClickHouse-backed log search and dashboards
  • SQL-based querying over logs and traces
  • Uptime and synthetic monitoring
  • On-call scheduling and incident management
  • Status pages with custom domains
  • Transparent, publicly listed per-GB pricing

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