Graylog alternatives

4 tools to consider instead of Graylog, shown against it.

Graylog Elasticsearch OpenSearch Grafana Loki Sumo Logic
Vendor Graylog, Inc. Elasticsearch B.V. (Elastic) OpenSearch Software Foundation (originated at Amazon) Grafana Labs Sumo Logic, Inc.
Pricing model Free tier + paid plans Usage-based Open source + paid options Free tier + paid plans Quote only
Free tier Yes Yes Yes Yes No
Deployment Cloud, Self-hosted Cloud, Self-hosted Cloud, Self-hosted Cloud, Self-hosted Cloud
Open source Yes (SSPL (Graylog Open); proprietary (Enterprise/Security)) No (Elastic License 2.0 / SSPL (source-available; AGPL-3.0 option since 2024)) Yes (Apache-2.0) Yes (AGPL-3.0) No
Best for Teams wanting a free, self-hosted log management core with a clear upgrade path to SIEM features. Teams needing a flexible, self-hostable search/log backend that can double as a SIEM without a separate platform. Teams that want an Elasticsearch-compatible, fully open-source log analytics stack without license-model risk. Teams already on Grafana/Prometheus who want cheap log storage without full-text indexing overhead. DevOps and SecOps teams wanting unlimited-ingest SaaS log analytics with a single credits pool across use cases.
Pricing

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.

Elastic Cloud Hosted starts from a base monthly rate for a reference config plus usage-based instance pricing; self-managed is free with paid subscription tiers for advanced features.

Standard from $99/month
Gold from $114/month
Platinum from $131/month
Enterprise from $184/month

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 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.

Credits-based consumption model: unlimited ingest, but analytics activity draws down prepaid credits at a rate that varies by data tier; no flat public per-GB rate.

Essentials quote
Enterprise Suite quote

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

Features
  • 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 inverted-index search at petabyte scale
  • Kibana for dashboards and log/trace exploration
  • Vector and hybrid search (dense + lexical)
  • Elastic Security app for SIEM on the same indices
  • Serverless or provisioned hosted deployment options
  • Rich ingest pipelines via Logstash and Beats/Elastic Agent
  • 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
  • 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
  • LogReduce pattern recognition across high-volume log streams
  • Cloud SIEM built on the same log platform
  • Unified logs, metrics and traces
  • Prebuilt apps for common cloud services
  • Real-time dashboards and alerting
  • Credits-based cost model decoupling ingest from query cost

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