Graylog is unique in the fact that it offers both a cloud and open-source solution. Many people know it well from its open-source capabilities, which are often more than enough for their business needs.

But, Graylog open-source does have a few drawbacks. For one, users are limited in the data sources for logs. API query results are limited to 10,000 and can cause server lock up if that limit is exceeded.

If you opt for their paid services, you have to immediately jump in with quite a lot of cash. Their bottom-of-the-barrel price starts at $1250 per month.

The truth is that because of its shortcomings, many people have been left looking for Graylog alternatives.

If that sounds like you, then don’t worry! There are plenty of options out there that make for great logging solutions. For your convenience, we’ve put together a comprehensive list of the top 10 Graylog alternatives on the market today.

Graylog Features

Graylog, whether it’s the cloud or open-source solution, offers just a handful of options. They aren’t exactly a full-stack observability tool, but what they do offer works decently well. Here’s a short list of what you can expect:

• Graylog Security – SIEM
• Graylog Operations – Log management platform
• Graylog Open – Open-source log management basics
• Graylog Cloud – Hosted SIEM and log management
• Graylog API Security – API threat detection

Graylog Pricing

Although Graylog offers everything above, they do not offer prices for all of it. Of course, Graylog Open is free to use, but there are only two other pricing options available on their website.

Graylog Operations starts at $1250 per month and Graylog Security starts at $1550 per month.

Both of these solutions can be cloud or self-hosted.

It is important to note, too, that these are the prices Graylog offers if you opt to pre-pay for an entire annual subscription. That means that right off the bat, you’re forking out $15,000 minimum.

The 10 Best Graylog Alternatives

1. Sematext

Graylog might give you log management and SIEM, but that’s just about it. If you want full observability, then it won’t be enough. Sematext makes up for that difference by offering the following monitoring solutions: Log Monitoring, Synthetic Monitoring, Real User Monitoring, and Infrastructure Monitoring.

All these solutions will send you alerts when an issue is detected, but also have the insights needed to visualize, locate, and resolve the issue at hand.

Sematext is a full-stack observability solution. You get exactly what you need to optimize the performance of your website and apps, and troubleshoot when they’re running slow.

Sematext Logs is a centralized hub for all your logs, no matter where they come from in your whole infrastructure and applications. You can troubleshoot problems as they come across your infrastructure, all from this centralized environment.

Even better, Logs Pipelines allow you to adjust or eliminate log events that you don’t want at all. As a result, this helps you control your costs, allowing you to save your data usage for only the log events that are important to you. You can even trim unwanted fields, enhance your logs, or transform them as needed. This is something that Graylog doesn’t offer.

With Synthetic Monitoring, you can passively test the performance and availability of all your websites and APIs. Synthetics simulates user interactions to run tests from multiple global locations and private locations, for when you want to monitor services behind your firewall.

Sematext Experience, also known as Real User Monitoring (RUM), uses real user data to give you insight into tracking metrics like UI interactions and page load times. Data is collected in a comprehensive overview with User Satisfaction metrics that use Apdex Scores.

Infrastructure Monitoring gives you additional insights into the usage of your servers, cloud instances, containers, Kubernetes, and more. Keep tabs on search engines, databases, queues, and more when they’re operating within your infrastructure.

With Sematext, there are even tailor-made integrations for specific services for both Monitoring and Logs. You can start without having to configure these integrations yourself, as they come with out-of-the-box dashboards and alert rules.

Features

• Log Monitoring
• Full stack observability
• Infrastructure Monitoring
• Real User Monitoring
• Synthetic Monitoring
• SSL Certificate Monitoring
• Status Pages
• Alerting with anomaly detection
• Correlation
• 100+ integrations

Pros

• Flexible payment options, plans, and per-App pricing
• Logs Pipelines for granular cost control
• Seamless setup process with accommodating support staff according to a number of reviews on G2
• Internal and external monitoring capabilities
• Customizable alert triggers
• Smooth incorporation with Incident Management Systems

Cons

• Fewer integrations than some larger competitors
• No support for transaction tracing

Pricing

Sematext’s pricing options are easy to scale, depending on what you need, and come with zero obligations. You can cancel, upgrade, or downgrade at any time.

Log Monitoring has a free plan and the paid options start at just $50 per month. This $50 plan comes with 1GB of ingested data per day and 7 days of retention, but you can scale this up to meet your needs.

Synthetic Monitoring has two pricing options. First, you have the pay-as-you-go plan. This plan offers single HTTP Monitors for $2 each and $7 per Browser Monitor.

The other pricing option is for monitor bundles. These start at just $29 per month but offer you more options. With the $29 plan, you can get up to 40 HTTP Monitors, 5 Browser Monitors, and 30 days of retention.

Infrastructure Monitoring also has a free plan, but the paid plans start at $3.60 per host per month. The $3.6 price tag comes with a standard 7 days of retention already, but you can customize this to meet your needs.

Finally, Real User Monitoring starts at just $9 per month. This comes with a 25,000-page view allowance per month and gives you 7 days of retention. Just like all of the other options, though, this can be scaled up to meet your exact needs.

2. New Relic

New Relic stands out as a comprehensive observability tool, encompassing log management among its extensive features. Notably, the acquisition of New Relic by Francisco Partners for $6.5 billion suggests a focus on catering to massive corporations with substantial financial resources.

While New Relic is prominently recognized for its Performance and Infrastructure Monitoring capabilities, it offers robust functionality across various solutions. This includes features such as real user monitoring, synthetic monitoring, and log management, positioning it as a strong alternative to Graylog.

Features

• Browser monitoring
• Synthetic Monitoring
• Log management and monitoring
• Serverless monitoring
• Infrastructure Monitoring

Pros

• Offers a large number of integrations
• Customizable dashboards
• Agents that are easy to deploy

Cons

• Confusing pricing model that includes per-seat pricing
• Very expensive at scale
• Dependency on agent installation on various devices
• User interface feels outdated and clunky

Pricing

New Relic’s pricing is strange. They claim it to be transparent, but it is still quite complicated with all their upcharges and per-seat pricing.

With all plans, there’s a $49 monthly charge for what they call “core” users. This is an extra $49 per login seat.

If you want to have full access to the platform that you’re already paying a lot to use, the cost per seat goes up to $99 for Standard plans, $349 for Pro plans, and an insane $549 for Enterprise plans.

Remember, these prices are per user and only if you opt for a yearly pricing plan, forcing you to fork out a chunk of cash upfront. If you can believe it, the prices can actually get worse than that if you want to pay monthly.

There’s a 100GB allowance, and if you go over, you’ll have to pay an extra $0.30 per GB for “Original” data and $0.50 per GB for “Plus” data. They don’t really go into detail on what each data plan includes.

There’s also an allowance for synthetic runs. Each plan has a set number of runs that you’re allowed to perform each month. If you go over that allowance, you’ll be paying $0.005 per check. If you have a decent number of runs that you need to perform, that can add a good amount to your bill.

All this said, New Relic isn’t for everyone. Sematext offers much more reasonable pricing plans and pretty much all the same functionality. Check out Sematext vs New Relic for more details.

3. Loggly

Loggly is a log management-focused Graylog alternative that is owned by SolarWinds. This sounds strange to a lot of people, and it is honestly confusing.

What makes Loggly stand out from Graylog is the field explorer. This lets you search, filter, and summarize log events from a single view. You can view event frequency, select fields and values to filter, and apply custom parameters without typing in a query.

Loggly is also agentless, which means that all log-aggregating components in your stack have to be preconfigured to forward logs to its database.

Features

• Log management and analysis

Pros

• Unlimited users
• Built-in email alerting
• Comprehensive, graphical dashboards

Cons

• Limited functionality
• Anomaly detection only available with enterprise plan
• User reviews report slow data propagation
• Limited parsing rules

Pricing

Loggly offers 4 pricing options, the first one being free and very limited. The prices for the paid plans start at $79 per month. The Pro Plan is $159 per month, and the Enterprise plan comes in at $279.

Please note that these are only the starting prices, and they are for annual plans. If you choose Loggly, you are paying up front and are fully committed for a minimum of 1 year.

Want to see how Sematext stacks up? Check out our page on Sematext vs Loggly.

4. Datadog

Datadog stands as a potent SaaS monitoring solution, equipped with a wide range of robust features encompassing cloud infrastructure, application, container, network, logs, and serverless monitoring capabilities. Its adaptability and efficiency provide users with a holistic observability solution, granting full visibility into their application stack. But before we dive too deep, please note that Datadog is expensive. It absolutely is not for anyone other than large-budgeted corporations. Just take a look at what people are saying on X.

Moreover, Datadog boasts a diverse set of features for data analysis, alerting mechanisms, and customizable dashboards, rendering it an excellent option for users seeking a comprehensive monitoring solution.

What makes Datadog a standout Dynatrace alternative is the 21 individual solutions that it offers. Each comes with its own set of features and pricing plans.

Features:

• Browser monitoring
• Synthetic Monitoring
• Log management and monitoring
• Serverless monitoring
• Infrastructure Monitoring

Pros

• Flexible graphing widget
• Offers a wide variety of integrations
• User-defined thresholds
• Easy-to-visualize data
• Comprehensive monitoring capabilities

Cons

• Poor customer support
• The 21 individual solutions can be confusing
• Steep learning curve
• Crowded and complex UI
• Can become very expensive

Pricing

Datadog has 20+ individually priced solutions, so we won’t get into all of them. But, there are some solutions that we’ll mention.

• Log management starts at $0.10 per ingested GB and $1.70 per million log events
• Synthetic Monitoring is $7.20 per 10,000 API tests and $18 per 1,000 browser tests.
• Infrastructure monitoring starts at $18 per month per host
• Real User Monitoring starts at $2.20 per 1,000 sessions per month

Even just a quick glance can probably tell that your expenses can stack up quickly with Datadog.

If you really want to see how expensive Datadog is, then check out our page on Sematext vs Datadog. We broke down their pricing and compared it to Sematext so that you can get a clear visual of how much you could be saving.

5. Mezmo

Mezmo, formerly LogDNA, is entirely focused on log management. This makes it a great alternative to Graylog for those who are utilizing it as a log management solution.

Mezmo offers decent on-premise, cloud-based, private, and hybrid or multi-cloud logging and deployment models. Mezmo’s UI is also praised for being intuitive and straightforward.

Using the search option in Mezmo, you can quickly identify groups of logs with filters for key fields. The platform itself provides plenty of customization options for views and graphs. It even allows users to create custom dashboards for user-specific log events.

Features

• Log management and analysis

Pros

• Relatively cheap
• Free, limited option
• 3, 7, 14, or 30 days of retention

Cons

• Does not offer RUM, Synthetics, or Infrastructure Monitoring
• Limited to 25 users, unless you go with a custom plan

Pricing

Mezmo offers a free version of its tool, but it is very limited. If you want more features and opt for the “Professional” plan, you’ll pay anywhere between $0.80/GB and $1.80/G. It just depends on your retention period.

Mezmo also offers a custom plan, but there is no starting price mentioned. This plan can offer unlimited users and a variety of additional, more enterprise features.

Want to see how Sematext stacks up? Check out our page on Sematext vs Mezmo.

6. Sumo Logic

Sumo Logic is aimed at large corporations, but it also offers decent log management capabilities, making it a good choice of Graylog alternatives.

What makes it unique on this list is the cloud-based machine learning. This helps in processing big data, which makes it ideal for massive corporations.

If you’re looking for something more than basic log management, Sumo Logic is a decent option for end-to-end monitoring. It comes with root cause analysis, anomaly detection, and pre-set alerts.

Features

• Log Analytics
• Cloud SOAR
• Cloud SIEM
• Cloud Security Analytics
• Application Observability
• Infrastructure Monitoring

Pros

• Decent selection of observability and security tools
• Real-time insights
• Powered by AI
• Pre-set dashboards and alerts

Cons

• Expensive
• User reviews complain about the complexity of the tool
• User reviews complain about data collection lagging
• User reviews complain about slow searching for large data ranges

Pricing

Sumo Logic is able to process big data, which means that it is aimed at companies that have a lot of data. In other words, Sumo Logic is aimed at big corporations with big budgets.

If you’re looking for their 3 security solutions: Cloud SOAR, Cloud SIEM, and Cloud Security Analytics, you will have to contact their sales team for prices.

Application Observability starts at $2.31 per GB.

Infrastructure Monitoring starts at $0.50/1000 data points per minute (DPM) per day. DPM is the per-minute rate at which metric values are sent individually to Sumo Logic.

Not sure about how many DPMs your server, VM, Kubernetes pod, or container will send? How about a server with more CPU cores or more disk partitions? This makes it very difficult to predict costs.

Finally, Log Analytics is a staggering $3.30 per ingested GB. Quick math tells us that if you set yourself a 1GB per day limit, you’ll spend roughly $100 per month.

If you’re unfamiliar, 1GB logs/day is not very much for even very small applications. They offer a retention window of anywhere between 1 day and 5,000 days, but nowhere will you find any information on how it affects the cost.

7. Dynatrace

Continuing with the trend of all-in-one platforms, Dynatrace is a great alternative to Graylog. It has a big focus on Application Performance Monitoring (APM), but it offers all the same log management capabilities that Graylog does.

Dynatrace is great for big businesses looking for enterprise-level monitoring. It’s great for providing essential business metrics across numerous digital platforms and even implements casual AI to help automate complex workflows.

Features

• Log management and Analytics
• Full-stack Monitoring
• Infrastructure Monitoring
• Application Security
• Real User Monitoring
• Synthetic Monitoring

Pros

• Lots of observability options
• Priced based on data that you use
• Powerful alerting
• Powered by AI

Cons

• Very expensive
• User reviews report that the tool is complex to use
• User reviews report bad customer service and support
• User reviews report poor documentation

Pricing

Dynatrace offers their pricing in low numbers so as to seem cheap as low volumes. The truth is that if you scale it up to any reasonable number, it gets pricey.

For example, with log management, the prices start at $0.20 per ingested and processed GiB. To retain that GiB only costs you about $0.0007 per month, but to query that logging data, you have to pay $0.0035 per GiB!

Just to put this into perspective, for 1GB ingested and 7 days retention, that’s $6 ingestion + $0.0049 retention = $6.0049 per month. But, since Dynatrace charges $0.0035 per GiB for queries. With 7GB stored and queries every 10 minutes, that’s an extra $3.5 per day, or $111 per month total.

A synthetic request is $0.001. This might sound like a deal, but let’s put this into perspective. If you set up an HTTP monitor from a single location with 1-minute intervals, the monthly cost racks up. In terms of math, that equation looks like this: 0.001 * 1440 * 30 = $43. 1440 is the number of runs in a month and 30 is the average number of days in a month. This means that you’re paying $43 per month for a single HTTP monitor.

With Infrastructure Monitoring, they charge $0.04 per hour. With 24 hours in a day and the average month having 30 days, the monthly charge per host is 0.04 * 24 * 30, which totals $28.8. That’s $28.8 per host!

Real User Monitoring is charged based on the number of sessions. Each session will cost you $0.00225. Quick math shows us that 100,000 sessions would cost you $225 per month.

Want to see how Sematext stacks up? Check out our page on Sematext vs Dynatrace.

8. Splunk

Splunk is a well-known log management solution that’s been around forever. It offers a variety of observability solutions, making it an ideal Graylog alternative in terms of functionality. Splunk offers users Log Management, Synthetic monitoring, Infrastructure Monitoring, APM, Security Monitoring, and more.

Splunk’s Application Performance Monitoring (APM) is a solution for cloud-native, microservice-based applications. It also offers auto-instrumentation for popular stacks like Java, Kotlin, Python, Ruby, and more. Users also have the ability to create their own instrumentation using open APIs.

Splunk is one of the founding members and active contributors to OpenTelemetry, which means that Splunk APM supports open, neutral instrumentation.

Sadly, Splunk is another uber-pricey solution whose sales folks are targeting large enterprises with deep pockets ready to sign big contracts. See below for details.

Features

• Log aggregation and monitoring tool
• Application monitoring
• Infrastructure Monitoring
• Real User Monitoring
• Automated anomaly detection
• Synthetic Monitoring

Pros

• Ability to install add-ons
• On-premise or cloud-based
• Supports multiple formats
• Works well with unstructured data from various sources

Cons

• Pricey!
• Requires user to continuously stay updated with SPL (Splunk Processing Language)
• Outdated user interface design
• Limited data modeling and machine learning capabilities

Pricing

Splunk offers a decent number of monitoring, security, and detection tools. Unfortunately, they only offer prices for some of their observability tools, and even those prices are kind of buried in the website.

Synthetic Monitoring starts at just $1, but with that, you only get 10,000 Uptime requests. Incident Response starts at $5 per user per month. Real User Monitoring (RUM) starts at $14, but it only covers 10,000 sessions. Infrastructure Cloud Monitoring starts at $15 per month per host. Finally, APM starts at $55 per month per host.

Keep in mind that these prices are only available if you opt for annual billing, meaning you have to commit to Splunk for an entire year.

Want to see how Sematext stacks up to Splunk? Check out our page on Sematext vs Splunk.

9. Elastic Stack

Formerly known as ELK, Elastic Stack is an open-source solution for log management. All-in-all, Elastic Stack is made up of 4 distinct tools:

• Elasticsearch – Distributed JSON-based search engine
• Logstash – Log ingestion and pipeline processor
• Kibana – Data visualization for Elasticsearch
• Beats – Single-purpose, lightweight data shippers

The appeal to Elastic Stack is that it doesn’t cost anything to download and use. Of course, like any open-source solution, there will be additional management costs. That being said, once it’s installed, you will gain instant access to all the tools listed above. Using these tools, you can ship data from multiple sources, process it, and then subsequently store it in a central location.

It even comes with a web-based interface that allows you to visualize and analyze data fairly easily.

Because it’s an open-source tool, there’s a massive community of developers behind it. With this community comes an extensive library of plugins that you can use to further extend the capabilities of Elastic.

Features

• Log management and analytics

Pros

• Open-source
• Library of free plugins
• Supportive and helpful community

Cons

• Complex management requirements
• The cost of ownership can be expensive
• Reliability and uptime issues
• Data useability challenges
• As a result of the cons above – scaling challenges

Pricing

As we said before, there’s no upfront cost of downloading and using Elastic Stack. But, the cost of ownership, managing, and maintaining this open-source tool is where the bills start to stack up.

Just as an example, a daily log data ingestion of 100GB/day on AWS with industry-standard best practices for Elastic stack configuration and data retention creates a hosting cost somewhere around $180,000 annually. (Source: ChaosSearch)

Want to see how Sematext stacks up? Check out our page on Sematext vs Elastic Stack.

10. AppDynamics

AppDynamics is mostly known as an Application Performance Monitoring (APM) tool. However, like Graylog, it also offers log management and analytics. The platform allows users to ingest both structured and unstructured data and gain visibility into cloud, virtual, and physical infrastructures in real-time.

What makes AppDynamics useful as a Garylog alternative is its support for multi-cloud capabilities. The AppDynamics cloud provides decent visibility with insight via AIOps-driven alerts and notifications. It provides the user with easy-to-understand views of application performance and health, IT infrastructure, and cloud-based services.

Features

• Synthetic Monitoring
• Infrastructure Monitoring
• Application performance management
• Real User Monitoring
• Business performance monitoring
• Log Analytics

Pros

• Easy new application deployment
• Code-level visibility option for deep performance analysis
• Intuitive workflow monitoring within application tracking
• Predictive intelligence provides valuable insights into tool usability
• High transaction visibility for detailed performance analysis

Cons

• Very expensive
• User reviews complain of various difficulties across the entire platform
• Challenges with integrating with different event sources
• User Review complains of 3rd-party tools required to start/stop instances being monitored

Pricing

AppDynamics offers a range of pricing options, starting from $6 per month per CPU core for basic Infrastructure Monitoring. If you wish to utilize Synthetic Monitoring, plans start at $60 per month per CPU core, while the Enterprise Edition is available at a cost of $90 per month per CPU core.

It is a bit confusing that they choose to price their solutions based on CPU cores, and not by data or number of users. They do not offer any more insight into exactly what is covered in a single CPU core, so be weary before making a purchase.

It’s also worth noting that they charge $0.06 per month for 1,000 “tokens” for Real User Monitoring. They do not explain what a token is or what it covers.

Want to see how Sematext stacks up? Check out our page on Sematext vs AppDynamics.

Start Free Trial