Graylog vs. Kibana

Overview
ProductRatingMost Used ByProduct SummaryStarting Price
Graylog
Score 8.8 out of 10
N/A
Graylog, headquartered in Houston, offers their eponymous platform for centralized log management that helps users find meaning in data faster so as to take action immediately. Graylog is available via Enterprise and Cloud plans, but also has a Small Business Plan, and an Open (free) plan with limited features.N/A
Kibana
Score 8.3 out of 10
N/A
Kibana allows users to visualize Elasticsearch data and navigate the Elastic Stack so you can do anything from tracking query load to understanding the way requests flow through your apps.N/A
Pricing
GraylogKibana
Editions & Modules
No answers on this topic
No answers on this topic
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
GraylogKibana
Free Trial
NoNo
Free/Freemium Version
YesNo
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
NoNo
Entry-level Setup FeeNo setup feeNo setup fee
Additional Details
More Pricing Information
Community Pulse
GraylogKibana
Considered Both Products
Graylog
Chose Graylog
Blackfire and Sentry both offer more resources, not only monitoring logs but also performance and real time erros - on those areas they are more complete and generalistic tools. Graylog, however, is better on log saving, search and analysis alone, because of its flexible and …
Chose Graylog
Graylog has the simplest deployment, and it is ready to work in a few clicks. Although we also use Grafana and Zabbix in our environment, the role of processing log data is better suited to Graylog. In our case, we use Graylog to process and analyze web application logs, such …
Chose Graylog
Azure Monitor is not exactly what I mean, but I couldn't find Azure Application Insights. Anyway, for a large organization, Azure makes more sense than using Graylog because a lot of logging will already be inside Azure. And you don't want to have two "central" logging …
Chose Graylog
We use the free edition, because it is free and open source. We evaluated numerous other products, but we decided to go down the Graylog track because of initial costs. While the competition (Splunk, AlienVault, etc.) are very good products and come highly recommended, it …
Chose Graylog
In terms of log aggregation, the free product fully stacks up with the competitors listed. Full control over the data ingests for flexible configuration. Graylog even better on that front than Alienvault USM because you cannot configure the variable mapping. We haven't used …
Chose Graylog
Graylog does what other similar products that cost more do, but the more expansive one typically has more features or are multiple products wrapped in one. We went with Graylog because it does everything we need it too, and the price was less than other and fit into our budget. …
Chose Graylog
We previously used Syslog(-ng) and considered moving to the Logstash with Kibana as part of the standard ELK stack as we are consumers of ELK in other scenarios, but we determined that maintaining a distributed Graylog system was going to require less work overtime for our main …
Chose Graylog
Graylog provides some great functionality for free. There are some more premium products that would handle more logs and would be a little easier to configure.
Kibana
Chose Kibana
Well when it comes to using Kibana when compared to Datadog, I can say that Kibana is pretty [...] cheap. Apart from APM and Datadog hosted agents, Kibana gives a good competition to Datadog for real time log analysis as well as metrics analysis.
While OpsGenie is a great tool …
Chose Kibana
Stackdriver and CloudWatch are not as intuitive and easy-to-use as Kibana, and do not offer such advanced filtering capabilities.

Google BigQuery is not really suitable for real-time searches.
Features
GraylogKibana
BI Standard Reporting
Comparison of BI Standard Reporting features of Product A and Product B
Graylog
-
Ratings
Kibana
7.0
Ratings
14% below category average
Pixel Perfect reports00 Ratings6.00 Ratings
Customizable dashboards00 Ratings8.00 Ratings
Report Formatting Templates00 Ratings7.00 Ratings
Ad-hoc Reporting
Comparison of Ad-hoc Reporting features of Product A and Product B
Graylog
-
Ratings
Kibana
6.7
Ratings
16% below category average
Drill-down analysis00 Ratings8.00 Ratings
Formatting capabilities00 Ratings7.00 Ratings
Integration with R or other statistical packages00 Ratings5.00 Ratings
Report sharing and collaboration00 Ratings6.90 Ratings
Report Output and Scheduling
Comparison of Report Output and Scheduling features of Product A and Product B
Graylog
-
Ratings
Kibana
6.8
Ratings
18% below category average
Publish to Web00 Ratings8.00 Ratings
Publish to PDF00 Ratings8.00 Ratings
Report Versioning00 Ratings6.00 Ratings
Report Delivery Scheduling00 Ratings6.00 Ratings
Delivery to Remote Servers00 Ratings6.00 Ratings
Data Discovery and Visualization
Comparison of Data Discovery and Visualization features of Product A and Product B
Graylog
-
Ratings
Kibana
6.7
Ratings
14% below category average
Pre-built visualization formats (heatmaps, scatter plots etc.)00 Ratings8.00 Ratings
Location Analytics / Geographic Visualization00 Ratings7.00 Ratings
Predictive Analytics00 Ratings6.00 Ratings
Pattern Recognition and Data Mining00 Ratings6.00 Ratings
Best Alternatives
GraylogKibana
Small Businesses
SolarWinds Papertrail
SolarWinds Papertrail
Score 8.9 out of 10
Supermetrics
Supermetrics
Score 9.7 out of 10
Medium-sized Companies
Sumo Logic
Sumo Logic
Score 9.0 out of 10
Supermetrics
Supermetrics
Score 9.7 out of 10
Enterprises
Sumo Logic
Sumo Logic
Score 9.0 out of 10
IBM Analytics Engine
IBM Analytics Engine
Score 7.1 out of 10
All AlternativesView all alternativesView all alternatives
User Ratings
GraylogKibana
Likelihood to Recommend
9.0
(0 ratings)
8.0
(0 ratings)
Usability
9.0
(0 ratings)
8.0
(0 ratings)
Support Rating
3.6
(0 ratings)
7.7
(0 ratings)
User Testimonials
GraylogKibana
Likelihood to Recommend
If you already have a basic understanding of Elasticsearch and/or MongoDB, Graylog will be a great fit when it comes to log aggregation. It will be a decent option even if you don't have any experience but have the time and willingness to roll up your sleeves that learning those tools will require. Graylog supports plugins to extend functionality for things like SNMP traps, telemetry collection, and solar flares. As is the case with most software with plugins, if the core functionality for which you are looking (i.e. not logging) is based on a plugin, Graylog probably isn't for you. The majority of the plugins in the marketplace are developed by third-parties looking to solve their specific use case so bug fixes and new features are not a given.
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Great for teams big and small that want a single pane of glass for understanding their systems, from dev, to staging, to production. Well-suited for teams that need to preserve logs for long-term compliance reasons, and also mine their logs for useful operational insights. Highly recommended as both an open source project and a commercial offering with fantastic paid support.
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Pros
  • Very fast process of hugh amounts of information
  • Easy to built dashboards with rich visual display
  • Intuitive filter string auto-complete
  • Alerts based on differents scenarios and triggers
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  • searching
  • near real-time
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Cons
  • Configuration can be hard to understand
  • More quickly and easy ways to search for data
  • Auto-categorization of log entries would be excellent
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  • Improved tutorial/ user guidance
  • Improved labeling for sources
  • Ease of login and sharing with coworkers
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Usability
Graylog is more on the technical side of user interface, with a steep learning curve that can be challenging for non-tech people. Once its logic is understood, however, its great to use and people have no issues to find the information they need. It's configuration is also not that easy, however this we consider impossible to avoid in spite of the type of service it does
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Its usability is generally good and it provides teams with a basic to intermediate understanding about data visualization. It is very user-friendly when it comes to creating dashboards. The UI is very good and simple. Its integration with other tools for alerting and reporting is amazing. But its advance features have a learning curve and a first timer needs some time to use the advance features.
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Support Rating
Community support does not give simple straightforward answers; simply search up Graylog Issues and look at some of the responses on the forums. The documentation is your only hope if you are on the free version, as you can NOT purchase only support. The few times I have worked with Graylog Enterprise support they were great though.
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I have not contacted Kibana support.
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Alternatives Considered
Azure Monitor is not exactly what I mean, but I couldn't find Azure Application Insights. Anyway, for a large organization, Azure makes more sense than using Graylog because a lot of logging will already be inside Azure. And you don't want to have two "central" logging locations. But Azure is chaos and highly "not intuitive." So for small and mid-size organizations, Graylog is still the better option.
Read full review
Well when it comes to using Kibana when compared to Datadog, I can say that Kibana is pretty [...] cheap. Apart from APM and Datadog hosted agents, Kibana gives a good competition to Datadog for real time log analysis as well as metrics analysis. While OpsGenie is a great tool for alerting, it lacks visualization when compared to Kibana. Grafana is another opensource tool that gives a lot of insights like Kibana but Grafana cannot be easily integrated with OpenSearch.
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Return on Investment
  • Able to offer monitoring services to new and existing clients to increase revenue
  • Staff have increased billing percentage
  • Potential to expand security services
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  • First stop when diagnosing production performance issues.
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ScreenShots