ELK Stack
8.3#10 in log management softwareFree planFree planAPILinuxmacOSSelf-hosted
VisitELK Stack vs Grafana Loki
Grafana Loki
8.9#1 in log management softwareFrom $19 a monthFree planWebAPILinuxSelf-hosted
VisitWhat both publish
| Fact | ELK Stack | Grafana Loki |
|---|---|---|
| Deployment options | Available as Serverless, Hosted, or self-managed Elasticsearch. | self-hosted |
| Free plan | Yes | Yes |
| Integrations | Elastic offers over 300 turn-key integrations for Search, Security, Observability, and cloud providers including AWS, Azure, and GCP. | Official documentation lists Grafana Alloy as the recommended collector and describes OpenTelemetry, Promtail, Fluent Bit, Fluentd, Vector, Logstash and other clients. |
| Live log tailing | Yes | Yes |
| Log pipelines | Yes | Yes |
| Purpose | The Elastic Stack combines Elasticsearch, Kibana, Beats, and Logstash to take data from any source and format for search, analysis, and visualization. | Loki is a log aggregation system designed to store and query logs from applications and infrastructure. |
ELK Stack plans
- Basic—
- Logs EssentialsPriced on request
- Complete$0.09 a month
- Standard$99 a month
- Gold$114 a month
- Platinum$131 a month
Grafana Loki plans
- Grafana Cloud Logs FreeFree
- Grafana Loki OSS self-hostedFree
- Loki (self-hosted)Free
- Grafana Cloud Logs Pro$19 a month
- Grafana Cloud Logs Enterprise—
Pick ELK Stack if…
The Elastic Stack suits teams that need search, analytics, visualization, centralized logging, monitoring, or security analytics. Its hosted and self-managed deployment options support different infrastructure choices.
Pick Grafana Loki if…
Loki suits teams that need to aggregate and query application or infrastructure logs and can manage a self-hosted deployment or use Grafana Cloud Logs. Its label-based indexing and LogQL are central considerations for selecting it.