Elastic (ELK Stack) vs Grafana Loki
No clear leader: Elastic (ELK Stack) (68.4) and Grafana Loki (67.7) are within the 5-point margin; treat as a tie. The attribute-by-attribute breakdown below, with a source and date on every value, is the honest way to compare them.
Capabilities
Feature-by-feature on the axes that matter for log management software. “-” means undocumented, not absent.
What each one is
The product in its own terms, so the numbers below have context.
Elastic (ELK Stack)
A cloud-based observability and search platform that ingests logs from multiple sources, automatically structures them with AI, and enables full-text search, alerting, dashboards, and machine learning analysis on unstructured data.
Grafana Loki
Loki is a distributed log aggregation platform designed for simplicity and cost efficiency. It stores logs with only label metadata indexed rather than full-text content, making it straightforward to operate and integrate with Prometheus and Grafana for unified observability.
Pricing
List pricing as published by each vendor, with the date we read it. Always verify at the source before you buy.
Elastic (ELK Stack)
From $99/month. Subscription model with free 14-day trial. Usage-based pricing for cloud resources (120 GB storage / 2 zones baseline).
- StandardFrom $99/month. Free 14-day trial.
- Distributed Elasticsearch Platform on AWS, Azure, GCP
- Elasticsearch Query Language (ES|QL)
- AutoOps monitoring
- Hundreds of out-of-the-box integrations
- Discover, dashboards, alerting
- +4 more
- GoldFrom $114/month. Includes reporting and third-party integrations.
- Everything in Standard
- Reporting
- Third-party alerting actions
- Watcher
- Enterprise Search
- +2 more
- PlatinumFrom $131/month. ML and advanced security included.
- Everything in Gold
- Advanced security features
- Machine learning: anomaly detection, supervised learning
- Cross-cluster replication
- Semantic and vector search with ML models (ELSER, e5)
- +5 more
- EnterpriseFrom $184/month. Full AI suite and advanced automation.
- Everything in Platinum
- Searchable snapshots in cold/frozen tiers
- Elastic Maps Server
- Cross-cluster search and ES|QL Data Federation
- GPU inference with Elastic Inference Service
- +10 more
Grafana Loki
Free tier available. Pro from $19/month + metered usage with volume discounts. Enterprise from $25,000/year.
- FreeFree
- All Grafana Cloud services with limited usage
- Community support
- 14 days retention for metrics, logs, traces, profiles, & k6 performance tests
- ProFrom $19/month + usage with volume discounts
- Pay as you go above the Free tier
- 8X5 email support
- 13 months retention for metrics
- 30 days retention for logs, traces, profiles, & k6 performance tests
- Automatic volume discounts
- EnterpriseContact sales
- Premium support
- Custom retention
- Deployment flexibility (Public Cloud, Federal Cloud, Bring Your Own Cloud)
- Scalable pricing based on annual commit and volume discounts
Platform & deployment
Where each product runs and how it can be hosted. A dash means undocumented, not unsupported.
Integrations
What each product connects to. Counts come from the vendor's own integration directory where one exists.
Elastic (ELK Stack)
- OpenAI
- Anthropic
- Jina AI
- Amazon Bedrock
- Google Vertex AI
- Microsoft Azure AI
- Mistral
- Cohere
- Hugging Face
- NVIDIA
- IBM watsonx
- LlamaIndex
- LangChain
- Vectorize.io
- Slack
- Jira
- PagerDuty
- ServiceNow
- Microsoft Teams
- xMatters
- IBM Resilient
- Filebeat
- Metricbeat
- Heartbeat
- +7 more
Grafana Loki
- Prometheus
- Grafana
- Kubernetes
- Docker
Comparison generated from independently-sourced facts. Every value links to its source and retrieval date. See the method.