Elasticsearch vs Grafana Loki
A side-by-side comparison of two self-hosted apps from related categories
— licensing, setup difficulty, resource needs, and what each one
replaces.
Not the right match-up?
Compare Elasticsearch with
choose an app… Meilisearch Milvus Perplexica SearXNG Qdrant Typesense Sonic Kibana ZincSearch Weaviate Tantivy SearX OpenSearch Manticore Search Whoogle Search Quickwit Sonic Note Meili-alt Bleve Orama Lunr.js ParadeDB Morphic Graylog Vespa MindSearch RediSearch Hound Pagefind Marqo Infinity Lucene Note Solr-alt Toshi mtail YaCy Morphik Farfalle Apache Lucene Swirl tinysearch Stork Stract Pyserini Search VictoriaLogs Marginalia Search Mwmbl Vald Apache Solr lnx Sist2 Websurfx Fess Blast PISA Xapian Groonga LibreX 4get Meilisearch UI Meme Search Whoosh Araa Search LibreY Recoll Summa OramaCore MetaGer DocFetcher PeARS
Compare Grafana Loki with
choose an app… Uptime Kuma Netdata Grafana Superset Prometheus Metabase Portainer CE Umami PostHog CasaOS Glance What's Up Status Postiz Netron Glances Homepage InfluxDB Grafana k6 Redash Plausible Dashy Apache SkyWalking Beszel Dockge Jaeger Vector Matomo Kibana GoAccess Cube cAdvisor Telegraf VictoriaMetrics Zipkin Upptime Phlare Logstash Sampler Dashboard Thanos Druid Dozzle Pinpoint APM Unleash Node Exporter Fluentd OpenSearch Rybbit Gatus Grafana Pyroscope Homer Quickwit Checkmate Healthchecks HyperDX Benphelps Homepage Heimdall Beszel Hub Alertmanager Graylog ntopng Scrutiny Fluent Bit Coroot OpenTelemetry Collector Hertzbeat Statup Status WatchYourLAN NetAlertX Pulse Monitor Zabbix Graphite Speedtest Tracker Cortex Blackbox Exporter Grafana Tempo Grafana Mimir Kener Parca LibreNMS Monitoror Errbit Uptrace mtail Grafana OnCall Redis Exporter Vmstat Exporter PostgreSQL Exporter Grafana Alloy collectd Pushgateway Robusta Cstate Karma Kafka Exporter MySQL Server Exporter Kapacitor Perses Checkmk Kuberhealthy Icinga 2 PHP Server Monitor SNMP Exporter Process Exporter Munin VictoriaLogs Elasticsearch Exporter Grafana Beyla Nagios Core NGINX Prometheus Exporter Statping-ng Bugsink Smokeping Vigil Cacti Mailrise Domain Locker Proxmox VE Exporter Oncall Peekaping OpenNMS Horizon Shinken ElastAlert 2 Grafana Faro Sensu Go Percona Monitoring and Management Icinga Web 2 Kuma Mieru JSON Exporter Smokeping Prober Argus Monitor Web PHP-FPM Exporter Cloudprober Ping Exporter Monika IPMI Exporter SQL Exporter smartctl Exporter Pandora FMS Community Thruk NetXMS Apache Exporter NUT Exporter Speedtest Exporter Monit Naemon Bytebot Watch Fail2Ban Webinterface Lunalytics Observium Phoenix Panel
Feature Elasticsearch Grafana Loki Category Search Engines Monitoring & Status License Elastic-2.0 AGPL-3.0 Language Java Go Setup difficulty Hard Medium Min. RAM 2,048 MB 512 MB Deployment docker, kubernetes, bare-metal docker, kubernetes, helm GitHub stars ★ 77,808 ★ 28,687 First released 2010 2018 Replaces Algolia, Splunk Splunk, Datadog Logs
Why pick each one
Choose Grafana Loki if… Cheap to run compared to full-text indexers Familiar Prometheus-style labels Grafana Loki details
Frequently asked questions Is Elasticsearch or Grafana Loki better? Neither is universally better. Elasticsearch has the larger community, while Grafana Loki is simpler to set up (medium difficulty). Choose based on the comparison table above and your own setup.
Are Elasticsearch and Grafana Loki free and open-source? Yes. Elasticsearch is licensed under Elastic-2.0 and Grafana Loki under AGPL-3.0. Both can be self-hosted at no software cost.
Can I run Elasticsearch and Grafana Loki with Docker? Elasticsearch: yes. Grafana Loki: yes.