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It's a split decision.
These are not direct substitutes. Choose Graphite if your team wants AI-assisted pull-request reviews, stacked changes, a merge queue, and a unified PR inbox; its paid plans start at $20 per user/month with annual billing, while monthly pricing is unpublished. Choose Graylog for centralized logging or SIEM: its self-managed Open edition is free, while paid subscriptions start at $15,000/year. Graylog pricing is annual and starts at 10 GB/day or 100 GCUs.
01Side by side
| Graphite | Graylog | |
|---|---|---|
| Paid starting price | $20/user/month, annual billing; monthly price unpublished | $15,000/year; annual subscription, from 10 GB/day |
| Free plan | Hobby; limited AI reviews and Graphite Chat | Open; no volume restrictions, self-managed |
| Best for | Teams managing pull requests and code review | Security and operations teams managing logs |
| Core strength | AI code review, stacked PRs, and merge queue | SIEM, threat detection, and centralized log management |
| Learning curve | PR workflow; learning curve not published | Self-managed operation; learning curve not published |
| Integrations and data | GitHub, Slack, CLI, VS Code, and MCP | Syslog, CEF, GELF, Beats, Netflow, and more |
| Team and seat costs | $20 or $40 per user/month, billed annually | No user or device fees; volume-based paid tiers |
| Support | Enterprise includes premium support and SLAs | Open includes community support; TAM add-on unpriced |
Graphite Choose Graphite if
- Choose Graphite if you need AI-assisted PR reviews.
- Choose Graphite if you use stacked changes and merge queues.
- Choose Graphite if annual per-user pricing fits your team.
Graylog Choose Graylog if
- Choose Graylog if you need centralized logging and search.
- Choose Graylog if your security team needs SIEM detections.
- Choose Graylog if you can self-manage Open or budget $15,000/year.
02Pricing compared
Graphite has a free Hobby plan for personal projects, but its AI Reviews and Chat are limited. The pricing page lists Starter at $20 per user/month and Team at $40 per user/month with annual billing; monthly prices are not published. Enterprise pricing is also not published. Starter adds organization repositories and team features, while Team includes unlimited AI reviews and Chat, customizations, automations, and a merge queue.
Graylog Open is free and has no volume restrictions, but teams maintain it themselves. Paid subscriptions are annual: Graylog Enterprise starts at $15,000/year, and Graylog Security starts at $18,000/year. Those prices are equivalent to $1,250 and $1,500 per month when divided by 12, not monthly billing options. Both paid plans start at 10 GB/day or 100 GCUs. Graylog’s paid entry price is substantially higher, but the products solve different problems.
03Features and depth
Graphite is built around pull-request review and merging. Its features include AI reviews that flag critical bugs and suggest fixes, Graphite Chat for code context and CI failures, stacked PRs for sequencing smaller changes, a merge queue, and a team PR inbox. CI optimizations run stacking-integrated CI only when needed. That is a focused code-review workflow, not a logging or security-monitoring tool.
Graylog centralizes logs across systems, with search, dashboards, pipelines, and data routing listed for its free Open edition. Its paid offerings add capabilities for operations and security: Enterprise includes data-lake routing and tiering, while Security adds anomaly detection and maintained detection rules mapped to MITRE ATT&CK. Graylog also lists risk-scored incidents, AI-assisted investigations, prebuilt detections, and retention controls. Those are SIEM and log-management capabilities, not substitutes for Graphite’s PR reviews or merge queue. Compare them only if you are choosing between separate needs in your stack.
04Ease of use and learning curve
The main difference is what your team has to operate. Graphite’s workflow centers on PRs, stacks, reviews, and merging, and its Hobby plan includes a CLI, VSCode extension, and MCP. The published details do not specify setup requirements or a learning curve, so we would not treat the feature list as proof that adoption is effortless.
Graylog Open is explicitly aimed at teams able to maintain their own log management. That means the free price comes with operational ownership; paid plans add enterprise controls and support options, but the published pricing details do not explain setup effort. Pick based on whether your team needs a code-review workflow or can own a logging platform—not on an assumed ease-of-use winner.
Questions people ask
What are some alternatives to Graylog?
The published details do not compare Graylog with other log-management products, so we can’t responsibly name a best alternative. They do distinguish Graylog Open, Enterprise, and Security. Graphite is not a like-for-like alternative: it handles AI-assisted code reviews and pull-request workflows.
How much RAM does Graylog need?
The published Graylog information does not publish a RAM requirement. It lists paid-plan starting thresholds of 10 GB/day or 100 GCUs, but those are licensing thresholds, not memory recommendations. Check Graylog’s current technical documentation for system requirements before sizing a deployment.
Which is better, Grafana or ELK?
The published material does not compare Grafana with ELK or provide enough detail to rank them. It describes Graylog as a centralized logging and SIEM platform, with search, dashboards, pipelines, and data routing in Open. Choose based on your requirements and verified product documentation.
Can Graylog be used as a syslog server?
Graylog Open’s listed inputs include Syslog, alongside CEF, GELF, Beats, and Netflow. That supports saying it can receive syslog data, but the published details do not cover configuration steps or deployment requirements. Check Graylog’s documentation for setup guidance.