Amazon CloudWatch Logs vs Grafana Loki
Amazon CloudWatch Logs
aws.amazon.comGrafana Loki
grafana.comSide by side
| Figure | Amazon CloudWatch Logs | Grafana Loki |
|---|---|---|
| Price from | $0.03/mo | $19/mo |
| Free plan | Yes | Yes |
| Free trial | — | — |
| Open source | — | Yes |
| Web | Yes | Yes |
| Windows | — | Yes |
| Linux | — | Yes |
| API | Yes | Yes |
| Self-hosted | — | Yes |
| Plans published | 5 | 5 |
| Spec score · Log Analysis Software | 9.2 (#1) | 9.1 (#4) |
| Spec score · Log Management Software | 9.2 (#5) | 9.4 (#3) |
| Spec score · Log Monitoring Tools | 9.1 (#5) | 9.2 (#4) |
| Deployment options | cloud | self-hosted |
| Free plan | No | Yes |
| Integrations | CloudWatch Logs integrates with Amazon OpenSearch Service for querying and analyzing logs without moving or duplicating the data. | Official documentation lists Grafana Alloy as the recommended collector and describes OpenTelemetry, Promtail, Fluent Bit, Fluentd, Vector, Logstash and other clients. |
| Live Tail | Live Tail provides interactive real-time analysis of streaming log data from a central view. | Yes |
| Log pipelines | Yes | Yes |
| Purpose | Amazon CloudWatch collects and stores logs from AWS resources, applications, services, on-premises resources, and other clouds. | Loki is a log aggregation system designed to store and query logs from applications and infrastructure. |
| Structured log parsing | Yes | Yes |
| Support | The CloudWatch page directs users with questions to contact AWS. | Grafana directs Loki users to its community forum, Grafana Labs Slack, and the Loki project email for help. |
Plans
Amazon CloudWatch Logs
- Logs data ingestion$0.50 a month
- Logs archive storage$0.03 a month
- Pay-as-you-goPrice not published
- Free tierFree
- Paid usagePrice not published
Grafana Loki
- Grafana Cloud Logs FreeFree
- Grafana Loki OSS self-hostedFree
- Loki (self-hosted)Free
- Grafana Cloud Logs Pro$19 a month
- Grafana Cloud Logs EnterprisePrice not published
In their own words
Amazon CloudWatch Logs
Amazon CloudWatch Logs collects and stores logs from AWS resources, applications, services, on-premises systems, and other clouds. It offers log pipelines, structured parsing, archive export, and live tailing through web and API access. Logs Insights lets users query records with filters, aggregations, and regular expressions, then visualize time-series data or export results to CloudWatch Dashboards. Logs are available in Standard for real-time monitoring and advanced analytics, or Infrequent Access for ad-hoc queries and forensic analysis. Live Tail provides a central interactive view of streaming logs, while anomaly detection uses machine learning to identify patterns and changes. Users can search and analyze logs across accounts from a monitoring account at no additional cost. The free tier includes 5 GB for ingestion, archive storage, and query scans, plus 1,800 Live Tail minutes per month. Usage-based charges are billed at month end, with no upfront commitment or minimum fee; rates vary by Region.
Grafana Loki
Grafana Loki is a free, AGPLv3-licensed log aggregation system for storing and querying application and infrastructure logs. It can be self-hosted on Linux or accessed through Grafana Cloud Logs plans, with API support and live log tailing. Loki scales horizontally, supports high availability and multiple tenants, and indexes labels instead of log-line contents. LogQL provides queries in Grafana or the LogCLI command-line tool. Grafana describes object-storage support for high-throughput, durable, petabyte-scale retention. Loki can evaluate alerting rules on incoming logs and send results to Prometheus Alertmanager, with native integrations for Prometheus, Grafana, and Kubernetes. Documented ingestion options include Grafana Alloy, OpenTelemetry, Kubernetes Monitoring Helm, Docker, Fluent Bit, Fluentd, and Logstash. Installation methods include Helm, Tanka, Docker, Docker Compose, local installation, and source builds. Cloud plans range from free to paid Pro and Enterprise options.