Central Logging vs Grafana Loki
Central Logging
centrallogging.comGrafana Loki
grafana.comSide by side
| Figure | Central Logging | Grafana Loki |
|---|---|---|
| Price from | $187/mo | $19/mo |
| Free plan | — | Yes |
| Free trial | Yes | — |
| Open source | — | Yes |
| Web | Yes | Yes |
| Windows | — | Yes |
| macOS | Yes | — |
| Linux | Yes | Yes |
| API | Yes | Yes |
| Self-hosted | Yes | Yes |
| Plans published | 3 | 5 |
| Spec score · Log Management Software | 8.5 (#32) | 9.4 (#3) |
| Deployment | It runs as a statically linked, self-contained executable with no installer, runtime, or dependencies. | self-hosted |
| Free plan | Yes | Yes |
| Integrations | The site documents log shipping guides for Nginx, Caddy, Docker, Kubernetes, Proxmox, PostgreSQL, rsyslog, systemd, and Python. | 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 | Central Logging is a self-hosted logging, alerting, cron monitoring, and uptime system installed on the customer's server. | Loki is a log aggregation system designed to store and query logs from applications and infrastructure. |
| Structured log parsing | Yes | Yes |
Plans
Central Logging
- Free trialFree
- Unlimited license$187 a month
- Unlimited license$187, paid once
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
Central Logging
Central Logging has no write-up on Specifiction yet; its figures are above.
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.