ClickStack vs Grafana Loki
ClickStack
clickhouse.comGrafana Loki
grafana.comSide by side
| Figure | ClickStack | Grafana Loki |
|---|---|---|
| Price from | $53/mo | $19/mo |
| Free plan | Yes | Yes |
| Free trial | Yes | — |
| Open source | Yes | Yes |
| Web | Yes | Yes |
| Windows | — | Yes |
| Linux | Yes | Yes |
| API | Yes | Yes |
| Self-hosted | Yes | Yes |
| Plans published | 6 | 5 |
| Spec score · Log Monitoring Tools | 9.3 (#1) | 9.2 (#4) |
| Spec score · Log Management Software | 9.3 (#4) | 9.4 (#3) |
| Deployment options | both | self-hosted |
| Documentation depth | The documentation navigation covers architecture, deployment, ingestion, configuration, TTLs, search, dashboards, SQL visualization, alerts, service maps, session replay, RBAC, API reference and an MCP server. | The documentation covers architecture, deployment modes, configuration, ingestion clients, operations, multi-tenancy, LogQL, APIs, troubleshooting, upgrades and release notes. |
| Free plan | Yes | Yes |
| Independent assessment | Thoughtworks Technology Radar places ClickStack in its “Worth exploring” ring and describes it as an OpenTelemetry-compatible open-source platform for unified observability. | Thoughtworks’ 2025 Technology Radar says Loki reduces operational complexity and storage costs, integrates tightly with Grafana and Alloy, and added native OpenTelemetry support in version 3.0. |
| Integrations | Documented partners include Bindplane, bitdrift, Odigos and Telflo for collector management, mobile telemetry, eBPF tracing and routing control. | Official documentation lists Grafana Alloy as the recommended collector and describes OpenTelemetry, Promtail, Fluent Bit, Fluentd, Vector, Logstash and other clients. |
| Log pipelines | No | Yes |
| Purpose | ClickStack is an open-source observability stack for OpenTelemetry that unifies logs, metrics, traces, session replays, and errors. | Loki is a log aggregation system designed to store and query logs from applications and infrastructure. |
| Security and compliance | ClickHouse’s trust center lists a HIPAA report, PCI DSS SAQ A, penetration test report, and vulnerability assessment report. | Grafana Labs’ trust center lists SOC 2, ISO/IEC 27001, PCI DSS 4.0.1, GDPR, FedRAMP High and other attestations for its services. |
| Structured log parsing | Yes | Yes |
| What it does | ClickStack is an open-source observability stack for OpenTelemetry data covering logs, metrics, traces, errors and session replay. | Grafana Loki is a horizontally scalable, highly available, multi-tenant system for collecting, storing and querying logs. |
Plans
ClickStack
- ClickStack Open SourceFree
- ClickStack Open SourceFree
- Managed ClickStack trialFree
- Basic$53 a month
- Scale$437 a month
- Enterprise$571 a month
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
ClickStack
ClickStack is an open-source observability stack for OpenTelemetry that brings logs, metrics, traces, session replays, and errors into one system. Its HyperDX interface provides Lucene-style search, SQL access, dashboards, alerts, event deltas, and event patterns. A bundled OpenTelemetry Collector handles native collection, while non-OTel wide event data can be used when it has a timestamp field. ClickStack stores data in ClickHouse and is designed for high-cardinality telemetry, with the product site describing sub-second queries even on petabytes of data. It supports self-hosted, hybrid, and cloud deployment. Managed ClickStack runs on ClickHouse Cloud with operations, scaling, upgrades, backups, reliability, authentication, and user management included. The managed offer advertises indefinite retention and storage below one cent per GB. An MCP server connects observability workflows with coding tools, collaboration services, runbooks, and custom agents.
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.