Google Cloud Logging vs Grafana Loki
Google Cloud Logging
cloud.google.comGrafana Loki
grafana.comSide by side
| Figure | Google Cloud Logging | Grafana Loki |
|---|---|---|
| Price from | $0.01/mo | $19/mo |
| Free plan | Yes | Yes |
| Free trial | Yes | — |
| Open source | — | Yes |
| Web | Yes | Yes |
| Windows | Yes | Yes |
| Linux | Yes | Yes |
| iOS | Yes | — |
| API | Yes | Yes |
| Self-hosted | — | Yes |
| Plans published | 13 | 5 |
| Spec score · Log Management Software | 9.5 (#2) | 9.4 (#3) |
| Spec score · Log Monitoring Tools | 9.3 (#2) | 9.2 (#4) |
| Spec score · Log Analysis Software | 9.2 (#2) | 9.1 (#4) |
| Deployment options | cloud | self-hosted |
| Free plan | Yes | Yes |
| Integrations | Official integrations include Cloud Monitoring, Error Reporting, Cloud Trace, Pub/Sub, Cloud Storage and BigQuery. | 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 | Cloud Logging is a fully managed, real-time log management service for storage, search, analysis, and alerting at exabyte scale. | Loki is a log aggregation system designed to store and query logs from applications and infrastructure. |
| Rating on G2 | 4.4 out of 5 from 37 reviews | 219 reviews are listed for Grafana Labs, the maker of Loki; the profile shows 155 five-star, 62 four-star, 1 three-star and 1 one-star review counts. |
| Rating on Gartner Peer Insights | 4.0 out of 5 from 1 review | 4.6 out of 5 from 348 ratings for Grafana Cloud, the managed Loki platform |
| Rating on TrustRadius | Google Cloud Platform scores 9 out of 10 from 59 ratings | 8.1 out of 10 from 21 reviews |
| Self-hosting | Cloud Logging is documented as a managed Google service; the documentation provides agents and APIs for sending data rather than a self-hosted server distribution. | Local installation instructions provide Linux and Windows binaries and a downloadable configuration file, with Docker, package-manager and Helm deployment paths documented. |
| Support | The product page directs customers who need help getting started to contact sales. | Grafana directs Loki users to its community forum, Grafana Labs Slack, and the Loki project email for help. |
| System requirements | Ops Agent installation requires a supported VM and operating system, authorized credentials, enabled Logging and Monitoring APIs, and no conflicting legacy agents. | The local quickstart requires Docker and Docker Compose for its sample stack, while standalone binaries are supplied for Linux and Windows. |
| What it does | Cloud Logging is a fully managed service for storing, searching, analyzing, monitoring and alerting on log data at very large scale. | Grafana Loki is a horizontally scalable, highly available, multi-tenant system for collecting, storing and querying logs. |
Plans
Google Cloud Logging
- Logging storage (non-vended network logs)$0.50, paid once
- Vended network logs storage$0.25, paid once
- Logging retention beyond default period$0.01 a month
- Free allotmentFree
- Log AnalyticsFree
- Log RouterFree
- Logs RouterFree
- Extended retention$0.01 a month
- Logging retention$0.01 a month
- Vended network logs storage$0.25, 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
Google Cloud Logging
Google Cloud Logging is a managed cloud service for storing, searching, analyzing and alerting on logs. Logs Explorer supports query-based searches, sorting, histogram views, field exploration and saved queries. Log Analytics uses BigQuery for SQL analysis, and log data can also be accessed in BigQuery alongside other business data. Google Cloud platform logs are ingested without setup; GKE workload logs are captured automatically, while the Ops Agent collects VM workload logs. Logs Router can send logs to external systems through Pub/Sub, and Cloud Storage can hold archives. Regional log buckets keep and process workload data in a selected region, with configurable access controls and retention. The service integrates with Cloud Monitoring, Error Reporting and Cloud Trace. Cloud Audit Logs records administrative activity and resource access, and its entries are immutable; the product page states 400 days of audit-log retention at no additional cost. Standard logging storage includes the first 50 GiB per project per month free, and new Google Cloud customers are offered $300 in credits. The listed deployment is cloud; platforms include API, Linux and web.
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.