Grafana Loki vs Seq
Grafana Loki
grafana.com
Seq
datalust.coSide by side
| Figure | Grafana Loki | Seq |
|---|---|---|
| Price from | $19/mo | $90.83/mo |
| Free plan | Yes | Yes |
| Free trial | — | Yes |
| Open source | Yes | — |
| Web | Yes | Yes |
| Windows | Yes | Yes |
| macOS | — | Yes |
| Linux | Yes | Yes |
| API | Yes | Yes |
| Self-hosted | Yes | Yes |
| Plans published | 5 | 5 |
| Spec score · Log Management Software | 9.4 (#3) | 8.6 (#23) |
| Spec score · Log Monitoring Tools | 9.2 (#4) | 8.8 (#7) |
| Deployment options | self-hosted | Seq is self-hosted and supported on Windows or under Docker/Linux, and can be deployed on-premises or in a public cloud. |
| Documentation depth | The documentation covers architecture, deployment modes, configuration, ingestion clients, operations, multi-tenancy, LogQL, APIs, troubleshooting, upgrades and release notes. | The documentation covers ingestion, querying, dashboards, alerting, authentication, storage, backups, Docker, Kubernetes, Azure, clustering, APIs and troubleshooting. |
| Integrations | Official documentation lists Grafana Alloy as the recommended collector and describes OpenTelemetry, Promtail, Fluent Bit, Fluentd, Vector, Logstash and other clients. | Documented ingestion options include Serilog, Microsoft.Extensions.Logging, OpenTelemetry, Node.js libraries, HTTP, GELF, syslog, RabbitMQ, Docker and Kubernetes. |
| License | Grafana states that Loki is released under the GNU Affero General Public License version 3. | Seq is proprietary subscription software; its agreement grants a non-exclusive, non-transferable internal-use license and forbids copying, resale and source-code derivation. |
| Purpose | Loki is a log aggregation system designed to store and query logs from applications and infrastructure. | Seq is a self-hosted telemetry server that stores structured application events and makes them searchable through its web interface. |
| Self-hosting | Local installation instructions provide Linux and Windows binaries and a downloadable configuration file, with Docker, package-manager and Helm deployment paths documented. | Seq runs on Windows or Docker/Linux and can be deployed on-premises or in public-cloud infrastructure. |
| Storage | Grafana says Loki stores logs in object storage for petabyte scale, high throughput, and durable storage. | Seq stores telemetry locally and supports native, Microsoft SQL Server or PostgreSQL metastore options. |
| Support | Grafana directs Loki users to its community forum, Grafana Labs Slack, and the Loki project email for help. | The Individual plan includes community support; paid plans include priority email support, and Datacenter includes a 45-minute onboarding call with the engineering team. |
| System requirements | The local quickstart requires Docker and Docker Compose for its sample stack, while standalone binaries are supplied for Linux and Windows. | Windows deployments require Windows 10 or later or Windows Server 2016 or later on a 64-bit machine. |
| What it does | Grafana Loki is a horizontally scalable, highly available, multi-tenant system for collecting, storing and querying logs. | Seq is a self-hosted, real-time server for searching and analyzing structured application logs, traces and metrics. |
Plans
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
Seq
- IndividualFree
- IndividualFree
- Team$1,090 a year
- Standard$2,990 a year
- Datacenter$10,990 a year
In their own words
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.