# ELK stack

15 Hacker News commenters recommended ELK stack and 7 criticized it, November 2025 to November 2026. It was recommended in 8 of 13 months. It meets the Hacker Approved badge rule.

**Verdict:** Free open-source stack with strong log filtering and querying; some also use the Eclipse ELK layout engine for flowcharts. Caveat: heavy on memory and operations.

## Why people recommend it

- Clear automatic flowchart and graph layouts (5 comments): "I often find myself preferring Dagre or ELK when I want a long flowing graph." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49605972)) "Elk makes it obvious that everything is flowing into “database” or “reports.”" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49609796)) "ELK more often than not does give a clearer flowchart" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49269380))
- Powerful and customizable layout options (2 comments): "If you get into the nitty gritty of elk you can do a _lot_ with it." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50135970)) "Emacs-style extensibility as a kit, years before Guile existed." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48870736))

## What people warn about

- Heavy memory and operational overhead (3 comments): "It needs a ridiculous amount of memory, because it will shove everything in memory." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48111755)) "ran its own Elastic stack, which was a bit of cost in its own right" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49425535)) "both data synchronization and operational overhead were very high" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48668424))
- Too heavy for small setups (2 comments): "didn't want to spin up a full ELK stack just for a quick analysis" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47040322)) "elastic stack is so heavy it's out of question for smaller clusters" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45935361))

## Alternatives hackers recommend

- [Grafana Loki](https://hackerapproved.com/p/loki.md): 19 recommend
- [VictoriaLogs](https://hackerapproved.com/p/victorialogs.md): 8 recommend
- [Splunk](https://hackerapproved.com/p/splunk.md): 7 recommend
- [Kibana](https://hackerapproved.com/p/kibana.md): 6 recommend

## Cite as

Hacker Approved, "ELK stack", https://hackerapproved.com/p/elk/ (counts from 1,795,640 Hacker News comments, November 2025 to November 2026).