ELK stack
Hacker ApprovedRanked 2 of 5 log analytics platforms by recommenders
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.
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.
22 people gave an opinion
- recommend it
- 15
- criticize it
- 7
- approval share
- 68%
Recommended in 8 of 13 months
- November 2025: recommended
- December 2025: recommended
- January 2026: not recommended
- February 2026: recommended
- March 2026: not recommended
- April 2026: not recommended
- May 2026: recommended
- June 2026: not recommended
- July 2026: recommended
- August 2026: recommended
- September 2026: recommended
- October 2026: recommended
- November 2026: not recommended (month in progress)
Why it carries the badge
- 15 people recommend itNeeds 10 or more, met.
- 2.1 recommenders for every criticNeeds 2 to 1 or better, met.
- Recommended in 8 of 13 monthsNeeds 4 or more, met.
The same three rules apply to every product, and the badge can’t be bought. How the badge works
What people say about it
The reasons people give, with the number of comments that give each one. Open a reason to read what they said.
Why people recommend it
Each mark is one comment
Clear automatic flowchart and graph layouts
“I often find myself preferring Dagre or ELK when I want a long flowing graph.”
Comment from 8 Sep 2026 in “TALA Is Open-Source” “Elk makes it obvious that everything is flowing into “database” or “reports.””
Comment from 8 Sep 2026 in “TALA Is Open-Source” “ELK more often than not does give a clearer flowchart”
Comment from 12 Aug 2026 in “Show HN: Line9 - a Mermaid rendering engine with its own layout” - Comment from 12 Aug 2026 in “Show HN: Line9 - a Mermaid rendering engine with its own layout”
- Comment from 18 Sep 2026 in “Mastering Layout Engines in Graphviz: Dot vs. Neato vs. Twopi vs. Circo”
Powerful and customizable layout options
“If you get into the nitty gritty of elk you can do a _lot_ with it.”
Comment from 17 Oct 2026 in “Pele – Mermaid diagrams as themeable SVG” “Emacs-style extensibility as a kit, years before Guile existed.”
Comment from 11 Jul 2026 in “Scarf has moved away from Haskell”
What people warn about
Each mark is one comment
Heavy memory and operational overhead
“It needs a ridiculous amount of memory, because it will shove everything in memory.”
Comment from 12 May 2026 in “Why senior developers fail to communicate their expertise” “ran its own Elastic stack, which was a bit of cost in its own right”
Comment from 24 Aug 2026 in “What Is a Syslog Server?” “both data synchronization and operational overhead were very high”
Comment from 25 Jun 2026 in “PostgreSQL Is Enough” Too heavy for small setups
“didn't want to spin up a full ELK stack just for a quick analysis”
Comment from 16 Feb 2026 in “Show HN: Twsla – A tiny, high-speed log analyzer written in Go” “elastic stack is so heavy it's out of question for smaller clusters”
Comment from 15 Nov 2025 in “I can't recommend Grafana anymore”
Other log analytics platforms people recommend
The four most recommended other log analytics platforms, with the same counts for each, so you can compare like for like. The tick on each bar marks the 2 to 1 line the badge needs.
| Product | Recommend | Criticize | Approval | Months | Owned | Badge |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Grafana Loki | 19 | 7 | 73% | 8 | — | Approved |
| ELK stackThis page | 15 | 7 | 68% | 8 | — | Approved |
| VictoriaLogs | 8 | 0 | 100% | 7 | — | — |
| Splunk | 7 | 20 | 26% | 6 | — | — |
| Kibana | 6 | 2 | 75% | 4 | — | — |
What people said
21 of the 22 comments that mention it, newest first. Each links to the original comment.
“If only it had a good documentation. I really like the elkjs JavaScript version”
“If you get into the nitty gritty of elk you can do a _lot_ with it.”
“existing libraries fall short or are too complex to use”
“ELK that I found gave the best results”
“Elk makes it obvious that everything is flowing into “database” or “reports.””
“I often find myself preferring Dagre or ELK when I want a long flowing graph.”
“ran its own Elastic stack, which was a bit of cost in its own right”
“it's been good to me for some types of flowcharts”
“ELK more often than not does give a clearer flowchart”
“having an observability stack like ELK or Prometheus + Grafana tends to outweigh the application itself”
“so much easier to understand what Elk is (and why it is)”
“copy large parts of the Elk codebase”
“Emacs-style extensibility as a kit, years before Guile existed.”
“both data synchronization and operational overhead were very high”
“it does provide awesome filtering and querying capabilities”
“It needs a ridiculous amount of memory, because it will shove everything in memory.”
“didn't want to spin up a full ELK stack just for a quick analysis”
“have you ever had to troubleshoot a rsyslog based ELK setup?”
“They make following track of events really hard.”
“elastic stack is so heavy it's out of question for smaller clusters”
“it didn't come in much cheaper than $0.50/Gi everyone seems to charge”
Counts come from 1,795,640 Hacker News comments, November 2025 to November 2026. How we count. Report a mistake.