Terminal log file navigator that merges several log files into one timeline, highlights errors, and lets you query log lines with SQL. Runs locally, no server.
Pricing and hosting
- Pricing
- Free
- Open source
- Yes (BSD-2-Clause)
- Self-hosted
- Yes
- Launched
- 2009
- Status
- Active
- Website
- lnav.org
Plans and prices change; check the tool's own site before you decide.
What it does
Log management checklist
5 of 10 confirmed in lnav's own documentation. The same checklist is used for every tool in Logs.
- Full-text search Yes
- Structured log parsing Yes
- OTLP logs ingest No
- Log alerts No
- Live tail Yes
- Metrics from logs Yes
- Archive or tiered retention No
- Dashboards Not confirmed
- Query language Yes
- Access control No
Local terminal viewer: no ingest server, storage, alerting or users
Checked against: github.com, docs.lnav.org
Alternatives to lnav
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Fluent Bit Lightweight C log and metrics processor from the Fluentd project, common as the node-level agent in Kubernetes. Ships to Loki, Elasticsearch, cloud logging and OTLP. -
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Grafana Loki Log aggregation system that indexes only labels, not full log text, and stores chunks in object storage. Queried with LogQL from Grafana; hosted as part of Grafana Cloud. -
Graylog Centralised log collection with parsing pipelines, stream routing, search and alert conditions. Graylog Open is free to self-host; paid editions add security analytics and archiving. -
Logflare Log ingestion and search backed by Google BigQuery, popular with Cloudflare Workers, Vercel and Elixir apps. Now part of Supabase and open source. -
Logz.io Hosted observability platform that grew out of managed ELK: log search and alerting on OpenSearch, plus metrics and traces. Priced per GB ingested.