Papertrail

Pricing and hosting

Pricing

Paid

Open source

No

Self-hosted

No

Launched

2011

Status

Active

Website

papertrail.com

Plans and prices change; check the tool's own site before you decide.

What it does

Log management checklist

7 of 10 confirmed in Papertrail's own documentation. The same checklist is used for every tool in Logs.

• + Full-text search Yes
• + Structured log parsing Yes
• ? OTLP logs ingest Not confirmed
• + Log alerts Yes
• + Live tail Yes
• ? Metrics from logs Not confirmed
• + Archive or tiered retention Yes
• ? Dashboards Not confirmed
• + Query language Yes
• + Access control Yes

Search-count metrics only by sending alerts to Librato/HostedGraphite

Checked against: papertrail.com, papertrail.com (2), papertrail.com (3), papertrail.com (4), papertrail.com (5), papertrail.com (6)

Alternatives to Papertrail

Other log management tools. See all 25.

• Axiom Hosted event store for logs, traces and other event data, queried with the APL language, with dashboards and monitors. Integrates with Vercel, Cloudflare and OpenTelemetry.
• Better Stack Telemetry Better Stack's log, metric and trace store built on ClickHouse, queried with SQL or a live-tail view. Shares an account with Better Stack uptime and on-call.
• Bugfender Remote logging for mobile and web apps: the SDK sends device logs to the cloud so you can read what happened on a user's device, with crash reports and user feedback.
• CrowdStrike Falcon LogScale Index-free log store (formerly Humio) that compresses and searches large log volumes quickly; sold by CrowdStrike for security and operations logging.
• Dozzle Small web UI that streams and searches live Docker container logs across hosts, with no log storage. Optional Dozzle Cloud adds grouped alerts and log analysis.
• Elastic Stack (ELK) Elasticsearch, Logstash, Kibana and Beats: full-text indexing and search of logs with Kibana dashboards and alerting. Self-host the free distribution or buy Elastic Cloud.
• 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.
• Fluentd CNCF graduated log collector that reads, parses, buffers and forwards logs to hundreds of outputs through a plugin system. Written in Ruby and C.
• 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.
• lnav 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.
• Logflare Log ingestion and search backed by Google BigQuery, popular with Cloudflare Workers, Vercel and Elixir apps. Now part of Supabase and open source.