Log management tools in 2026
5 commercial products, ranked by how many people read about each, or about its maker, on Wikipedia's mobile site. Of those with an article of their own, Sumo Logic has the most readers, about 219 a month. 22 open-source projects, ranked by GitHub stars and how recently each was worked on. Loki leads with 29k stars, ahead of OpenObserve. 17 had code pushed in the last three months. Most common licenses: MIT (8), Apache-2.0 (7) and AGPL-3.0 (3).
Commercial log management tools
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1
Sumo Logic Sumo Logic
Sumo Logic provides best-in-class cloud monitoring, log management, SIEM tools, and real-time insights for web and SaaS based apps.
Complete system Production-ready A mid-size or large company wants hosted log analytics and security monitoring without operating Splunk or Elasticsearch itself.
219 readers a month Since 2010 Commercial -
2
Splunk Enterprise Cisco
Unify security and observability at petabyte scale on the Splunk data platform for trusted AI. Stop threats and prevent downtime at machine speed.
Complete system Production-ready A large organisation needs one platform for security and operations data at high volume and has staff who can write SPL and run the deployment.
Commercial -
3
Loggly SolarWinds
Log Analysis / Log Management by Loggly: the world's most popular log analysis & monitoring in the cloud. Free trial. See why ⅓ of the Fortune 500 use us!
Complete system Production-ready You already use SolarWinds products and want hosted log search that fits with them.
13 readers a month Since 2009 Commercial -
4
Papertrail SolarWinds
Papertrail lets you search, react, and resolve infrastructure issues instantly with real-time log tailing. Sign up and start debugging.
Complete system Production-ready A small team wants hosted log tailing and search set up in minutes, without running its own log stack.
Commercial -
5
Better Stack Logs Better Stack
30x cheaper than Datadog. Predictable pricing. Exceptional customer support. 7,000+ happy customers. 60-day money back guarantee.
Complete system Production-ready A startup or small team wants cheaper hosted logging than Datadog, with uptime checks and on-call from the same vendor.
Commercial
Open-source log management tools
Complete systems you can adopt 6
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1
Loki grafana
Like Prometheus, but for logs.
Complete system Production-ready You already use Prometheus and Grafana and want low-cost centralised logs.
★ 29k AGPL-3.0 Go Active, pushed today -
2
OpenObserve openobserve
Open source observability platform for logs, metrics, traces, RUM (web, android, ios), Session replay, pipelines, SLO and LLM observability. A sophisticated, simple and highly performant alternative to Datadog, Splunk, and Elasticsearch with 140x lower storage costs and single binary deployment.
Complete system Production-ready You want a cheaper self-hosted alternative to Elasticsearch, Splunk or Datadog for logs and traces.
★ 23k AGPL-3.0 TypeScript Active, pushed today -
3
Dozzle amir20
Realtime log viewer for containers. Supports Docker, Swarm and K8s.
Complete system Production-ready You run containers on a few hosts and want to watch logs in a browser without a logging stack.
★ 15k MIT Go Active, pushed today -
4
HyperDX hyperdxio
Resolve production issues, fast. An open source observability platform unifying session replays, logs, metrics, traces and errors powered by ClickHouse and OpenTelemetry.
Complete system Usable You want a Datadog-style debugging experience self-hosted on ClickHouse.
★ 10k MIT TypeScript Active, pushed today -
5
LogTide logtide-dev
🛡️ Open-source, self-hosted log management. Privacy-first alternative to Datadog & ELK. Lightweight, GDPR-compliant, and deployed in minutes with Docker.
Complete system Experimental A small team wants simple self-hosted logging in Docker without the weight of ELK.
★ 458 AGPL-3.0 TypeScript Active, pushed today -
6
Rootprint rootprint
Open-source, self-hosted logs and traces with full-text search directly on S3-compatible object storage.
Complete system Experimental You want cheap log and trace retention on object storage with a simple UI.
★ 441 Apache-2.0 Svelte Active, pushed today
Building blocks for your own system 2
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1
Quickwit quickwit-oss
Cloud-native OSS search engine for observability
Building block Usable You need cheap, large-scale log search and want to move off Elasticsearch.
★ 12k Apache-2.0 Rust Active, pushed today -
2
CLP y-scope
Compressed Log Processor (CLP) is a free log management tool capable of compressing logs and searching the compressed logs without decompression.
Building block Usable You store very large log volumes and storage cost matters more than a polished UI.
★ 1.1k Apache-2.0 C++ Active, pushed today
Developer tools 2
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1
LNAV tstack
Log file navigator
Developer tool Production-ready You read server or application logs on the command line and want more than less and grep.
★ 11k BSD-2-Clause C++ Active, pushed yesterday -
2
Nerdlog dimonomid
Nerdlog: fast, remote-first, multi-host TUI log viewer with timeline histogram and no central server
Developer tool Usable You manage a handful of servers and want fast cross-host log search without deploying a logging stack.
★ 1.6k BSD-2-Clause Go Active, pushed 30 days ago
Compared head to head
Also under monitoring and observability tools
Open-source licenses
- Permissive: 17. Use it anywhere, including in closed products. You keep the copyright notice; Apache-2.0 also grants patent rights.
- Network copyleft: 3. Like GPL, and running a changed version as a web service counts as distributing it, so its users get the source too.
- Strong copyleft: 2. If you distribute the program or anything built on it, you must release the whole source under the same license.
Languages
Go 7, TypeScript 3, C++ 2, JavaScript 2, Rust 1, Svelte 1, Jinja 1, Shell 1, C# 1, Astro 1, Python 1 and Perl 1.
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