LogTide vs Loggly for Log Management
Compare LogTide and SolarWinds Loggly: self-hosted vs SaaS, daily-volume pricing, retention limits, SIEM capabilities, and a practical migration path.
Loggly (a SolarWinds product, like Papertrail) is a veteran SaaS log aggregator focused on JSON-aware ingestion and search. LogTide is a self-hosted, open-source log management platform with a built-in SIEM. The trade is the classic one — managed convenience against volume-capped pricing — but the details decide which side you should be on.
Cost Comparison
Loggly Pricing
Loggly bills by daily ingestion volume with retention tied to the plan tier (figures indicative — SolarWinds adjusts plans periodically):
| Plan | Daily volume | Retention | Approx. price |
|---|---|---|---|
| Lite (free) | 200 MB/day | 7 days | $0 |
| Standard | ~1 GB/day | ~2 weeks | from ~$79/month |
| Pro | several GB/day | ~2-4 weeks | from ~$159/month |
| Enterprise | custom | ~30+ days | from ~$279/month |
The structural issues mirror its sibling Papertrail:
- Daily caps, not monthly averages. One verbose deploy or incident burst can hit the daily cap and get your overage throttled or dropped — exactly when you need logs most.
- Retention measured in weeks. Investigating anything older means hoping you exported in time.
- Volume tiers compound with growth. Every new service pushes you toward the next tier.
Real-world example: A team ingesting 5 GB/day needs Pro/Enterprise territory — realistically $300-600+/month with retention still capped around a month.
LogTide Pricing
LogTide is free, open-source software. You pay only for infrastructure:
| Component | Cost |
|---|---|
| Software license | Free (AGPLv3) |
| VPS (4 CPU, 8-16 GB RAM) | ~$40-100/month |
| Storage (1 TB SSD) | ~$50-80/month |
| SIEM features | Included |
| Users | Unlimited |
| Retention | Unlimited (storage-bound) |
Same 5 GB/day scenario: ~$100-180/month of infrastructure, with months of searchable retention and no daily cap to throttle you mid-incident.
Feature Comparison
| Feature | Loggly | LogTide |
|---|---|---|
| HTTP/S ingestion | Yes | Yes |
| Syslog ingestion | Yes | Yes (via Fluent Bit/Vector) |
| Agentless setup | Yes (core strength) | Yes (HTTP/syslog) |
| SDKs (Node.js, Python, JVM, Go, PHP, .NET) | Token-based, generic | Yes (official SDKs) |
| Automated parsing (apache, nginx, JSON…) | Yes | JSON-native + shipper parsing |
| Full-text search | Yes | Yes |
| Field/JSON queries | Yes | Yes |
| Live tail | Yes | Yes (SSE) |
| Dashboards | Yes | SIEM dashboard |
| Alerting | Yes | Yes |
| Anomaly detection | Basic | Sigma-rule based |
| Sigma detection rules | No | Built-in |
| MITRE ATT&CK mapping | No | Included |
| Incident management | No | Yes |
| Daily volume caps | Yes (plan-based) | No |
| Retention | ~7-30 days (plan-based) | Unlimited (storage-bound) |
| Self-hosted option | No | Yes |
| Open source | No | AGPLv3 |
| Data sovereignty | No (US SaaS) | Yes |
Where Loggly Wins
Zero infrastructure. Fully managed: nothing to deploy, patch, scale, or back up. For teams without ops capacity, that’s the entire decision.
Agentless ingestion breadth. Loggly’s standard-syslog and HTTP endpoints plus scripted setup for common platforms make onboarding heterogeneous legacy systems genuinely easy.
Automated parsing. Out-of-the-box field extraction for dozens of formats (apache, nginx, Java stack traces, JSON) with derived fields for custom patterns — solid for teams who can’t normalize logs at the source.
Free tier for small workloads. 200 MB/day free with 7-day retention covers side projects and small staging environments at literally zero cost.
Where LogTide Wins
No daily caps. Incident bursts are precisely when logs matter; a platform that throttles overage during a traffic spike fails at its one job. LogTide ingests whatever your hardware handles.
Retention. Weeks vs months-to-years. Compliance lookbacks, post-mortems on month-old deploys, and security forensics all need history that Loggly’s tiers simply don’t keep.
Built-in SIEM. Sigma rules, MITRE ATT&CK mapping, and incident management included — Loggly offers log search and basic anomaly alerts, not security detection.
Self-hosting and data sovereignty. Loggly is US-hosted SaaS only. LogTide keeps logs — and the PII that inevitably leaks into them — on infrastructure you control, making GDPR a configuration detail.
Cost trajectory. Tiered SaaS pricing rises in steps with every growth phase; self-hosted infrastructure cost rises slowly and predictably with storage.
Open source. AGPLv3, standard SQL storage (TimescaleDB/ClickHouse), portable Sigma rules — no lock-in at any layer.
When to Choose Loggly
- You have no capacity or appetite to operate any infrastructure
- Volume is small and stable (within or near the 200 MB/day free tier)
- You need automated parsing for legacy formats you can’t change
- Two weeks of retention genuinely covers your investigation needs
- Data residency is not a requirement
When to Choose LogTide
- Daily caps or retention limits have bitten you during an incident
- Volume is multiple GB/day and SaaS tiers are escalating
- You need months of searchable history for compliance or forensics
- Logs must stay on your own infrastructure (GDPR, data sovereignty)
- You want security detection (Sigma, MITRE ATT&CK) without a separate SIEM
- You prefer open source with no vendor lock-in
Migration Path
Step 1: Dual-ship from your existing pipeline
Loggly ingestion is syslog/HTTP based, so add a parallel output in whatever shipper you already run. With rsyslog:
# Existing Loggly forward (keep during migration)
*.* @@logs-01.loggly.com:514
# Add: forward to local Fluent Bit for LogTide
*.* @@127.0.0.1:5140And Fluent Bit ships to LogTide:
[INPUT]
Name syslog
Mode tcp
Listen 127.0.0.1
Port 5140
Parser syslog-rfc5424
[OUTPUT]
Name http
Match *
Host logtide.internal
Port 8080
URI /api/v1/ingest/single
Format json_lines
Header X-API-Key lp_your_api_key
Header Content-Type application/jsonApplications using Loggly’s HTTP token endpoint can adopt the LogTide SDKs directly and gain structured metadata in the process.
Step 2: Concept mapping
| Loggly | LogTide |
|---|---|
| Customer token | API key (per project, lp_ prefix) |
| Source group | Project / service filter |
| Derived fields | Structured metadata fields |
| Saved search | Saved query |
| Alert (search-based) | Alert rule + notification channel |
| Live tail | SSE streaming |
| Dashboards | SIEM dashboard |
| Archiving to S3 | Native retention (still searchable) |
Step 3: Validate and cut over
- Run both for 1-2 weeks; compare the same queries and time windows
- Recreate alerts and confirm notification parity
- Verify parsing: fields Loggly auto-extracted should arrive as JSON metadata from your shipper
- Remove the Loggly output, downgrade to Lite or cancel
Ready to own your log management?
- Deploy LogTide - Free, open-source
- LogTide vs Papertrail - The other SolarWinds logging product
- Self-hosted log management - Why teams move off metered SaaS
Frequently Asked Questions
What is the best self-hosted alternative to Loggly?
LogTide covers Loggly's core feature set — JSON ingestion, full-text and field search, dashboards, alerting — as self-hosted open source, and adds a built-in SIEM with Sigma rules. Loggly is SaaS-only, so teams with data-residency requirements or growing volume caps typically migrate to a self-hosted platform.
Is LogTide cheaper than Loggly?
Beyond the free tier, usually yes. Loggly's paid plans start around $79/month for roughly 1 GB/day with about two weeks of retention, and scale steeply with volume. A LogTide instance handling several GB/day runs on infrastructure costing $100-200/month with months of searchable retention and unlimited users.
What does Loggly do better than LogTide?
Loggly is fully managed — no servers to run — with mature agentless ingestion (syslog and HTTP from anywhere), automated parsing for dozens of common formats, and polished derived-field tooling. Small teams under a few hundred MB/day who don't want to operate anything get real value from its free and entry tiers.
How do I migrate from Loggly to LogTide?
Loggly receives logs via syslog and HTTP, so the migration is shipper-level: add a second output to your rsyslog/Fluentd/Fluent Bit pipeline pointing at LogTide's HTTP ingest API, run both for one or two weeks while validating searches and alerts, then remove the Loggly output and downgrade the subscription.