# 10 Best SolarWinds Papertrail Alternatives in 2026
Solarwinds Papertrail is undoubtedly a powerful tool that aggregates and
analyses logs from multiple sources, coming in various types such as syslogs,
txt log files, Apache, MySQL, Ruby, Heroku, and more. Papertrail centralizes,
stores, analyzes, and compares logs to detect anomalies, performance trends and
produces real-time visualization and summaries. While all that's great, some
developers started to voice their disappointment with features that either
underperform or lack.
Community criticized that the learning curve is not really new-user friendly and
documentation lacks both depth and broadness. The UI is not as intuitive, and
their pricing is not at all competitive. There were also many issues reported
concerning the SolarWinds websites. However, we are not here to throw shade at
Papertrail but to provide a synthesis of information emerging from our community
and for our community.
## 1. Better Stack
[Better Stack](https://betterstack.com/) is the sharpest upgrade from Papertrail available. Where Papertrail stores logs in plain text files with limited search and a pricing model that doesn't scale, Better Stack is built on [ClickHouse](https://clickhouse.com) — delivering **sub-second SQL-compatible queries across billions of log records** at a fraction of the cost per GB. No proprietary query language, no index management, no TSV files to wrangle.
Integrations cover Kubernetes, Docker, Heroku, AWS, Logstash, Rails, and more. The [Better Stack Collector](https://betterstack.com/tracing) instruments services with **zero code changes** using eBPF-based auto-instrumentation, shipping logs, traces, and metrics automatically. See how live log search and tail works:
Beyond logs, Better Stack adds **[distributed tracing](https://betterstack.com/tracing), [error tracking](https://betterstack.com/error-tracking), [real user monitoring](https://betterstack.com/real-user-monitoring), [uptime monitoring](https://betterstack.com/uptime), and [incident management](https://betterstack.com/incident-management)** — none of which Papertrail covers. See how the Collector instruments your stack:
Built-in dashboards with dozens of ready-made templates cover the most common cloud services out of the box. Anomaly detection and absence-based alerting notify you when log patterns deviate without manual threshold configuration. Slack and MS Teams integrations and on-call scheduling are included. See how metrics dashboards come together:
### Main benefits of Better Stack:
- **Sub-second SQL log queries** on ClickHouse — no Papertrail-style text search limitations or TSV format constraints
- **Zero-code eBPF instrumentation** ships logs, traces, and metrics automatically — faster to set up than Papertrail's manual syslog configuration
- **Full observability in one platform**: logs, traces, error tracking, RUM, uptime, and incident management — everything Papertrail lacks beyond basic log aggregation
- **Free plan** includes 3 GB logs, 100,000 exceptions, 5,000 session replays, and 10 monitors; paid plans from **$29/month** with unlimited team members
- **60-day money-back guarantee** on all paid plans
## 2. Sumo Logic
 Sumo Logic offers a complete set of log
management tools for the entire stack, whether it's cloud, on-premises, or
hybrid. Centralized data visualization allows you to spot developing trends and
prevent errors before they occur.
Thanks to anomaly detection, outlier detection, and predictive analytics, you
get deep and comprehensive insights into your architecture's performance. Sumo
logic offers real-time visibility into AWS, Azure, and GCP cloud applications
and infrastructure. However it's plans come at quite a [significant
cost](https://betterstack.com/community/comparisons/sumologic-alternatives/) compared to Papertrail.
Alongside that, you get access to over 150 apps and native integrations to get
full out-of-the-box visibility into third-party technologies. Sumo Logic
provides you with two dashboards - a live dashboard and an interactive one. The
live dashboard offers numerous real-time data in the order as they come.
However, it doesn't provide an option to look back at the older data. That's
when the interactive dashboard comes in. In the interactive dashboard, you can
view a complete overview of events and trends, focus on the graphs and identify
rare events. You can filter for the specific errors and exceptions to be able to
focus on them in the future.
### Main Benefits of Sumo Logic
- A free limited version is provided to you to test out the service
- It allows you to ingest the logs from your network directly and in real-time
- The application also offers extensive REST API
- GUI is easy to grasp, thus making it quicker to start
## 3. LogDNA
 LogDNA allows you to ingest, process, route,
analyze and store all of your log data in one place. LogDNA runs on an
Elastic-based stack and allows you to search and filter your data, visualize
critical log events and identify trends over time. Alerts, as usually are either
Presence or Absence based and are set conditionally. Integration into multiple
notification channels is possible, including Slack, PagerDuty, Webhook,
Ops-genie, Datadog, AppOptics, VictorOps(Splunk On-Call), and Sysdig.
A fully-featured web UI provides an interface for live tail, queries,
visualization, or alerting. LogDNA allows you to filter logs by key fields or
group them by source. You are also able to create custom dashboards or
user-specific logs. It also provides an option for agentless log collection via
Syslog and HTTP(S) with full-text search and visualizations. Their "secret
sauce" architecture, as they call it, uses a microservice-based architecture to
split tasks into two roles - log ingestion and log retrieval.
### Main Benefits of LogDNA
- Powerful, but expensive ELK stack
- Progressive approach and well-written documentation
## 4. Logz.io
 Logz.io offers an end-to-end cloud
monitoring built, allowing you to unify logs, metrics, and trace analytics on
any scale on one platform. All the centralized data are visualized in intuitive
and easy-to-use monitoring dashboards, and your logs are monitored with the aid
of artificial intelligence and machine learning. In case of any anomalies, you
will be alerted in your favorite alerting channels, such as Slack, PagerDuty, or
Gmail. Logz.io is based on monitoring technologies that are easily integrated
into cloud environments such as AWS, Azure, Google Cloud, Kubernetes, Docker,
Kafka, and more.
Using query language, you can create custom and flexible alerts to be the first
one to know about any bugs, threats, or anomalies. Kibana's query language
provides you with multiple more features such as identifying specific events,
customizing alert formats, or grouping options by fields.
Logz.io provides a safe way to store your in-transit data with its support for
SSL encryption and robust AES 256-bit encryption.
### Main benefits of Logz.io
- It's based on open source
- ELK-stack provides a wide array of tools
- Reasonable pricing model
## 5. Sematext Logs
Sematext Logs is a Log Management-as-a-service which allows you to collect logs
from any part of your software stack, IoT, network hardware, etc. It supports
sending logs from infrastructure, containers, AWS, applications, custom events
via an Elasticsearch API or via Syslog. Custom dashboards with real-time data
summarize top values and searching logs is quite intuitive, thanks to google-ish
query syntax. Searches can also pose as real-time alerts and trigger
notifications via E-mail, Slack, PagerDuty, and other popular third-party
solutions.
Sematext is ELK-stack based, meaning that you benefit from all the
Elasticsearch, Logstash, and Kibana for collecting and transforming data,
searching, filtering, analyzing, and visualizing your data. Troubleshooting is
made easier with real-time log visualization and alerting.
Sematext runs on AWS, which ensures above-average security measures, using the
best industry-standard practices. Your logs are encrypted using HTTPS and sent
via TLS/SSL channels. Better data protection is ensured by the ability of
role-access to specific data.
### Main Benefits of Sematext Logs
- It brings infrastructure and application performance monitoring together with
log management
- Easy to use with good pre-configured dashboards and reports thus also quick to
start
- No need to lengthly configure; it works fine out of the box
## 6. Datadog
Datadog helps you to filter and assess which logs to archive and which will just
waste storage without compromising data integrity, creating information gaps, or
accidentally removing essential data. Log management, also called logs,
decouples log ingestion and log indexing to collect, process, archive, explore,
and monitor logs without limits. This is covered by their trademarked Logging
without Limits, which also powers Security Monitoring.
Datadog automatically parses JSON logs and lets users choose how to parse
records from different formats via the Grok Parser. You can use MySQL, JSON,
Windows Event Logs, W3C Log Formats, and other various log formats throughout
the board. It also provides a view of all IIS log files, which can help you
discover multiple patterns and trends. You can search them by date, IP address,
and more, eliminating the need to search through many different files. Datadog
lets you analyze IIS log data, graph it, and more.
This solution can also provide you with real-time data and detect the number of
events per second or a sampling rate. It gives users the option to customize
vast parts of their GUI.
### Main Benefits of Datadog
- Quick to start
- Team collaboration tools
- Full API access
- Alert notifications
## 7. Logic Monitor
 LogicMonitor offers log
intelligence at scale for hybrid and multi-cloud environments. Your data are
centralized, correlated, and contextualized, with an emphasis on data hygiene
and internal compliance. LogicMonitor allows you to centralize your monitoring
correlate relevant logs with metrics in a single platform.
It supports more than 2000 integrations, modules, and pre-built templates for
on-premises and cloud infrastructures. LogicMonitor is truly user-friendly since
it offers query options for all experience levels. It also allows you to access
raw data up to 12 months old. Metrics, logs, and log anomalies are all
associated with their corresponding devices, cloud instances, and containers.
LogicMonitor manipulates your data with machine learning tools, which decreases
troubleshooting times and allows better workflow by sparing your engineers of
unproductive tasks. Anomalies are automatically detected and contextualized for
easier root cause analysis. LogicMonitor offers Full IT operations lifecycle
support via integrations like ServiceNow, CMDB, and Ansible.
One of the biggest disadvantages is the need to communicate your subscription
with a sales team. You need to get a custom quote.
### Main Benefits of LogicMonitor
- Heavy usage of automation and machine learning methods
- Suitable of all experience levels without compromising functions
## 8. Dynatrace
 Log Monitoring from Dynatrace
enables you to access and monitor logs of all your mission-critical processes.
Creating custom log metrics is easy and allows you to oversight and comprehend
log data in the context of the rest of your infrastructure in real-time.
Logs can be filtered based on keywords or timeframe and are also processed using
AI, which correlates log messages with problems and uses this correlation in
root-cause analysis. You can use Log Monitoring v1 or Log Monitoring v2 if you
use Dynatrace as SaaS. Dynatrace's documentation covers all the nuances.
However, Dynatrace is not easy to jump into and requires more learning.
Dynatrace offers either a full-stack monitoring solution or multiple individual
plans.
### Main benefits of Dynatrace
- AI-assisted full-stack monitoring solution
- More than 560 supported technologies
- Solutions also cover security, Digital Experience or even Business Analytics
## 9. New Relic One
 New Relic's Log Management
allows you to instantly search through logs, visualize them, use logging data to
create custom charts, dashboards, and alerts, and troubleshoot any emerging
issues within one platform. Log collection uses its infrastructure monitoring
agent.
If you prefer to go agentless, you can forward Syslog data to a TCP endpoint.
New Relic supports both on-premise and cloud data. New Relics benefits from
machine learning to detect performance patterns, mark those logs, and create
clusters based on correlations that are easy to query, visualize, analyze or use
for alerting.
Visualization is handled by the Logs UI, allowing you to spot patterns that
could benefit you in software tweaking or observing logs in context. Logs can be
explored and manipulated using filters and parsing rules. Data is split into
partitions to optimize query performance. Alerting options are available and
help prevent any unwanted events.
### Main benefits of New Relic One
- All-in-one infrastructure monitoring tool
- Open Source projects available
- Pay-as-you-go pricing model
## 10. Logstash
The "L" in ELK stack, Logstash, offers a free and open server-side data
processing tool for data ingestion from multiple sources, transformation, and
transport into a "stash" of your choice. Since Logstash is open-source, you have
to deploy it on your own machine. Logstash is often used as a part of the ELK
stack with Elasticsearch and Kibana. However, a wide array of different options
is available, like Graphite, Librato, or Datadog, for example. ELK stack is a
powerful solution as a whole, so Logstash does not really offer a plethora of
features on its own.
Logstash supports a variety of outputs that allows you to route your data with
flexibility and according to your needs. Thanks to more than 200 plugins,
Logstash is quite customizable, and if you don't find what you're looking for,
you can always use their API for plugin development.
### Main benefits of Logstash
- The direct part of the ELK stack ecosystem
- Elastic Maps Server
- Advanced alerting tools