SolarWinds Papertrail vs. Sumo Logic

Overview
ProductRatingMost Used ByProduct SummaryStarting Price
SolarWinds Papertrail
Score 8.9 out of 10
N/A
Austin based SolarWinds acquired log management tool Papertrail in April, 2015.N/A
Sumo Logic
Score 8.8 out of 10
N/A
Sumo Logic is a log management offering from the San Francisco based company of the same name.
$3
Per GB Logs
Pricing
SolarWinds PapertrailSumo Logic
Editions & Modules
No answers on this topic
Essentials
$3.00
Per GB Logs
Enterprise
$4.00
Per GB Logs
Enterprise Security
$4.25
Per GB Logs
Enterprise Suite
$4.75
Per GB Logs
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
SolarWinds PapertrailSumo Logic
Free Trial
NoNo
Free/Freemium Version
YesNo
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
NoNo
Entry-level Setup FeeNo setup feeNo setup fee
Additional Details
More Pricing Information
Community Pulse
SolarWinds PapertrailSumo Logic
Considered Both Products
SolarWinds Papertrail
Chose SolarWinds Papertrail
Papertrail is faster and easier to use. Simplicity and ease of use are really important to our team.
Chose SolarWinds Papertrail
I selected SolarWinds Papertrail because it was cheap and already provided precisely the integration surface required by the Heroku stack. It probably provided the least number of 'useful' features (out of the bunch) due to the nature of my logs and the post-mortem updates …
Chose SolarWinds Papertrail
We started with SolarWinds Papertrail and have never left.
Chose SolarWinds Papertrail
NR logging just didn't seem to work all that well for us. We had issues with logs getting to them. SolarWinds Papertrail was much simpler to set up.
Chose SolarWinds Papertrail
SolarWinds Papertrail is easier to set up, and in my opinion, its UI is quicker for searching specific logs. LogDNA (now Mezmo) have advantage in the UI look and in the power to create charts and counters.
Chose SolarWinds Papertrail
CloudWatch, by itself, is terrible at search. CloudWatch Insights works great and has powerful search capabilities, but it's more difficult to set up alerts. Also, because Insights charges per search, you have the potential to accumulate a large bill if you need to do many …
Chose SolarWinds Papertrail
SolarWinds Papertrail is as easy and intuitive to use as Amazon CloudWatch is hard and intuitive.
Chose SolarWinds Papertrail
As a way to just read your logs in a stream, aggregated across apps, it does that better than Datadog or Honeycomb. While DataDog does have a logging product, Honeycomb does not, so Honeycomb + SolarWinds Papertrail could be useful.
Chose SolarWinds Papertrail
Papertrail offers a much easier to use solution than Azure. We were able to integrate it into our applications without much work and the solution works robustly. Papertrail offers traditional logging services, only, but we have used sysdig monitor together with papertrail and …
Chose SolarWinds Papertrail
I much prefer SolarWinds Papertrail as it just makes things so much easier to read and follow through than other tools. It's much faster, and so much easier to set up and get into a running state. It takes us on average maybe 5-10 minutes to configure our apps to send log data.
Chose SolarWinds Papertrail
AWS user interface and user experience is not really great, its really hard to trace logs on their console. Papertrail offers so much better user experience for us, its also very easy to setup alarm on Papertrail whenever something's gone wrong. I personally choose Papertrail …
Chose SolarWinds Papertrail
We have used other services such as Coralogix before but love SolarWinds Papertrail for its ease of use and not-too-bloated features. This also makes our engineers and other staff use it more often.
Chose SolarWinds Papertrail
We have used Papertrail right from day 1 of our startup. We didn't find any major drawbacks for us to check/evaluate anything else. Part of the reason is also that we started with Heroku and Papertrail was available as an add on for Heroku.
Sumo Logic
Chose Sumo Logic
Sumo hits the right balance between the high price of Splunk and the reduced features and usabilty of cheaper competitors like Graylog and Humio
Chose Sumo Logic
Sumo Logic works very well out of the gate. For a small business it has given us what we need. I worked at a larger company previously, and we produced so many logs we had to create a custom logging service to handle them all. Cost and availability are big issues when …
Chose Sumo Logic
It's cheaper, by an ungodly number of dollars. Splunk is insanely expensive. But Splunk is also incredibly fast and efficient. Splunk also holds information indefinitely (forever) so if I wanted to see if a specific end-user clicked a very specific button in 2012, I can search …
Chose Sumo Logic
We felt the features were comparable and Sumo Logic offered a better price. This was our first log aggregation tool so we don't have a lot of insight for competing products. I speak with many others specifically regarding splunk and it seems to be comparable in many ways except …
Chose Sumo Logic
Provides the same basic solution as Splunk as it is a central log aggregator. The main difference for us is hosted or cloud vs. on-premise. The other large difference for us was the central management of the collectors. Sumo provides a single view of all the collectors, …
Chose Sumo Logic
For use this was a better overall solution for our needs. Between reporting, access and the ability to support an external two-factor solution for controlled access.
Chose Sumo Logic
Comparing them to Logstash and other open source tools, Sumo Logic is a clean, already well built tool that is ready to ingest and analyze data instantly. Other open source tools take a lot of time to build and manage; and their graphs/dashboards are almost always lacking. Sumo …
Chose Sumo Logic
We had used Splunk previously. Sumo Logic defeats them when it comes to cost, including the costs that would normally come with supporting/managing/patching/upgrading your own infrastructure and storage. Those were wins, but especially the real-time CDN integrations due to Sumo …
Best Alternatives
SolarWinds PapertrailSumo Logic
Small Businesses
SolarWinds Loggly
SolarWinds Loggly
Score 7.6 out of 10
LevelBlue USM Anywhere
LevelBlue USM Anywhere
Score 8.0 out of 10
Medium-sized Companies
Sumo Logic
Sumo Logic
Score 8.8 out of 10
InsightIDR
InsightIDR
Score 8.4 out of 10
Enterprises
Sumo Logic
Sumo Logic
Score 8.8 out of 10
InsightIDR
InsightIDR
Score 8.4 out of 10
All AlternativesView all alternativesView all alternatives
User Ratings
SolarWinds PapertrailSumo Logic
Likelihood to Recommend
8.6
(0 ratings)
9.6
(0 ratings)
Likelihood to Renew
9.1
(0 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Usability
9.1
(0 ratings)
9.0
(0 ratings)
Support Rating
9.1
(0 ratings)
8.7
(0 ratings)
Implementation Rating
-
(0 ratings)
9.0
(0 ratings)
User Testimonials
SolarWinds PapertrailSumo Logic
Likelihood to Recommend
SolarWinds Papertrail is great if you have multiple separate applications and you want to be able to view and search all the logs in one place. It also works well for alerts based on certain keywords in log entries (for example, ERROR, WARN, etc.) Since only the first four weeks of logs are searchable in Papertrail, it may not work well for use-cases where much older log entries need to remain searchable.
Read full review
SumoLogic is a fantastic log aggregator and analysis tool, a fine alternative to Splunk. Searching is powerful and mostly intuitive and results come fast. If you have application logs in clusters or Kubernetes pods that lose their logs every time they're restarted, Sumo is the solution for you
Read full review
Pros
  • Collects logs from many sources in real time.
  • Makes it really easy to filter logs to dig into the logs of many services working simultaneously.
  • Alerts triggered on certain search matches.
Read full review
  • Log Aggregation and uploading. The architecture for Sumo Logic makes a great deal of sense and works very well.
  • Automated analysis. It still impresses me how well a newly uploaded log can be broken into intelligent parts, then searched and sorted using their tools.
  • Dashboards. It might not be what YOU will need as an IT admin, but you can give access to these dashboards easily to business users who love that kind of stuff. Most other types of (monitoring / alerting) tools, for no apparent reason, lack this feature.
  • Reporting, monitoring, and graphing. Given, you need to have useful log generation for an application or service as a prerequisite for sumo logic to be able to gain use, once it has it is an amazingly powerful tool.
Read full review
Cons
  • The CLI was a bit clunky and required some Linux-y thought to get right (obviously more designed with scripting in mind)
  • Tracking logs in real time (think something like `tail`) wasn't wildly intuitive
  • Accessing/searching archives required a lot of CLI-style pulling/extracting/reg-exing
Read full review
  • I like the help center, but I think if it had more GUI tools, it could help new users.
  • Pulling out data is sometimes hard to read, (Maybe if I knew how to export data better, this would not be an issue for me).
  • I would like better know-how on how to create reports that will help our business.
Read full review
Likelihood to Renew
We are definitely going to continue using Papertrail. It's been a lifesaver.
Read full review
No answers on this topic
Usability
It's extremely easy to use. I and new colleagues have never had any issues configuring this tool or setting it up, it works almost out of the box with very simple instructions to follow to configure it to our own environment. I would highly recommend it on that ability alone.
Read full review
Sumo Logic is very powerful but definitely requires some configuration work to get the most out of it. You can get a certification related to this, but it is definitely not something you can just throw together.
Read full review
Support Rating
I honestly have never had the need to use the support team, as we have not run into any issues so far. If we did however, judging from how the tool itself works, I don't doubt that the team would provide excellent support for any issues that we may possibly run into.
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I would give this rating because I attended a free Sumo Logic training at a WeWork in Chicago. I found the training very useful, and I learned a lot of features that I was not aware of before I went to the training. I like the idea that SumoLogic provides free training seminars. I am certified in level1, and I plan on certifying to level2.
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Implementation Rating
No answers on this topic
I was satisfied with the implementation, as at the time, it was the best way to implement the product with the available feature sets in Sumo Logic. User creation and management became more of an issue during continued use, instead of it being an issue related to deploying the product in our environment.
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Alternatives Considered
I selected SolarWinds Papertrail because it was cheap and already provided precisely the integration surface required by the Heroku stack. It probably provided the least number of 'useful' features (out of the bunch) due to the nature of my logs and the post-mortem updates that were required to make them usable.
Read full review
We had used Splunk previously. Sumo Logic defeats them when it comes to cost, including the costs that would normally come with supporting/managing/patching/upgrading your own infrastructure and storage. Those were wins, but especially the real-time CDN integrations due to Sumo Logic's collaborations with other vendors. We had spoken to Logentries and discovered that many of the cons we found with Sumo Logic seemed to have been resolved in their product. Their pitfall was that, at the time, Logentries did not have the ability to get real-time log ingestion from our CDN. They said they had a solution, which was scripted, but we had not evaluated/tested. Logentries also did not have a User / RBAC REST API, and are nowhere near the level of compliance that Sumo Logic had (https://www.sumologic.com/press/2015-02-19/sumo-logic-successfully-completes-pci-data-security-stand...). In the end, I believe Logentries and Sumo Logic would be two good vendors to get involved in a bake-off
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Return on Investment
  • We are alarmed properly so it makes it easy for us to monitor the server.
  • Very easy to debug our apps when something's gone wrong (bug) in the production server.
  • Noticed whenever any third party scan was going on our server.
Read full review
  • Sumo Logic has allowed us to move forward quickly without having to maintain a custom log service
  • The service runs in the background without much interaction from the dev teams
  • Because logs aren't lost, we are able to support our customers quickly
Read full review
ScreenShots

SolarWinds Papertrail Screenshots

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