Papertrail vs Graylog Pricing (2026)

Papertrail vs Graylog

Log Management pricing comparison · 2026

Papertrail pricing ranges from $0–$280/month, while Graylog ranges from $0–$1550/month. Papertrail is typically 100% more affordable, though your actual cost depends on tier and team size.

Log Management

Papertrail

$0–$280
/month
5 plans · Free tier
Full pricing breakdown →
VS
Log Management

Graylog

$0–$1550
/month
5 plans · Free tier
Full pricing breakdown →

Papertrail and Graylog both operate in the log management category. This page compares their list pricing.

Plan-by-Plan Pricing

Plan Papertrail Graylog
Free Free /free Free /free (self-hosted)
Small $7 /$7/month $1.3K /$1,250/month for 10GB/day
Medium $40 /$40/month $1.6K /$1,550/month for 10GB/day
Large $230 /$230/month Custom
Enterprise Custom $1.5K /$1,500/month minimum

Cost at Scale

Total cost of ownership — licenses, implementation, and hidden costs included.

Papertrail

7 scenarios
$0/month
Solo Developer - Free Plan
Free tier with 50MB/month and 48-hour retention. Perfect for non-critical hobby projects.
$7/month ($84/year)
Small Startup - 1GB/month (Small)
Small plan with 7-day retention, unlimited saved searches, Slack/PagerDuty alerts. Scales to ~33MB/day.
$40/month ($480/year)
Growing SaaS - 10GB/month (Medium)
Medium plan with 7-day retention. Enables usage-based overages up to 20GB/month at 30% premium ($52 max).
See all 7 scenarios →

Graylog

4 scenarios
$1,500
Startup - Open Source Self-Hosted (10GB/day)
2,500/month - Infrastructure: 3 Graylog nodes, 3 Elasticsearch nodes, MongoDB, load balancer ($1,000-2,000/month) + DevOps time 20 hours/month ($500-1,000). Total: $1,500-2,500/month for unlimited logs.
$3,000
Mid-Size SaaS - Graylog Cloud Operations (25GB/day)
3,500/month - Graylog Cloud Operations with 25GB/day ingestion, 30-day retention, HA, auto-scaling, email/chat support. Negotiate 10-15% discount on annual contract: $2,700-3,000/month.
$6,000
Security Team - Graylog Cloud Security (50GB/day)
7,500/month - Graylog Cloud Security with 50GB/day, 90-day retention, Sigma rules, threat intelligence, incident investigation, compliance reporting. Negotiate 15-20% discount: $5,000-6,000/month.
See all 4 scenarios →

Market Intelligence

Papertrail

Median annual cost
$575
Based on
11 deals

Graylog

Median annual cost
$750
Based on
11 deals

Hidden Costs

Beyond the sticker price — what catches buyers off guard.

Papertrail 3 hidden costs

medium
Log retention limits on free tier Upgrade required for longer retention
high
Volume-based pricing escalation $575/month at 100GB volume
medium
Limited long-term archive capabilities Additional storage costs for long-term retention
See all Papertrail hidden costs →

Graylog 3 hidden costs

medium
Infrastructure Setup Complexity 10-20% of license costs
high
Disk Storage Management and Index Corruption 5-15% of license costs
low
Manual Update Management Required $500-$2,000
See all Graylog hidden costs →