When comparing Loggly vs Timber, the Slant community recommends Loggly for most people. In the question“What are the best log management, aggregation & monitoring tools?” Loggly is ranked 6th while Timber is ranked 17th. The most important reason people chose Loggly is:
[Unlike Airbrake](https://github.com/airbrake/airbrake-js/issues/82), you don't have to add try/catch blocks to automatically capture JavaScript errors.
Specs
Ranked in these QuestionsQuestion Ranking
Pros
Pro Automatically captures JavaScript errors
Unlike Airbrake, you don't have to add try/catch blocks to automatically capture JavaScript errors.
Pro Hosted on a CDN already
Unlike Airbrake or LogEntries, you can download the library from GitHub and concatenate/minify it along with your other JS, or you can use it directly from Loggly's CDN.
Pro Supports raw text, syslogs, and JSON
Raw text, syslogs, and JSON can be fed to Loggly.
Pro Easy to set up
You only have to set up a HTTP JSON input and there are community examples to guide you.
Pro Beautiful, modern, easy interface
The Timber interface stands out in the space:
- It's beautiful, easy, and modern.
- It's fast. It uses advanced front-end technologies to maximize performance and usability (react, redux, etc).
Pro Great search
Timber offers a really great simple search, with a support for advanced features like: term negation, condition grouping (parenthesis), regex, field searches and conditions, etc.
Pro SQL query your logs (w/ join support)
Timber allows you to SQL query your logs just like you would a traditional database. The JOIN support is very powerful.
Pro Six month searchable retention
The retention Timber offers is exceptionally longer. The default is generally 2 - 4 weeks, Timber offers 6 months.
Pro Real-time graphing
Because Timber fully embraces structured data, graphing is simple, real time, and fast. They provide a number of aggregates you can graph on.
Pro Automatic context & structured data
Timber provides native libraries that automatically attach metadata to your logs. They've designed a schema that defines events and context, which normalizes the data and makes querying, alerting, and graphing simple and reliable.
Pro Easy installation
Timber can be installed in < 1 min and usually with a single command. It asks your for your application details and provides 1 set of simple instructions.
Pro Simple pricing and plans. No feature matrices.
Besides the free plan, Timber doesn't impose limits on the number of users, alerts, etc. It's entirely based on the amount of data allowed for the plan. It's refreshingly straightforward.
Pro Real-time alerts with thresholds
The alerts are real-time and the approach is thoughtful. Instead of blasting you with alerts every time it's triggered, they change the state of the alert once, notify you once, and then notify you again when the alert is no longer an issue.
Pro Excellent documentation
Timber's docs are detailed and thoughtful, both for the service as well as the libraries they offer.
Pro No rate limiting
Beyond the space your plan is allowed to use, there is no rate limiting.
Pro Logs show up quickly
Logs show up < 3 seconds of when they are generated
Cons
Con Expensive
Loggly QUICKLY overflows the 200mb daily free allowance.
Con Difficult to setup
Setup is not easy, the whole process is disjointed, with open source libraries that regularly change and out of date installation instructions.
Con The UI is confusing
The UI is very difficult to use, but it does offer a lot of features.
Con Timestamps are in UTC in the UI, and can't be converted
Loggly shows all timestamps in UTC, and the bookmarklet that's supposed to convert them to local time doesn't work.
Con JavaScript tracker has removed tag support
Con Not really a centralized log management tool
It only takes in events from specified "apps", not all unstructured data. And, if you select "other" (apps), it just says:
Bummer! We don't support apps of this type yet.