When comparing Loggly vs Kafka, 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 Kafka is ranked 8th. 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 Optimized for performance
Kafka is optimized for supporting a huge number of users.
Pro Native mirroring support
Kafka has native support for mirroring.
Pro Native compression support
Kafka has native support for compression.
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Setup is not easy, the whole process is disjointed, with open source libraries that regularly change and out of date installation instructions.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 Java is a resource hog
Java is a resource hog, making this far too slow unless you have money to throw at multiple servers with 1/2TB of ram.
Con Need Zookeeper
Kafka can only work with Zookeeper