Papertrail 2026: Benefits, Features & Pricing

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On this page

Overview
Pricing and Plans
Features
Integrations
User Reviews

Overview

Papertrail

4.3

(12)

Pricing

Starting at $7.00 per month

About Papertrail

Papertrail is a cloud-based log management solution that helps businesses consolidate and monitor application logs, text log files and Syslogs. Supervisors can detect anomalies within system activity and application performance and receive real-time summaries with detailed timestamps, graphs and charts to initiate troubleshooting processes.

Papertrail’s built-in search functionality utilizes query syntax methodology to filter data across multiple sources, including applications and servers. Administrators can configure role-based permission levels and access rights, restricting specific users to view, edit or delete information. Additionally, users can configure automated backups and store data archives on a centralized platform.

Papertrail comes with an application programming interface (API), which allows businesses to integrate the system with several third-party solutions, such as Slack, PagerDuty, Librato and more. It is available on monthly subscriptions and support is extended via email.

Papertrail Screenshots

Papertrail Pricing and Plans

Starting price: $7.00 per month

Free Trial

Free Version

Free

$0.00

flat rate

Plan includes:

48 Hours Search
50 MB/Month
7 Days Archive
Unlimited Systems
Unlimited Users

1 GB

$7.00

flat rate, per month

Plan includes:

1 GB/Month
1 Week Search
1 Year Archive
Automated Export for Reporting
Encrypted Logging
Intuitive Web-Based Log Viewer
Long-Term Archive (S3)
Powerful Command-Line Tools
REST API
Search Alerts

2 GB

$18.00

flat rate, per month

Plan includes:

1 Week Search
1 Year Archive
2 GB/Month
Automated Export for Reporting
Encrypted Logging
Intuitive Web-Based Log Viewer
Long-Term Archive (S3)
Powerful Command-Line Tools
REST API
Search Alerts

4 GB

Pricing available upon request

Plan includes:

1 Year Archive
2 Week Search
4 GB/Month
Automated Export for Reporting
Encrypted Logging
Intuitive Web-Based Log Viewer
Long-Term Archive (S3)
Powerful Command-Line Tools
REST API
Search Alerts

8 GB

Pricing available upon request

Plan includes:

1 Year Archive
2 Week Search
8 GB/Month
Automated Export for Reporting
Encrypted Logging
Intuitive Web-Based Log Viewer
Long-Term Archive (S3)
Powerful Command-Line Tools
REST API
Search Alerts

16 GB

Pricing available upon request

Plan includes:

16 GB/Month
1 Year Archive
2 Week Search
Automated Export for Reporting
Encrypted Logging
Intuitive Web-Based Log Viewer
Long-Term Archive (S3)
Powerful Command-Line Tools
REST API
Team-Wide Groups & Searches

Popular features found in Application Performance Management
Access Controls/Permissions
Alerts/Notifications
Data Visualization
Event Logs
Monitoring
Reporting/Analytics
Resource Management
Root Cause Analysis
Server Monitoring
Uptime Reporting
More features of Papertrail
Activity Dashboard
Activity Monitoring
Analytics
Anomaly Detection
API
Application Management
Archiving & Retention
Audit Management
Audit Trail
Charting
Compliance Tracking
Correlation Analysis
Data Analysis Tools
Diagnostic Tools
IP Filtering
Log Analysis
Log Collection
Log Management
Log Parsing
Log Rotation
Network Monitoring
Pattern Detection and Recognition
Performance Metrics
Real-Time Monitoring
Remediation Management
Reporting & Statistics
Search/Filter
Server Logs
Threshold Alerts
Troubleshooting
Visual Analytics

Papertrail Integrations

Datadog

PagerDuty

AppOptics

Slack

Amazon CloudWatch

Zapier

Papertrail User Reviews

Overall Rating

4.3

Ratings Breakdown

33%

67%

Secondary Ratings

Ease of Use

4.0

Value for money

4.5

Customer support

4.5

Functionality

4.3

Have you used Papertrail and would like to share your experience with others?

Diego M.

Verified reviewer

Investment Management

11-50 employees

Used daily for more than 2 years

Review source

Reviewed February 2019

Simple UI, just what you need for log management

I love how it is like having the terminal, but all your logs in one place. tail/grep is really all you need when reading logs, their autorefreshed ui and search does what I need, and having things like email alerts when certain keywords appear on certain servers is a nice feature

Ratings Breakdown

Ease of use

Value for money

Customer support

Functionality

Pros:

tail -f style by default. No need to refresh the screen to get new events. But also has nice search with special character to exclude terms, time range, etc

Cons:

Nothing, all our team needed was a central place to get all our logs from, and papertrail did just that

Verified

Reviewer

Hospital & Health Care

201-500 employees

Used daily for more than 2 years

Review source

Reviewed March 2018

Used papertrail to log and monitor user devices and app usage.

We gain valuable insight into what our users and doing and experiencing by monitoring these logs. In certain situations where there's a live issues or outage, having live searchable data from our users is absolutely critical. My only gripe with Papertrail is that it's incredibly powerful but IMHO should be more intuitive, or have better training material to assist users in unlocking its full potential. We have a team of three developers who are competent enough to get what they need out of Papertrail, but I worry they may be missing out on some benefits we weren't even aware existed. Having software that you worry is too powerful for you to fully comprehend how your organization could benefit from it is a great problem to have though. Especially when it comes with an affordable price tag. This complaint is more about my own knowledge base and less of an issue with the software.

Ratings Breakdown

Ease of use

Value for money

Customer support

Functionality

Pros:

Gave us the ability to monitor devices based on usernames, device ID's, app versions, iOS versions, etc. Easy SQL searching and parsing. Gain the ability to create different visualizations based on predefined metrics but also allows for some customization. See user logs immediately as ours were set to upload every 10 seconds.

Cons:

Not very user friendly for new users. There's certainly a learning curve to get started. Depending on how your logging has been setup there can also be a lot of noise to sort through, making the overall experience cumbersome. Most of this is due to sheer volume of data being collected, which is a self imposed problem but it'd be nice to get more support regarding how to handle this or having built in tools to filter out duplicate data points. Users have the ability to setup predefined queries which helps cut down on some of unneeded data, but as mentioned there's a steep learning curve and not very much documentation to go off of.

Hung Q.

Verified reviewer

Computer Software

201-500 employees

Used daily for less than 6 months

Review source

Reviewed December 2019

My review

Ratings Breakdown

Ease of use

Value for money

Customer support

Functionality

Pros:

Intuitive UI, easy to use and setup. I can integrate papertrail to my app rapidly. It saves me a lot of time for troubleshooting issues.

Cons:

Do not have the on premise (Self-Hosted) version.

Reasons for choosing Papertrail

on premise version

Verified

Reviewer

Computer Software

2-10 employees

Used daily for more than 2 years

Review source

Reviewed August 2022

Quickly monitor, filter your logs and get notified about errors

Ratings Breakdown

Ease of use

Value for money

Functionality

Pros:

We use Papertrail for monitoring all of our micro services. It's really convenient to get an overview of the state of a service, quick and easy to filter through logs and to set up alerts for warnings or errors. Because of its integration with Heroku, adding Papertrail to a new service can be done in just a few clicks.

Cons:

It may be difficult to use some functions without prior software development knowledge. The syntax for filtering logs differs from the one used to set up alerts (with the latter being regex).

Verified

Reviewer

Information Services

201-500 employees

Used monthly for less than 2 years

Review source

Reviewed November 2021

Maintain logs and detect errors instantly

With Papertrail, we are able to gain visibility into our IT infrastructure and better analyze logs to improve troubleshooting as errors arise. It's great to have a centralized hub for logs and advanced monitoring tools at hand with powerful search capabilities.

Ratings Breakdown

Ease of use

Value for money

Customer support

Functionality

Pros:

Papertrail is packed with tons of features for log management. It has dashboards with an intuitive interface, search filters to find specific logs in a bunch of raw log data, and log archiving to store logs you may want to keep in the future. I especially find their search capability impressive since you can enter various keywords to quickly find what you are looking for and troubleshoot root causes.

Cons:

When configuring logs from the server to Papertrail, I wasn't able to enable this on my own. I needed a web developer's help since they are different ways to integrate the logs in Papertrail and I found it to be confusing. I didn't find their online resources to be as helpful either, however, their customer service is responsive and can point you in the right direction.

Kevin V.

Verified reviewer

Accounting

51-200 employees

Used daily for less than 2 years

Review source

Reviewed February 2017

Nice log aggregator

PaperTrail does the trick for log aggregation, it may not be quite as fully featured as others but the price makes up for it. For basic log aggregation it works well and has a decent search mechanism.

Ratings Breakdown

Ease of use

Value for money

Customer support

Functionality

Pros:

Good price, overall good general functionality. Product performs well and was easy to setup.

Cons:

The search functionality could be beefed up, they have a variety of options but based on the UI it isn't always obvious.

Verified

Reviewer

Computer Software

11-50 employees

Used weekly for less than 12 months

Review source

Reviewed December 2019

Quick and basic solution for centralized logging

We use this to aggregate log for our microservices app. The integration process is simple and straightforward, but analytic feature should be improved.

Ratings Breakdown

Ease of use

Value for money

Customer support

Functionality

Pros:

Easy to integrate: It took only 30 minutes to integrate Papertrail with our application. There are step-by-step instructions to integrate Papertrail with your app in most web servers/frameworks.

Cons:

The UI is pretty basic. No built-in analysis feature, we have to export the log manually for analysis.

Verified

Reviewer

Computer Software

51-200 employees

Used daily for less than 6 months

Review source

Reviewed December 2018

Great way to catch logs if you're on top of things.

Ratings Breakdown

Ease of use

Value for money

Functionality

Pros:

It is easy to link Papertrail to applications and search logs for the given log storage time.

Cons:

We only keep logs for 24 hours, and then we store them in S3. It is very difficult to search through these logs since they are broken up into one hour chunks and all mixed together. Though I understand if that is outside of Papertrail's control.

Verified

Reviewer

Used weekly for less than 2 years

Review source

Reviewed July 2018

Useful, Very Insight ful tool, with erespect to Heroku APP

Event logs, debug logs of application (Custom applications running on Heroku)

Ratings Breakdown

Ease of use

Value for money

Customer support

Functionality

Pros:

Good Insight on debug logs, and event monitoring, Provides high lithed view of the errors in the application.

Cons:

Monitoring database events, there is scope for improvement on monitoring the database level events/logs/deadlocks.

Jose F. G.

Verified reviewer

Internet

51-200 employees

Used monthly for less than 6 months

Review source

Reviewed May 2020

Helps consolidate logging in today’s containerized world

We’re able to keep track of key transactions logging and debugging errors faster and more efficiently.

Ratings Breakdown

Ease of use

Value for money

Functionality

Pros:

With today’s web infrastructure relying on multiple containers, it means that logs generation speed has multiplied and it makes it difficult to debug and trace core functionality. Papertrail helps solve the issue by providing a pipeline to a clean UI and tools to make it easy to debug and keep visibility of key application transactions.

Cons:

It’s cost structure was confusing at first and we spent our quota too quickly. It required us to rethink what to log and what not to log, which isn’t necessarily a bad thing.

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