Loggly is $79/mo (Standard). Chronicle is a self-hosted alternative at $1.99/mo. Here's when each makes sense.
| Chronicle | Loggly | |
|---|---|---|
| Hosting | Self-hosted, your infra | Managed SaaS (cloud only) |
| Data location | Your server, your disk | Loggly's cloud |
| Free tier | 1GB/day retention | Paid only |
| Pro pricing | $1.99/mo | $79/mo (Standard) |
| Dependencies | None (single binary + SQLite) | N/A (managed) |
| Setup time | ~30 seconds | Account signup |
| Dashboard | Built-in at /ui | Cloud dashboard |
| License | BSL 1.1 | Proprietary SaaS |
Chronicle is a single Go binary with embedded SQLite. Install it with one command, and you are running in under a minute. Your data stays on your server.
curl -fsSL https://stockyard.dev/chronicle/install.sh | sh
The decision between Chronicle and Loggly usually comes down to one question: do you need the breadth of features that Loggly offers, or would a focused tool that stays out of your way be a better fit? Loggly has spent years building an ecosystem around log aggregator. Chronicle does one thing well and gives you complete control of the underlying data.
Architecturally, Chronicle and Loggly could not be more different. Loggly runs on distributed cloud infrastructure with load balancers, managed databases, CDNs, and redundancy across availability zones. Chronicle is a single process writing to a single file on a single disk. That sounds fragile until you realize that SQLite handles more concurrent readers than most web applications will ever need, and WAL mode means reads never block writes.
Moving from Loggly does not have to be all-or-nothing. Some teams run Chronicle for new data while keeping Loggly as a read-only archive of historical records. The API makes it straightforward to build a sync script if you need both systems to reflect the same data during a transition period.
Single binary. Free to start. $1.99/mo for Pro.