Bronto vs. Elastic (ELK)
The Elastic ELK stack can be powerful, but it requires ongoing configuration and costly maintenance. With Bronto, everything is fully managed at scale with fast search and built-in tracing.
Why Teams are
Choosing Bronto
High-level comparison across what matters most.
Operations
Full Managed Logging & Tracing
Bronto auto-scales with your log volume, no reindexing or sampling required. Everything is automatically indexed and parsed.
Self-Managed Ops Toil
As your system evolves, you'll need to dedicate engineering time to configuring and maintaining Logstash pipelines, and still need a separate tool for tracing.
Query Speed
Fast Search at Scale
Bronto is architected to ensure sub-second search across TBs of data. Query more instead of waiting.
Slow Search for Large Datasets
Logstash users routinely report timeouts and slow Kibana dashboard loads when querying large datasets.
Data Retention
Always Hot, 1 Year Retention
Retain a larger dataset to ensure that your root cause analysis has enough context. With Bronto, we've architected our platform to enable log-driven learning.
Short-Term Retention (< 30 Days)
Elastic encourages 5-7 days of data retention for highest performance. Teams accept losing visibility as retaining logs becomes too expensive.
Cost of Ownership
Transparent & Predictable Pricing
Choose the Bronto plan that is right for you and see how accessible fully-managed logging and tracing can be for your team's applications.
Unpredictable Expenses & Hidden Costs
Spend engineering time configuring clusters to support a DIY logging approach that still risks slow query and dashboard performance.
One platform for all of your data
Logs
Filter with smart SQL autocomplete and keyboard-driven shortcuts. Results return in seconds — even across terabytes. Drill into any attribute, view raw logs, or jump straight into traces from the log table.
Loved by teams
around the world
“The combination of long-term retention, lightning-fast search, and AI-powered insights means we catch issues much earlier, often before customers notice them.”
Paul Griffin
Head of Platform Engineering
“We can access data with sub-second search, whether it's from last week or last year. For AI-powered analysis of our logs, data availability is key — it's just not possible with only a few days of retention.”
John Fitzpatrick
CTO
“Tasks that used to take 15 minutes are now almost instant. With a year's worth of data retention instead of just 90 days, I can now identify annual trends and patterns I couldn't see before.”
Brian Elliott
Senior Engineering Manager
“It's a night and day difference to our previous logging provider. Bronto typically returns results in seconds, while our old vendor took over 30 minutes and frequently failed to render visualizations.”
Jaymin Patel
Team Lead
“Bronto helped us cut costs and centralize our multi-cloud application logging. Troubleshooting is now significantly faster, and having all our logs correlate properly in one place has been a game-changer.”
Joaquín Sargiotto
DevOps Team Lead
“The TCO reduction is significant — we're saving hundreds of thousands annually. But the real value is in new and significantly enhanced capabilities. A significant reduction in time to root cause, investigating issues from months ago, having logs actually available during incidents — these aren't just improvements, they're game-changers. Our SysOps team now get to work on platform innovation instead of keeping Graylog alive.”
Aodh O'Mahony
Engineering Manager
“The combination of long-term retention, lightning-fast search, and AI-powered insights means we catch issues much earlier, often before customers notice them.”
Paul Griffin
Head of Platform Engineering
“We can access data with sub-second search, whether it's from last week or last year. For AI-powered analysis of our logs, data availability is key — it's just not possible with only a few days of retention.”
John Fitzpatrick
CTO
“Tasks that used to take 15 minutes are now almost instant. With a year's worth of data retention instead of just 90 days, I can now identify annual trends and patterns I couldn't see before.”
Brian Elliott
Senior Engineering Manager
“It's a night and day difference to our previous logging provider. Bronto typically returns results in seconds, while our old vendor took over 30 minutes and frequently failed to render visualizations.”
Jaymin Patel
Team Lead
“Bronto helped us cut costs and centralize our multi-cloud application logging. Troubleshooting is now significantly faster, and having all our logs correlate properly in one place has been a game-changer.”
Joaquín Sargiotto
DevOps Team Lead
“The TCO reduction is significant — we're saving hundreds of thousands annually. But the real value is in new and significantly enhanced capabilities. A significant reduction in time to root cause, investigating issues from months ago, having logs actually available during incidents — these aren't just improvements, they're game-changers. Our SysOps team now get to work on platform innovation instead of keeping Graylog alive.”
Aodh O'Mahony
Engineering Manager
“The combination of long-term retention, lightning-fast search, and AI-powered insights means we catch issues much earlier, often before customers notice them.”
Paul Griffin
Head of Platform Engineering
“We can access data with sub-second search, whether it's from last week or last year. For AI-powered analysis of our logs, data availability is key — it's just not possible with only a few days of retention.”
John Fitzpatrick
CTO
“Tasks that used to take 15 minutes are now almost instant. With a year's worth of data retention instead of just 90 days, I can now identify annual trends and patterns I couldn't see before.”
Brian Elliott
Senior Engineering Manager
“It's a night and day difference to our previous logging provider. Bronto typically returns results in seconds, while our old vendor took over 30 minutes and frequently failed to render visualizations.”
Jaymin Patel
Team Lead
“Bronto helped us cut costs and centralize our multi-cloud application logging. Troubleshooting is now significantly faster, and having all our logs correlate properly in one place has been a game-changer.”
Joaquín Sargiotto
DevOps Team Lead
“The TCO reduction is significant — we're saving hundreds of thousands annually. But the real value is in new and significantly enhanced capabilities. A significant reduction in time to root cause, investigating issues from months ago, having logs actually available during incidents — these aren't just improvements, they're game-changers. Our SysOps team now get to work on platform innovation instead of keeping Graylog alive.”
Aodh O'Mahony
Engineering Manager
Stop worrying about scaling and fine-tuning your ELK configuration. With Bronto, you can focus on what matters.
Feature comparison
| Feature | Bronto | Elastic (ELK) |
|---|---|---|
| Cluster management | Fully managed | Self-managed or Elastic Cloud |
| APM & trace correlation | Native, no extra agent | Separate tool / extra cost |
| Setup time | Minutes | Days and weeks |
| Search performance | Sub-second on TBs, guaranteed | Depends on cluster tuning |
| Dashboards | AI-suggested + drag/drop | Kibana, hand-built |
| Root cause analysis | BrontoScope, included | Not included |
Full fidelity, always hot, fully managed data
Always Hot Data
Every byte of telemetry is instantly queryable — no rehydration, no cold tiers, no waiting.
Long-Term Retention
12 months of retention included out of the box. Keep your data as long as you need it.
Full Fidelity, Full Coverage
No sampling, no aggregation, no data loss. Every log, trace, and metric stored exactly as received.
Transparent Usage & Controls
See exactly what you're ingesting and what it costs. Set quotas, alerts, and exclusion filters in seconds.
Fast at Large Scales
Sub-second queries across petabytes of data. Purpose-built indexing that scales with your growth.
Always Parsed & Searchable
At ingestion, Bronto parses your logs using known formats or AI — so every field is structured and instantly searchable.
