Bronto vs. Grafana Loki
Loki is an easy solution to get started with Grafana workflows, but it has serious limits at scale. With Bronto, you can collect full telemetry data and run sub-second queries in one central platform.
Why Teams are
Choosing Bronto
High-level comparison across what matters most.
Telemetry Coverage
Full-Fidelity Logging
Bronto indexes all fields and auto-scales with your log volume with no cardinality ceiling.
Indexing & Cardinality Limits
Loki has limited support for high cardinality. It only indexes 15 labels per series and does not index log line content.
Cost of Ownership
Transparent & Predictable Pricing
Bronto charges only $0.10 per GB of ingestion for always hot logs & traces.
Expensive Ingestion Prices
Grafana Loki charges $0.50/GB ingested at 30-day retention, with additional retention costs per 30-day increment.
Query Speed
Sub-Second Queries at Petabyte Scale
When an error pops up, query speed impacts your MTTR. Bronto was designed to enable lightning fast search across high volumes of logs.
Degraded Search Speed with Large Datasets
Loki searches run by filtering to a stream first, then iterating, so query latency is impacted by stream count and cardinality, not just data volume.
Data Retention
Always Hot, 1 Year Retention
Retain a larger dataset to ensure that your root cause analysis has rich context. No archiving or rehydrating logs to find what matters.
Short-Term Retention (30 Days)
30-day minimum on Grafana Cloud Logs; extensions sold in 30-day increments. Self-hosted: whatever your object store and operators can sustain.
Loved by teams
around the world
“Bronto fundamentally changed how we think about logging. We went from treating logs as a necessary evil — expensive, unreliable, and limited — to making them a key asset. The combination of unlimited retention, lightning-fast search, and AI-powered insights means we catch issues much earlier, often before customers notice them. But the real transformation is cultural: every team now has access to the data they need, when they need it.”
Paul Griffin
Head of Platform Engineering
“Bronto's long-term always-hot days mean we can access data with sub-second search, whether it's from last week or last year. This is huge for our security and AI strategy as we continue to revolutionize how we work at Nitro. For AI-powered analysis of our logs, data availability is key — it's just not possible with only a few days of retention. Bronto has become a key part of our toolkit when we think of log data and how it will play an important role for engineering, security and product teams going forward.”
John Fitzpatrick
CTO
“Tasks that used to take 15 minutes are now almost instant. I find myself using Bronto much more than the previous tool simply because it's faster and more responsive. I can quickly ask questions and get immediate answers, which makes it easier to explore insights that were previously hard to uncover. 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. This extended retention opens the door for much deeper analytics.”
Brian Elliott
Senior Engineering Manager, SaaS Services
“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. Bronto has come a long way with everything from usage to UI. Our users are getting what they're looking for.”
Jaymin Patel
Team Lead
“Bronto helped us cut costs and centralize our multi-cloud application logging, as well as providing cost-effective 12 month retention for billing-related events. Troubleshooting is now significantly faster, and having all our logs correlate properly in one place has been a game-changer for our team.”
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
“Bronto fundamentally changed how we think about logging. We went from treating logs as a necessary evil — expensive, unreliable, and limited — to making them a key asset. The combination of unlimited retention, lightning-fast search, and AI-powered insights means we catch issues much earlier, often before customers notice them. But the real transformation is cultural: every team now has access to the data they need, when they need it.”
Paul Griffin
Head of Platform Engineering
“Bronto's long-term always-hot days mean we can access data with sub-second search, whether it's from last week or last year. This is huge for our security and AI strategy as we continue to revolutionize how we work at Nitro. For AI-powered analysis of our logs, data availability is key — it's just not possible with only a few days of retention. Bronto has become a key part of our toolkit when we think of log data and how it will play an important role for engineering, security and product teams going forward.”
John Fitzpatrick
CTO
“Tasks that used to take 15 minutes are now almost instant. I find myself using Bronto much more than the previous tool simply because it's faster and more responsive. I can quickly ask questions and get immediate answers, which makes it easier to explore insights that were previously hard to uncover. 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. This extended retention opens the door for much deeper analytics.”
Brian Elliott
Senior Engineering Manager, SaaS Services
“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. Bronto has come a long way with everything from usage to UI. Our users are getting what they're looking for.”
Jaymin Patel
Team Lead
“Bronto helped us cut costs and centralize our multi-cloud application logging, as well as providing cost-effective 12 month retention for billing-related events. Troubleshooting is now significantly faster, and having all our logs correlate properly in one place has been a game-changer for our team.”
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
“Bronto fundamentally changed how we think about logging. We went from treating logs as a necessary evil — expensive, unreliable, and limited — to making them a key asset. The combination of unlimited retention, lightning-fast search, and AI-powered insights means we catch issues much earlier, often before customers notice them. But the real transformation is cultural: every team now has access to the data they need, when they need it.”
Paul Griffin
Head of Platform Engineering
“Bronto's long-term always-hot days mean we can access data with sub-second search, whether it's from last week or last year. This is huge for our security and AI strategy as we continue to revolutionize how we work at Nitro. For AI-powered analysis of our logs, data availability is key — it's just not possible with only a few days of retention. Bronto has become a key part of our toolkit when we think of log data and how it will play an important role for engineering, security and product teams going forward.”
John Fitzpatrick
CTO
“Tasks that used to take 15 minutes are now almost instant. I find myself using Bronto much more than the previous tool simply because it's faster and more responsive. I can quickly ask questions and get immediate answers, which makes it easier to explore insights that were previously hard to uncover. 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. This extended retention opens the door for much deeper analytics.”
Brian Elliott
Senior Engineering Manager, SaaS Services
“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. Bronto has come a long way with everything from usage to UI. Our users are getting what they're looking for.”
Jaymin Patel
Team Lead
“Bronto helped us cut costs and centralize our multi-cloud application logging, as well as providing cost-effective 12 month retention for billing-related events. Troubleshooting is now significantly faster, and having all our logs correlate properly in one place has been a game-changer for our team.”
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
Keep your dashboards. Pipe full-fidelity logs and traces into Bronto and get sub-second search with no cardinality ceiling.
Feature comparison
| Feature | Bronto | Grafana Loki |
|---|---|---|
| Hosting | Fully managed | Self-managed or Grafana Cloud |
| Hot log retention | 12 months included | 30 days default, archive extra |
| Search cost | 20x - 100x tiered search | 100x ingest included, overages billed |
| AI log analysis | BrontoScope, included free | Grafana Assistant, usage-based billing |
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.
