Bronto vs. OpenObserve
OpenObserve is an open-source observability platform built on object storage. With Bronto, you get the same low storage cost without running and tuning the stack yourself, plus 12 months of always-hot retention and sub-second search across TBs.
Why Teams are
Choosing Bronto
High-level comparison across what matters most.
Retention
12 Month Always Hot Retention
Retain a larger dataset to ensure that your root cause analysis has rich context. No archiving or rehydrating logs, traces, or metrics to find what matters.
30 Days, Then Pay by the Month
OpenObserve Cloud keeps logs and traces for 30 days by default. Each extra 30 days costs $0.02/GB, so a full year adds $0.22/GB on top of ingest.
Search Cost
Search Without Watching the Meter
Every Bronto plan includes a search allowance of 20x to 100x your ingest volume. Run the queries an investigation needs without pricing each one.
Every Query is Metered
OpenObserve Cloud bills $0.01 per GB queried, ten times Bronto's search rate. The bill grows with every investigation, right when your team needs answers most.
Operations
Fully Managed, Nothing to Run
Bronto is fully managed SaaS in EU and US regions. No clusters, buckets, upgrades, or capacity planning on your side.
Free to Download, Not to Run
The open-source edition is free, but you run the cluster, object storage, upgrades, and on-call. Self-hosted Enterprise is free only up to 50 GB/day.
Cost of Ownership
Transparent & Predictable Pricing
No surprise bills. Choose the Bronto plan that is right for you and see how accessible fully-managed logs, traces, & metrics can be for your applications.
Three Meters to Forecast
Ingest, query volume, and retention are billed separately, and SSO, RBAC, and extended retention sit behind the Enterprise plan. Total cost depends on how hard you search and how long you keep data.
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
Run a parallel POC with your own data and see what it costs to keep everything, always hot, fully managed.
Feature comparison
| Feature | OpenObserve | Bronto |
|---|---|---|
| Hot log retention | 30 days included, then $0.02/GB per extra 30 days | 12 months included |
| Search cost | $0.01 per GB queried | 20x to 100x tiered search |
| Time to first value | Minutes on Cloud; self-hosting means running the cluster and object storage | Minutes via OTel / Fluent Bit |
| Bill predictability | Separate ingest, query, and retention meters | One monthly price |
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.
Ready to try Bronto out?
- 12 month retention
- Always hot data
- Sub-second search
- $0.01 per GB
- Unified observability
- OTel native
- No sampling
- AI investigations
- Unlimited users
- Zero schemas
- Auto-parsing
- Auto-indexing
- Fully managed
- No self-hosting
- SQL across every signal
- MCP & CLI
- Built for AI agents
