Loggy vs Sentry vs Datadog vs Logtail: Choosing the Right Logging Tool in 2026

Choosing a logging tool shouldn’t feel like buying a car. But somehow, in 2026, picking the right way to collect and search your application logs involves comparing dozens of products, deciphering pricing calculators that require a spreadsheet to understand, and reading marketing pages that all claim to be “the most powerful observability platform” for “modern teams.” It’s exhausting, and we think it’s worth cutting through the noise with an honest comparison.

We built Loggy, so we’re obviously biased. We’ll be upfront about that throughout this post. But we also genuinely use and respect the other tools on this list, and we think different tools are right for different teams. Our goal here isn’t to convince you that Loggy is the best tool in every situation — it’s to help you figure out which tool is the best fit for your situation, right now, today.

Let’s look at four popular options: Datadog, Sentry, Logtail (now part of Better Stack), and Loggy. We’ll compare them on the things that actually matter when you’re trying to ship a product: how much they cost, how long they take to set up, what they’re actually good at, and where they fall short.

Datadog: The Enterprise Powerhouse

Datadog is the 800-pound gorilla of observability. They do everything — logs, metrics, traces, infrastructure monitoring, real user monitoring, security monitoring, CI/CD visibility, database monitoring, and about thirty other products we’re probably forgetting. If you can observe it, Datadog has a product for it.

The thing is, all of that power comes with real costs, and we don’t just mean the bill (though we’ll get to that). The setup process for Datadog involves installing agents on your servers, configuring integrations, learning their query language, and building dashboards. For a platform engineering team at a company with hundreds of engineers, that investment pays for itself many times over. For a team of three people building a SaaS product, it’s a week of work before you see your first useful dashboard.

Pricing is where Datadog gets genuinely complicated. Their log management starts at $0.10 per ingested GB per month for the first tier, but that doesn’t include indexing (another $1.70/GB), or retention beyond 15 days, or the various add-ons you’ll probably want. Most small teams we’ve talked to who use Datadog end up paying somewhere between $100 and $500 per month, and many report bill surprises when log volume spikes during incidents. Per-host pricing for infrastructure monitoring starts at $15/host/month, and APM starts at $31/host/month. It adds up fast.

Datadog is great if: You have a dedicated ops team, you’re running your own infrastructure, you need infrastructure-level monitoring, or your organization requires SOC 2 compliance and enterprise security features.

Datadog is probably overkill if: You’re a small team on managed hosting (Vercel, Railway, Fly.io), you don’t need infrastructure monitoring, or your monthly observability budget is under $100.

Sentry: The Error Tracking Specialist

Sentry carved out a very specific niche and they own it completely. If you care primarily about error tracking — catching exceptions, understanding stack traces, tracking error frequency, and getting alerted when new errors appear — Sentry is genuinely excellent at that. Their error grouping is smart, their stack trace presentation is best-in-class, and their SDK coverage across languages and frameworks is incredibly broad.

The challenge with Sentry is that error tracking, while valuable, is only one piece of the observability picture. Sentry doesn’t do general-purpose logging — you can’t send loggy.info("User signed up", { userId, plan }) to Sentry and search for it later. They’ve added performance monitoring and session replay, but their core competency is still “something threw an exception, here’s what happened.” If you need to search through info-level logs to understand why a user saw a specific behavior, or if you need heartbeat monitoring for your cron jobs, or if you need a status page for your customers, you’ll need additional tools alongside Sentry.

Pricing is straightforward. Their developer tier is free with limits, their team plan starts at $26/month, and business plans start at $80/month. You pay per event, with overage charges. For pure error tracking, it’s reasonable. But remember that you’re paying for one slice of the observability pie, and you’ll likely need to add other tools (and other bills) to cover logging, uptime monitoring, and status pages.

Sentry is great if: Error tracking is your primary concern, you want deep stack trace analysis, or you need session replay to understand user-facing bugs.

Sentry is probably not enough if: You need general-purpose log search, heartbeat monitoring, status pages, or an all-in-one observability platform.

Logtail (Better Stack): The Developer-Friendly Middle Ground

Logtail, now part of Better Stack, is probably the closest direct competitor to what we’re building with Loggy. They offer log management with a clean interface, and Better Stack bundles it with uptime monitoring and status pages. The developer experience is good — their SDKs are solid, the dashboard is modern, and the pricing is more transparent than Datadog.

Better Stack’s pricing starts with a free tier, and their paid plans begin at $24/month. Log ingestion is metered, starting at 1GB/month on the lowest tier with additional storage at $0.25/GB. For teams that generate moderate log volumes, this works fine. For teams with spiky or unpredictable log volumes, the per-GB pricing introduces the same bill anxiety that plagues Datadog, just at a smaller scale.

One thing to note is that Better Stack’s all-in-one offering involves combining separate products (Logtail for logs, Better Uptime for monitoring, Better Status Pages for status pages). They work together, but they’re still distinct products with distinct interfaces, which can feel a bit fragmented compared to a truly unified platform.

Logtail/Better Stack is great if: You want a modern logging experience with reasonable pricing, you need uptime monitoring alongside logs, or you’re coming from a legacy tool and want something refreshed.

Logtail/Better Stack falls short if: You want everything in a single unified dashboard, you need feature flags or distributed tracing in the same tool, or per-GB pricing makes you nervous.

Loggy: Simple, Unified, Flat-Rate

Here’s where we talk about ourselves, and we’ll try to be just as honest as we were about everyone else. Loggy is an all-in-one observability platform built specifically for small-to-medium teams, startups, and indie developers. Logging, heartbeat monitoring, alerting, status pages, feature flags, performance metrics, distributed tracing, and uptime monitoring — all in one dashboard, with flat-rate pricing.

Our free tier includes one project, 1,000 logs, one heartbeat, one status page, and a week of retention. Pro is $10/month. Team is $50/month. No per-seat fees, no per-GB charges, no overage penalties. You know exactly what you’re going to pay every month, regardless of how your log volume fluctuates.

Setup takes under five minutes. You can run npx @loggydev/loggy-cli init and the CLI will detect your framework, install the SDK, create your project, and save your token. Or do it manually with three lines of code:

import { CreateLoggy } from '@loggydev/loggy-node';

const loggy = CreateLoggy({
  identifier: 'my-app',
  accessToken: 'your-project-token',
});

loggy.info('Hello from Loggy!');

We have first-class SDKs for Node.js, Python, and Go, plus a REST API for everything else. Each SDK includes framework middleware for automatic request tracing — Express for Node.js, Flask and FastAPI for Python, and net/http for Go.

Where we’re honest about limitations: We don’t do infrastructure monitoring. If you need to track CPU, memory, and disk on your own servers, you’ll need something else. We don’t have the scale of Datadog — if you’re ingesting terabytes per day, we’re not built for that (yet). We don’t have session replay like Sentry. And we’re a newer product, which means our ecosystem is smaller.

Where we think we win: Setup speed, pricing simplicity, and the fact that everything lives in one dashboard. You don’t need to stitch together three tools and pay three bills to get logging, uptime monitoring, status pages, and alerting. The whole experience is unified, and data is correlated — click on a trace and see the related logs, check a heartbeat and see its history.

The Comparison Table

Here’s the practical side-by-side. We tried to be fair.

	Datadog	Sentry	Logtail/Better Stack	Loggy
Log Management	Full-featured	No (errors only)	Yes	Yes
Error Tracking	Yes	Best-in-class	Basic	Via log levels
Distributed Tracing	Yes	Yes (performance)	No	Yes (W3C)
Uptime Monitoring	Yes (Synthetics)	No	Yes (separate product)	Yes (built-in)
Status Pages	No	No	Yes (separate product)	Yes (built-in)
Heartbeat Monitoring	Limited	No	Yes	Yes
Feature Flags	Yes (limited)	No	No	Yes
Alerting	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes (Slack/Discord)
Performance Metrics	Yes	Yes	Partial	Yes
Free Tier	14-day trial	Yes (limited)	Yes (limited)	Yes (forever)
Setup Time	Hours to days	Minutes	Minutes	Minutes
Starting Paid Price	~$100+/mo	$26/mo	$24/mo	$10/mo
Pricing Model	Per-GB + per-host	Per-event	Per-GB	Flat rate
Best For	Enterprise/platform teams	Error-focused teams	Mid-size teams	Startups/small teams

So, Which One Should You Pick?

If you’ve read this far, you probably already have a gut feeling about which tool fits your situation. But here’s a simple decision framework.

Choose Datadog if you’re at a company with 20+ engineers, you run your own infrastructure, you need compliance certifications, or you have a dedicated platform team who will actually use all those features. The investment in setup and cost is worth it at that scale.

Choose Sentry if error tracking is your primary need, you want the deepest possible stack trace analysis, and you’re okay adding other tools for general logging and uptime monitoring. Sentry does one thing better than almost anyone else.

Choose Logtail/Better Stack if you want a modern logging experience, you’re comfortable with per-GB pricing, and you like the idea of Better Stack’s growing ecosystem of developer tools.

Choose Loggy if you’re a small team, a startup, or an indie developer who wants everything in one place at a predictable price. If you want to go from zero to fully-monitored in under 15 minutes and never worry about your observability bill, that’s exactly what we built for.

Whatever you choose, the most important thing is that you choose something. Running your application without logging and monitoring is like driving without a dashboard — you might be fine for a while, but when something goes wrong, you’ll wish you could see what’s happening under the hood. The best logging tool is the one you actually set up and use.

If you want to try Loggy, you can sign up for free in about 30 seconds. No credit card, no sales call, no 14-day trial that expires. Just create an account, connect your app, and start seeing your logs.