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Devo vs syslog-ng comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Oct 9, 2024

Review summaries and opinions

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:
 

Categories and Ranking

Devo
Ranking in Log Management
27th
Average Rating
8.4
Reviews Sentiment
7.1
Number of Reviews
22
Ranking in other categories
Security Information and Event Management (SIEM) (26th), IT Operations Analytics (6th), AIOps (17th)
syslog-ng
Ranking in Log Management
19th
Average Rating
8.6
Reviews Sentiment
6.3
Number of Reviews
5
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
 

Mindshare comparison

As of May 2025, in the Log Management category, the mindshare of Devo is 0.6%, down from 0.8% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of syslog-ng is 2.5%, down from 2.8% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Log Management
 

Featured Reviews

Michael Wenn - PeerSpot reviewer
Has cloud-first architecture with SIEM technology to run security operations
When it comes to scale, they're architected quite well. They handle some of the biggest customers globally, with significant throughput on their platform, managing thousands of customers. One of the most impressive aspects of Devo is its customer community. A large majority, over 80 percent of their customers, actively participate on a Devo-specific community page. They're contributing to product development and support, events, and user group information, helping each other out. This high level of engagement is rare and demonstrates both the loyalty of their customer base and the quality of their product. They offer a range of small, medium, and large options to cater to everyone. I sold Devo products while working with them, focusing on enterprise solutions. However, as a small reseller, my customers were typically smaller businesses. I rate the solution's scalability a nine out of ten.
RyanVargas - PeerSpot reviewer
It's a user-friendly open-source solution that can replace or augment a commercial product in some cases
I rate syslog-ng 10 out of 10. It's free and easy to use. It has built-in tools that help us index the various logs sent to it. It's a solid log product. If you're looking for a SIEM solution, syslog-ng will work as a stopgap measure at beginning of the project. It can also work as an injector for a true SIEM solution. You can send all the logs to syslog-ng and forward all the data to the SIEM solution after you've cleaned up the data and got the pertinent information. It's a good front end for a commercial SIEM solution, which becomes more expensive as you load more data into it. I would highly recommend syslog-ng for that use case. However, if you lack the expertise, you might need to go with a cloud-based SIEM instead. You need some in-house expertise or an outside consultant to manage it and set it up.

Quotes from Members

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:
 

Pros

"Devo has a really good website for creating custom configurations."
"The ability to have high performance, high-speed search capability is incredibly important for us. When it comes to doing security analysis, you don't want to be doing is sitting around waiting to get data back while an attacker is sitting on a network, actively attacking it. You need to be able to answer questions quickly. If I see an indicator of attack, I need to be able to rapidly pivot and find data, then analyze it and find more data to answer more questions. You need to be able to do that quickly. If I'm sitting around just waiting to get my first response, then it ends up moving too slow to keep up with the attacker. Devo's speed and performance allows us to query in real-time and keep up with what is actually happening on the network, then respond effectively to events."
"Those 400 days of hot data mean that people can look for trends and at what happened in the past. And they can not only do so from a security point of view, but even for operational use cases. In the past, our operational norm was to keep live data for only 30 days. Our users were constantly asking us for at least 90 days, and we really couldn't even do that. That's one reason that having 400 days of live data is pretty huge. As our users start to use it and adopt this system, we expect people to be able to do those long-term analytics."
"The most useful feature for us, because of some of the issues we had previously, was the simplicity of log integrations. It's much easier with this platform to integrate log sources that might not have standard logging and things like that."
"Scalability is one of Devo's strengths."
"The most powerful feature is the way the data is stored and extracted. The data is always stored in its original format and you can normalize the data after it has been stored."
"The user interface is really modern. As an end-user, there are a lot of possibilities to tailor the platform to your needs, and that can be done without needing much support from Devo. It's really flexible and modular. The UI is very clean."
"In traditional BI solutions, you need to wait a lot of time to have the ability to create visualizations with the data and to do searches. With this kind of platform, you have that information in real-time."
"Syslog-ng provides easy access to all my logs. It helps me show managers and other clients precisely where an incident occurred. I also like it because you can integrate syslog-ng with multiple solutions to allow real-time monitoring."
"Syslog-ng has built-in features that we can use to create alerts for a SIEM solution. It isn't a true SIEM solution, but it's sufficient for the time being."
"The ability to extract and store the logs is the most valuable feature of syslog-ng."
"For us, the most valuable feature is the use of compound search for searching logs at a specific time, by a specific user, or specific behavior."
"Syslog-ng has a separate config file in addition to the core configuration."
 

Cons

"Devo has a lot of cloud connectors, but they need to do a little bit of work there. They've got good integrations with the public cloud, but there are a lot of cloud SaaS systems that they still need to work with on integrations, such as Salesforce and other SaaS providers where we need to get access logs."
"The biggest area with room for improvement in Devo is the Security Operations module that just isn't there yet. That goes back to building out how they're going to do content and larger correlation and aggregation of data across multiple things, as well as natively ingesting CTI to create rule sets."
"There is room for improvement in the ability to parse different log types. I would go as far as to say the product is deficient in its ability to parse multiple, different log types, including logs from major vendors that are supported by competitors. Additionally, the time that it takes to turn around a supported parser for customers and common log source types, which are generally accepted standards in the industry, is not acceptable. This has impacted customer onboarding and customer relationships for us on multiple fronts."
"The overall performance of extraction could be a lot faster, but that's a common problem in this space in general. Also, the stock or default alerting and detecting options could definitely be broader and more all-encompassing. The fact that they're not is why we had to write all our own alerts."
"Some basic reporting mechanisms have room for improvement. Customers can do analysis by building Activeboards, Devo’s name for interactive dashboards. This capability is quite nice, but it is not a reporting engine. Devo does provide mechanisms to allow third-party tools to query data via their API, which is great. However, a lot of folks like or want a reporting engine, per se, and Devo simply doesn't have that. This may or may not be by design."
"Their documentation could be better. They are growing quickly and need to have someone focused on tech writing to ensure that all the different updates, how to use them, and all the new features and functionality are properly documented."
"Technical support could be better."
"They can improve their AI capabilities"
"It's hard to find people who know how to use syslog-ng. I often find problems with configurations, and solutions aren't integrated correctly with syslog-ng. For example, there might be data with extra decimals, or the collector agents are incorrectly named. It isn't a problem with the solution; it's a lack of professionals."
"The filtering has room for improvement."
"Syslog-ng has built-in features that we can use to create alerts for a SIEM solution. It isn't a true SIEM solution, but it's sufficient for the time being."
"There is room for improvement in terms of observability."
"There is always the potential for additional integration and protocol extensions."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"Devo is a hosted or subscription-based solution, whereas before, we purchased QRadar, so we owned it and just had to pay a maintenance fee. We've encountered this with some other products, too, where we went over to subscription-based. Our thought process is that with subscription based, the provider hosts and maintains the tool, and it's offsite. That comes with some additional fees, but we were able to convince our upper management it was worth the price. We used to pay under 10k a year for maintenance, and now we're paying ten times that. It was a relatively tough sell to our management, but I wonder if we have a choice anymore; this is where the market is."
"Devo was very cost-competitive... Devo did come with that 400 days of hot data, and that was not the case with other products."
"It's a per gigabyte cost for ingestion of data. For every gigabyte that you ingest, it's whatever you negotiated your price for. Compared to other contracts that we've had for cloud providers, it's significantly less."
"We have an OEM agreement with Devo. It is very similar to the standard licensing agreement because we are charged in the same way as any other customer, e.g., we use the backroom."
"Be cautious of metadata inclusion for log types in pricing, as there are some "gotchas" with that."
"The way Devo prices things is based on the amount of data, and I wish the tiers had more granularity. Maybe at this point they do, but when we first negotiated with them, there were only three or four tiers."
"Our licensing fees are billed annually and per terabyte."
"I rate the pricing a four on a scale of one to ten, where one is cheap, and ten is expensive."
"Syslog-ng is open-source."
"Syslog-ng is a free open-source solution."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
18%
Computer Software Company
15%
Government
8%
University
8%
Government
13%
Computer Software Company
13%
Financial Services Firm
8%
Manufacturing Company
8%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
No data available
 

Questions from the Community

What do you like most about Devo?
Devo has a really good website for creating custom configurations.
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Devo?
Compared to Splunk or SentinelOne, it is really expensive. I rate the product’s pricing a nine out of ten, where one is cheap and ten is expensive.
What needs improvement with Devo?
They can improve their AI capabilities. If you look at some integrations like XDR or AI, which add to the platform to correlate situations in events, there are areas for enhancement. For instance, ...
What do you like most about syslog-ng?
For us, the most valuable feature is the use of compound search for searching logs at a specific time, by a specific user, or specific behavior.
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for syslog-ng?
The pricing is in the middle. I would rate the pricing a six out of ten, with one being expensive and ten being cheap.
What needs improvement with syslog-ng?
There is room for improvement in terms of observability. Additionally, a possible new feature could be Kafka integration.
 

Comparisons

 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

United States Air Force, Rubrik, SentinelOne, Critical Start, NHL, Panda Security, Telefonica, CaixaBank, OpenText, IGT, OneMain Financial, SurveyMonkey, FanDuel, H&R Block, Ulta Beauty, Manulife, Moneylion, Chime Bank, Magna International, American Express Global Business Travel
Tecnocom, University of Victoria, University of Exeter, Datapath
Find out what your peers are saying about Devo vs. syslog-ng and other solutions. Updated: April 2025.
850,236 professionals have used our research since 2012.