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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
25th
Average Rating
8.4
Reviews Sentiment
7.1
Number of Reviews
22
Ranking in other categories
Security Information and Event Management (SIEM) (25th), IT Operations Analytics (9th), AIOps (18th)
syslog-ng
Ranking in Log Management
17th
Average Rating
8.8
Reviews Sentiment
2.1
Number of Reviews
6
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
 

Mindshare comparison

As of August 2025, in the Log Management category, the mindshare of Devo is 0.6%, up from 0.6% 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 helps us to unlock the full power of our data because they have more than 450 parsers, which means that we can ingest pretty much any type of log data."
"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."
"Devo has a really good website for creating custom configurations."
"It's very, very versatile."
"The user experience [is] well thought out and the workflows are logical. The dashboards are intuitive and highly customizable."
"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."
"Being able to build and modify dashboards on the fly with Activeboards streamlines my analyst time because my analysts aren't doing it across spreadsheets or five different tools to try to build a timeline out themselves. They can just ingest it all, build a timeline out across all the logging, and all the different information sources in one dashboard. So, it's a huge time saver. It also has the accuracy of being able to look at all those data sources in one view. The log analysis, which would take 40 hours, we can probably get through it in about five to eight hours using Devo."
"One of the biggest features of the UI is that you see the actual code of what you're doing in the graphical user interface, in a little window on the side. Whatever you're doing, you see the code, what's happening. And you can really quickly switch between using the GUI and using the code. That's really useful."
"The ability to extract and store the logs is the most valuable feature of syslog-ng."
"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."
"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

"The price is one problem with Devo."
"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."
"I would like to have the ability to create more complex dashboards."
"We only use the core functionality and one of the reasons for this is that their security operation center needs improvement."
"There's always room to reduce the learning curve over how to deal with events and machine data. They could make the machine data simpler."
"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."
"There's room for improvement within the GUI. There is also some room for improvement within the native parsers they support. But I can say that about pretty much any solution in this space."
"There is room for improvement in terms of observability."
"The filtering has room for improvement."
"There is always the potential for additional integration and protocol extensions."
"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."
"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."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"Pricing is based on the number of gigabytes of ingestion by volume, and it's on a 30-day average. If you go over one day, that's not a big deal as long as the average is what you expected it to be."
"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."
"[Devo was] in the ballpark with at least a couple of the other front-runners that we were looking at. Devo is a good value and, given the quality of the product, I would expect to pay more."
"I rate the pricing a four on a scale of one to ten, where one is cheap, and ten is expensive."
"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 very competitive. That was also a primary draw for us. Some of the licensing models with solutions like Splunk and Sentinel were attractive upfront, but there were so many micro-charges and services we would've had to add on to make them what we wanted. We had to include things like SOAR and extended capabilities, whereas all those capabilities are completely included with the Devo platform. I haven't seen any additional fee."
"I'm not involved in the financial aspect, but I think the licensing costs are similar to other solutions. If all the solutions have a similar cost, Devo provides more for the money."
"I like the pricing very much. They keep it simple. It is a single price based on data ingested, and they do it on an average. If you get a spike of data that flows in, they will not stick it to you or charge you for that. They are very fair about that."
"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
16%
Computer Software Company
11%
University
9%
Government
6%
Government
13%
Computer Software Company
12%
Manufacturing Company
8%
Financial Services Firm
8%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
 

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?
Something could potentially be improved, though it works effectively for me. In the early stages, over 10 years ago, syslog-ng was lacking some features, so I created a patch for it. I used a patch...
 

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: July 2025.
865,384 professionals have used our research since 2012.