# Papertrail Reviews 2026. Verified Reviews, Pros & Cons | Capterra > Is Papertrail the right Application Performance Management solution for you? Explore 12 verified user reviews from people in industries like yours to make a confident choice. Source: https://www.capterra.com/p/180057/Papertrail/reviews --- Papertrail 4.3 (12) Provider data verified by our Software Research team, and reviews moderated by our Reviews Verification team. [Learn more](https://www.capterra.com/our-story/) * * * Last updated March 13th, 2026 # Reviews of Papertrail Ease of use 4.0 Customer Service 4.5 ## Showing most helpful reviews Showing 1-12 of 12 Reviews Sort by: Most Helpful Rating Company Size Reviewer's Role Length of Use Frequency of Use Diego M. VP Engineering Investment Management Used the software for: 2+ years ### "Simple UI, just what you need for log management" February 23, 2019 5.0 I love how it is like having the terminal, but all your logs in one place. tail/grep is really all you need when reading logs, their autorefreshed ui and search does what I need, and having things like email alerts when certain keywords appear on certain servers is a nice feature Pros tail -f style by default. No need to refresh the screen to get new events. But also has nice search with special character to exclude terms, time range, etc Cons Nothing, all our team needed was a central place to get all our logs from, and papertrail did just that Review Source VR Verified Reviewer Jack of All Trades Hospital & Health Care Used the software for: 2+ years ### "Used papertrail to log and monitor user devices and app usage." March 19, 2018 4.0 We gain valuable insight into what our users and doing and experiencing by monitoring these logs. In certain situations where there's a live issues or outage, having live searchable data from our users is absolutely critical. My only gripe with Papertrail is that it's incredibly powerful but IMHO should be more intuitive, or have better training material to assist users in unlocking its full potential. We have a team of three developers who are competent enough to get what they need out of Papertrail, but I worry they may be missing out on some benefits we weren't even aware existed. Having software that you worry is too powerful for you to fully comprehend how your organization could benefit from it is a great problem to have though. Especially when it comes with an affordable price tag. This complaint is more about my own knowledge base and less of an issue with the software. Pros Gave us the ability to monitor devices based on usernames, device ID's, app versions, iOS versions, etc. Easy SQL searching and parsing. Gain the ability to create different visualizations based on predefined metrics but also allows for some customization. See user logs immediately as ours were set to upload every 10 seconds. Cons Not very user friendly for new users. There's certainly a learning curve to get started. Depending on how your logging has been setup there can also be a lot of noise to sort through, making the overall experience cumbersome. Most of this is due to sheer volume of data being collected, which is a self imposed problem but it'd be nice to get more support regarding how to handle this or having built in tools to filter out duplicate data points. Users have the ability to setup predefined queries which helps cut down on some of unneeded data, but as mentioned there's a steep learning curve and not very much documentation to go off of. Review Source HQ Hung Q. SSE Computer Software Used the software for: Less than 6 months ### "My review" December 12, 2019 4.0 Pros Intuitive UI, easy to use and setup. I can integrate papertrail to my app rapidly. It saves me a lot of time for troubleshooting issues. Cons Do not have the on premise (Self-Hosted) version. Alternatives considered [Elastic Stack](https://www.capterra.com/p/149304/Elasticsearch/) Reason for choosing Papertrail on premise version Review Source VR Verified Reviewer Backend Developer Computer Software Used the software for: 2+ years ### "Quickly monitor, filter your logs and get notified about errors" August 18, 2022 5.0 Pros We use Papertrail for monitoring all of our micro services. It's really convenient to get an overview of the state of a service, quick and easy to filter through logs and to set up alerts for warnings or errors. Because of its integration with Heroku, adding Papertrail to a new service can be done in just a few clicks. Cons It may be difficult to use some functions without prior software development knowledge. The syntax for filtering logs differs from the one used to set up alerts (with the latter being regex). Review Source VR Verified Reviewer Marketing Manager Information Services Used the software for: 1-2 years ### "Maintain logs and detect errors instantly" November 4, 2021 5.0 With Papertrail, we are able to gain visibility into our IT infrastructure and better analyze logs to improve troubleshooting as errors arise. It's great to have a centralized hub for logs and advanced monitoring tools at hand with powerful search capabilities. Pros Papertrail is packed with tons of features for log management. It has dashboards with an intuitive interface, search filters to find specific logs in a bunch of raw log data, and log archiving to store logs you may want to keep in the future. I especially find their search capability impressive since you can enter various keywords to quickly find what you are looking for and troubleshoot root causes. Cons When configuring logs from the server to Papertrail, I wasn't able to enable this on my own. I needed a web developer's help since they are different ways to integrate the logs in Papertrail and I found it to be confusing. I didn't find their online resources to be as helpful either, however, their customer service is responsive and can point you in the right direction. Review Source KV Kevin V. Software Architect Accounting Used the software for: 1-2 years ### "Nice log aggregator" February 8, 2017 4.0 PaperTrail does the trick for log aggregation, it may not be quite as fully featured as others but the price makes up for it. For basic log aggregation it works well and has a decent search mechanism. Pros Good price, overall good general functionality. Product performs well and was easy to setup. Cons The search functionality could be beefed up, they have a variety of options but based on the UI it isn't always obvious. Review Source VR Verified Reviewer Software Engineer Computer Software Used the software for: 6-12 months ### "Quick and basic solution for centralized logging" December 5, 2019 4.0 We use this to aggregate log for our microservices app. The integration process is simple and straightforward, but analytic feature should be improved. Pros Easy to integrate: It took only 30 minutes to integrate Papertrail with our application. There are step-by-step instructions to integrate Papertrail with your app in most web servers/frameworks. Cons The UI is pretty basic. No built-in analysis feature, we have to export the log manually for analysis. Review Source VR Verified Reviewer DevOps Engineer Computer Software Used the software for: Less than 6 months ### "Great way to catch logs if you're on top of things." December 19, 2018 4.0 Pros It is easy to link Papertrail to applications and search logs for the given log storage time. Cons We only keep logs for 24 hours, and then we store them in S3. It is very difficult to search through these logs since they are broken up into one hour chunks and all mixed together. Though I understand if that is outside of Papertrail's control. Review Source VR Verified Reviewer SAP Successfactors Consultant Used the software for: 1-2 years ### "Useful, Very Insight ful tool, with erespect to Heroku APP" July 24, 2018 4.0 Event logs, debug logs of application (Custom applications running on Heroku) Pros Good Insight on debug logs, and event monitoring, Provides high lithed view of the errors in the application. Cons Monitoring database events, there is scope for improvement on monitoring the database level events/logs/deadlocks. Review Source Jose F. G. Director of Operations Internet Used the software for: Less than 6 months ### "Helps consolidate logging in today’s containerized world" May 6, 2020 5.0 We’re able to keep track of key transactions logging and debugging errors faster and more efficiently. Pros With today’s web infrastructure relying on multiple containers, it means that logs generation speed has multiplied and it makes it difficult to debug and trace core functionality. Papertrail helps solve the issue by providing a pipeline to a clean UI and tools to make it easy to debug and keep visibility of key application transactions. Cons It’s cost structure was confusing at first and we spent our quota too quickly. It required us to rethink what to log and what not to log, which isn’t necessarily a bad thing. Review Source JM Jonathan M. Tect Computer & Network Security Used the software for: Less than 6 months ### "Papertrail" April 28, 2020 4.0 Free logging for our discord and other web scrapers. Use it to report any errors. Pros The ability to have multiple machines per host is really nice feature. Additionally, the ability to send errors by email, webhook or with any other integration is nice too. Cons Nothing big that I have discovered yet. The only feature that I wish for is that they would update the npm module. Review Source PT Phuong T. software engineer Computer Software Used the software for: Less than 6 months ### "Papertrail Review" March 9, 2020 4.0 Pros The first impression with Papertrail is that it's pretty much completed and easy to use with simple steps for new users. It saves and shows logs according to your need, so it helps user saving lots of time and effort. The software is very useful and stable, so I would recommend this to others. Cons The price is not very competitive. I would like to have more features with this price. Review Source Similar Products Featured