Do you think LogZilla is better than Kiwi?

tl;dr
On LinkedIn, I was asked the question "Do you think LogZilla is better that Kiwi?" and my response(below) was a few thousand characters more than LinkedIn allows in a "comment". See comment here.

Before trying LogZilla I did a quick comparison of a few centralized log management products(LogZilla included). This included research on compatibility, how to videos, usability, ease of install, and also "What do i need it for?" and "how am I going to use it?".

I did like Kiwi for its simplicity. I was happy to see they have a web-interface. I liked their one-time purchase price model. This would be perfect for a small scale install on a budget.

Kiwi is a small product offering from Solarwinds. Solarwinds' product focus is not centralized logging their product focus is compliance/configuration management and performance analytics. Kiwi is not their most profitable business unit.(If I'm wrong... tell me.)

What turned me off about Kiwi was it runs on a windows platform. I don't have spare Windows VM's or licenses lying around and for that reason I had to move on because I didn't have a platform to run it on.

The second product I looked at was LogZilla. Right out of the box, it had additional features and integrations that Kiwi didn't offer. I watched a few of the videos from their YouTube channel and decided I should give this product a try. They do centralized log management and they do it well. This isn't part of a larger suite of products, this is their product. What that means to me is, I don't have to worry about getting an inferior product because its not part of the most profitable business unit within the company instead, it is the business unit of the company.

They offer a free trial download and getting LogZilla installed can be completed with a single command. It can't get any easier right? If you read my blog then you know I decided to use the prebuilt VM which got me up and running in less than 30 minutes. I personally really like the dashboards/widgets and the layout LogZilla has. One thing I really like about it is, you can use it right out of the box or you can customize it to any level the suits you or your businesses needs. Almost everything is customizable. I'm piloting this at my house so I don't need much but, I am exploring building some automation scripts. This product fits my use case at home, and hopefully I can leverage it to fit business cases at work.

One of the last reasons I prefer LogZilla over Kiwi, isn't necessarily a technical or business reason it's more of a human reason. Shortly after getting LogZilla up and running I reached out to their sales department to get my trial period extended. I had a few back and fourths with members of their team and even the CEO reached out to me after seeing my blog post. That was important to me. I got to know them a little bit and understand that they too are a small business. I currently work for a small business, and before this company I worked for an even smaller business. Supporting small business is something I like to do, because I had a small business once and I know what its like. I enjoyed making every customer a personal experience and that's what LogZilla has done for me so far.

Some of the other products that were up for consideration were, ELK, Splunk and Nagios Log Server.

Although I don't work with Splunk directly, it's in most environments I work in. I know it as one of the super giants in the industry like ArcSight. Splunk does have a "free" version (with data cap) you can run, but I was a bit intimidated because I associate big names with big complicated systems. So until someone gives me a reason I 'have to run Splunk', it can live at the bottom of my list.

One product that I haven't tried and maybe I'll try it a bit down the road is Nagios Log Server. I didn't even know they had a log management product. I know Nagios from a few years ago, I had to work setup Nagios to monitor availability and performance for some forward facing services and back end services too. Looking into it, looks like it runs ELK in the background. I'm pretty excited about this product. Nagios Log Server you can run with a data cap of 500MB/day.

ELK is the new hip thing in town. It's trendy. Everywhere I work, organizations are standing up ELK stacks. Some big installs, some small installs, some in production, some just for testing, it's everywhere.

To be clear, I'm not doing a bake-off here. I just want to work with great products and push the limits of what I know to learn new things everyday.

Here's a summary if your considering a syslog for your home or business. Give them all a try and find the right product for you.

Hopefully I can continue to offer some valuable feedback from my experiences with the tools I choose to use.

Kiwi offered a fully features system free for 14-days.
LogZilla offers their system free for 7-days.
Splunk  - 500MB/per day
Nagios Log Server - 500MB/per day
ELK  ???