Logsnag is an event tracking tool, but it serves two purposes:

• Event notifications
• Product analytics

While both are integrated, our comparison focuses on the event notification side, where Operational shares similarities.

Feature differences

With Logsnag, you can push events and you’ll receive notifications. That’s all.

Operational answers the next logical step - What can you do with these events?

With Operational, not only can you receive event notifications, you can also send json, structured content, image urls and more.

Want to send structured events to better understand complex situations? We have an expressive api to give structure to your logs:

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12:00 am

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server started

Want to trigger something on your server through events? Operational has actions.

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12:00 am

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User unsubscribed

Want to understand contextual logs? We have that too. Operational has a extremely expressive API.

By contrast, Logsnag has a very basic API to show metadata.

Side-by-side UI differences

I believe Logsnag and Operational to have really slick interfaces in their own way.

Here’s logsnag’s UI on mobile. And Operational’s UI on the other side.

They are both easy on the eyes and functional.

Philosophical differences

Logsnag’s main modus operandi is delivering pretty product analytics. This is a great problem to solve as most people find Mixpanel, Posthog, etc too complex. And truth to be told, they haven’t really working on the notifications side of things for a long time.

Operational is here to solve operational issues for SaaS businesses. This puts us in a very specific domain category.

Pricing

Logsnag has a traditional tiered pricing. Operational has a pay-as-you-go pricing.

Operational wins out at three different levels.

1. Since there are no pricing tiers, you don’t need to guesstimate which plan you might want to pick. There is one standard pricing - $x.xxx per event per month.
2. This is great for early stage companies since what you’re paying is directly correlated with your usage. With Logsnag, you might be generating x no of events but you still pay the full price of their tier, whichever one you’re on.
3. We have a test mode which is free of charge. This is great when you’re integrating our product and don’t want to rack up bills just because you’re testing us out. Logsnag doesn’t have this.

Let’s be honest here, if you’re a early stage bootstrapped company, you want to save as much money as you can. Since you won’t be generating a ton of events, you’ll be paying a few dollars every month at most. At that stage, a dollar saved is a dollar earned.

To put it bluntly, you’re better off with us.

Final thoughts

I hope this was a compelling pitch for using Operational for event logging.

To be honest - I’ve used Logsnag and have paid for it in the past. I believe it is a great tool in its own right but they simply don’t have a solid offer.

For product analytics, we were with Logsnag but have moved to Posthog as it was better in almost every regard.

Lastly, if you like our offering, feel free to give us a try.