Amazon CloudWatch Logs vs ClickStack
Amazon CloudWatch Logs
aws.amazon.com
ClickStack
clickhouse.comSide by side
| Figure | Amazon CloudWatch Logs | ClickStack |
|---|---|---|
| Price from | $0.03/mo | $53/mo |
| Free plan | Yes | Yes |
| Free trial | — | Yes |
| Open source | — | Yes |
| Web | Yes | Yes |
| Linux | — | Yes |
| API | Yes | Yes |
| Self-hosted | — | Yes |
| Plans published | 5 | 6 |
| Spec score · Log Management Software | 9.2 (#5) | 9.3 (#4) |
| Spec score · Log Monitoring Tools | 9.1 (#5) | 9.3 (#1) |
| Deployment options | cloud | both |
| Free plan | No | Yes |
| Integrations | CloudWatch Logs integrates with Amazon OpenSearch Service for querying and analyzing logs without moving or duplicating the data. | Documented partners include Bindplane, bitdrift, Odigos and Telflo for collector management, mobile telemetry, eBPF tracing and routing control. |
| Log pipelines | Yes | No |
| Purpose | Amazon CloudWatch collects and stores logs from AWS resources, applications, services, on-premises resources, and other clouds. | ClickStack is an open-source observability stack for OpenTelemetry that unifies logs, metrics, traces, session replays, and errors. |
| Structured log parsing | Yes | Yes |
Plans
Amazon CloudWatch Logs
- Logs data ingestion$0.50 a month
- Logs archive storage$0.03 a month
- Pay-as-you-goPrice not published
- Free tierFree
- Paid usagePrice not published
ClickStack
- ClickStack Open SourceFree
- ClickStack Open SourceFree
- Managed ClickStack trialFree
- Basic$53 a month
- Scale$437 a month
- Enterprise$571 a month
In their own words
Amazon CloudWatch Logs
Amazon CloudWatch Logs collects and stores logs from AWS resources, applications, services, on-premises systems, and other clouds. It offers log pipelines, structured parsing, archive export, and live tailing through web and API access. Logs Insights lets users query records with filters, aggregations, and regular expressions, then visualize time-series data or export results to CloudWatch Dashboards. Logs are available in Standard for real-time monitoring and advanced analytics, or Infrequent Access for ad-hoc queries and forensic analysis. Live Tail provides a central interactive view of streaming logs, while anomaly detection uses machine learning to identify patterns and changes. Users can search and analyze logs across accounts from a monitoring account at no additional cost. The free tier includes 5 GB for ingestion, archive storage, and query scans, plus 1,800 Live Tail minutes per month. Usage-based charges are billed at month end, with no upfront commitment or minimum fee; rates vary by Region.
ClickStack
ClickStack is an open-source observability stack for OpenTelemetry that brings logs, metrics, traces, session replays, and errors into one system. Its HyperDX interface provides Lucene-style search, SQL access, dashboards, alerts, event deltas, and event patterns. A bundled OpenTelemetry Collector handles native collection, while non-OTel wide event data can be used when it has a timestamp field. ClickStack stores data in ClickHouse and is designed for high-cardinality telemetry, with the product site describing sub-second queries even on petabytes of data. It supports self-hosted, hybrid, and cloud deployment. Managed ClickStack runs on ClickHouse Cloud with operations, scaling, upgrades, backups, reliability, authentication, and user management included. The managed offer advertises indefinite retention and storage below one cent per GB. An MCP server connects observability workflows with coding tools, collaboration services, runbooks, and custom agents.