Comparing Winston and Bunyan Node.js Logging

A great study about Node.js logging published can be found at StrongLoop blog. Two logging frameworks are presented and compared: Bunyan and Winston.

The comparation criteries are the following:

• Time stamp each log line. This one is pretty self explanatory – you should be able to tell when each log entry occured.
• Logging format should be easily digestible by humans as well as machines.
• Allows for multiple configurable destination streams. For example, you might be writing trace logs to one file but when an error is encountered, write to the same file, then into error file and send an email at the same time.

The study concluded that both frameworks are very mature and established logging frameworks and are very much on par in terms of features. Winston has a lot of community support with various logging modules. Bunyan makes it easy out of the box to parse logs but leaves consumption up the user (generally syslog drain works pretty well here). I feel it all comes down to preference and how easy it is to integrate with your stack.

The full article can be found here.