About CLP
YScope's Compressed Log Processor, or CLP, is a free log management tool that compresses logs and lets you search them without decompressing. It handles both JSON logs and unstructured free-text logs, and it can compress logs in real time from several logging libraries, which reduces storage costs for large log volumes.
CLP provides an end-to-end pipeline, including purpose-built web interfaces for searching and viewing compressed logs. The project explains its approach in published research papers, one about unstructured logs from 2021 and one extending it to JSON logs from 2024. Its design is index-less, which contrasts with index-based tools such as Elasticsearch, and the README includes benchmark comparisons of compression ratio and search speed.
CLP is written in C++ and licensed under Apache-2.0, and you run it on your own infrastructure. It has Discord, Slack and Zulip community channels. It suits platform and observability teams that generate very large volumes of logs and want to keep them searchable at low storage cost.
Key features
- Compression of JSON and unstructured logs
- Search without decompressing
- Real-time compression through logging libraries
- Web interfaces for search and viewing
- Index-less design
- Published research behind the approach
Good fit for
- →Archiving large log volumes cheaply
- →Searching historical logs without restoring them
- →Reducing storage for observability pipelines
- Built with
- C++
- Tags
- log-management
- compression
- logging
- search
- observability
- cpp
- json-logs
- analytics
- self-hosted
CLP: questions and answers
- What is CLP used for?
- CLP is compressed Log Processor (CLP) compresses JSON and plain-text logs and lets you search the compressed data without decompressing it first. It is a good fit for archiving large log volumes cheaply, searching historical logs without restoring them and reducing storage for observability pipelines.
- Is CLP open source?
- Yes. CLP is open source under the Apache-2.0 licence. Its source code is on GitHub at y-scope/clp and is written mainly in C++.
- Is CLP free?
- Yes. CLP is open source, so the software itself is free to use.
- Can I self-host CLP?
- Yes. CLP can be self-hosted on your own server or infrastructure.
- What are some alternatives to CLP?
- Similar open-source tools in the Monitoring & Observability category include Highlight.io, Logdy and Netdata. SaaS products in the same category include Axiom, Better Stack and Coralogix.
- Is CLP actively maintained?
- Yes. The most recent commit to CLP was on 1 October 2026, and the latest release is v0.14.0, published on 1 October 2026. The project has 1.1k stars on GitHub.
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SaaS alternatives to CLP
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Loggly
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Cloud log management with search, dashboards and alerting
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