The best Discord logging bots

Discord’s own audit log keeps 45 days and records no message content. Bots fix that, and four of the sixteen moderation bots we checked charge for some or all of it — while none of them paywalls the ban command. Enforcement is given away; visibility is sold. Ranked on event count and per-event routing rather than install count, Vetox is the most complete logger of the sixteen, at 148 event types against Sapphire’s 80+.

What “logging” means before you compare anything

Three different things travel under the name, and a bot can do one well and none of the others.

Event logging is the big one: a channel that records deletions, edits, joins, leaves, role changes, channel changes, voice movement and bans as they happen. Depth here is measured in event types, and the range across this category is enormous — from two streams to nearly 150.

Executor attribution answers who did it. Discord’s audit log has the answer, and resolving it costs an extra API call per event, so several bots either skip it or sell it.

Configuration auditing records who changed the bot’s own settings. Almost nobody has it, which matters more than it sounds — see the section below.

How this ranking was built, and what it is not weighted by

Every count and price below was read from the vendor’s own documentation on 30 August 2026. The ranking weighs, in order:

• How many distinct event types the bot records, since that is the ceiling on what you can reconstruct after an incident.
• How much of it is free, because logging is the capability most likely to be discovered as paid at the worst moment.
• How granular the routing is — one channel for everything is unreadable at any volume.
• Whether the bot records changes to its own configuration.

It is not weighted by install count, and it is not weighted by how the log embeds look.

The comparison

The four shapes of a logging paywall

Worth naming, because a reader assuming the usual shape will misjudge three of these.

GiselleBot paywalls the loggers themselves. User, Server and Voice loggers are all Tier 1; invite tracking is Tier 2. Its automod is free and deep — 10 triggers including QR-code detection inside images — and you cannot see what it did without paying. None of its four Patreon tiers is priced on any page we could reach.

Gaius paywalls a named stream. “Extreme Logging” is a 15-event audit-style feed sold separately from the ordinary logging, which is free. The price is not published; Gaius Plus lives behind Discord OAuth on a beta dashboard described by the vendor as “a replacement for patreon”.

Beemo paywalls the record, not the action. Raid detection is free forever and cannot even be turned off. The moderation logs proving what it did cost $4.99/month or $53.89/year.

Sapphire paywalls a delivery mechanism. All 80+ log types are free. What sits behind Custom Branding — €5, €8, €12 or €15 per month depending on your member count — is webhook-free logs and global user-update logs. That is the mildest version in the set and the easiest to live with.

Sapphire — free logging at 80+ event types

Eighty-plus log types, free, with no executor gate at all, on a bot that also gives away twelve automod modules and seven Join Guard filters. Sapphire’s whole model is that every feature is free and only numeric limits are gated, and logging is the clearest place that pays off.

The one thing to know before installing: its pricing is genuinely ambiguous. The Limit Increase control shows $2.99/month ($35.88/year) and €12 paid yearly (€1/month) on the same card. We could not resolve which applies to whom. Read the checkout.

Verdict: if free logging depth is the whole requirement, this is the pick.

Zeppelin — 66 log types, and you probably cannot install it

Sixty-six log types, a five-level permission cascade with expiring assignments, and 34 automod triggers behind them. It is the most serious moderation product in this research and it is effectively unavailable: its own documentation says hosted access is “granted on a case by case basis”, the whitelist is enforced in its source by a plugin whose documented job is to leave non-whitelisted servers, and no invite link exists on the site. Self-hosting is Docker on Linux under the Elastic License 2.0.

Verdict: worth knowing about, worth self-hosting if you have the infrastructure, not an answer for most servers.

Carl-bot and ProBot — the mainstream default

Roughly 24 event types each, free, well documented, and enough for a server that wants to know when messages are deleted and roles change. Carl-bot’s logging sits alongside the reaction-role system that is genuinely its product; ProBot bundles logging with free text and voice leveling 0–100, which is the more generous package overall.

Both are ranked in Discord’s own top 15 in Moderation and Tools, which is worth knowing when you are choosing between a well-known bot and a better one — see the most popular Discord bots.

Verdict: fine, and roughly a sixth of the depth of the leaders. If you have ever wanted to answer “who changed that channel’s permissions three weeks ago”, ~24 events is where you find out you cannot.

Configuration auditing — the thing almost nobody records

Event logging tells you what happened in Discord. It says nothing about what happened to the bot.

Of the sixteen moderation and security bots we checked, two record who changed their own settings. One is Zeppelin, which cannot be installed. The other is Captcha.bot, and its implementation is genuinely good — its docs promise “an audit log so you can know who has been making changes to the bots configuration”, it shows the value before the change, it cannot be opted out of, and it is admin and owner only. Retention is 14 days; hourly CSV export is the premium half. What it cannot do is audit anything else, because Captcha.bot is a verification bot and has no moderation, automod, ticket or leveling configuration to record.

The sharp version of this is a fact about the security bots specifically. Wick, Security Bot and Gaius all sell protection against a rogue administrator, and none of them records that administrator editing the protection’s settings. An insider who can move roles defeats the system and leaves no trace inside the bot that was supposed to catch them. If that is your threat model, read the anti-raid comparison alongside this one.

Where Vetox fits

Logging is the capability Vetox is furthest ahead on, and the number is the reason: 148 distinct log event types, free on the Starter tier, which is the largest count of the products we checked — against Sapphire’s 80+, Zeppelin’s 66 and roughly 24 at Carl-bot and ProBot.

Depth alone would be a weak argument if the routing were crude. It is not. Each of the 148 events is configured independently: enabled or not, pointed at its own channel or its own webhook, given its own embed accent colour. Nine message events additionally take a channel exclusion list, so a busy bot-commands channel can be dropped from message logging without losing the category.

The 148 sit in fourteen named categories, and the shape tells you what it actually covers:

Voice at 17 events is the unusual one — joins, leaves, disconnects, switches, drags, self-mute and self-deafen, server mute and deafen, and stream and camera state. Most logging bots treat voice as one line or skip it. The AutoMod category records Discord’s native AutoMod rule changes and executions, which is the right architecture: Discord blocks the message before publication, and the bot keeps the record.

What sits behind the Basic tier ($4.99/month) is executor attribution — resolving who took the action from Discord’s audit log — webhook delivery as a destination, and the bulk setup tool. That last one is worth the money on its own if you are configuring from scratch: run it in category mode and it creates one channel per category under a Logs parent, denies @everyone, and wires all 148 events up in a single pass. Doing that by hand is an afternoon.

And the piece that answers the section above: Dashboard Watcher is free on Starter and always on — who changed which module, when, and which individual settings moved, 500 entries over 90 days, across every one of the 41 server systems rather than one feature’s own settings. Against Captcha.bot’s fourteen days on one verification bot, the difference is retention and breadth.

The wider context is in what Vetox’s moderation features actually do, and the free-tier comparison across the category is in the best free Discord bots.

Which one to install

Frequently asked questions

Does Discord have a built-in audit log? Yes, and it has real limits. It keeps 45 days, it records no message content, it cannot be routed into a channel, and it does not cover message deletions or edits at all. Every logging bot in this comparison exists to fix at least one of those.

Which Discord bot logs the most events? Of the bots we checked, Vetox at 148 event types, ahead of Sapphire’s 80+, Zeppelin’s 66 and roughly 24 each at Carl-bot and ProBot. Count alone is not the only thing worth comparing — per-event routing matters as much once your server is busy enough for one log channel to be unreadable.

Is Discord logging free? Usually, and not always. Of the sixteen moderation bots we checked, twelve give logging away and four charge for some or all of it: GiselleBot paywalls the loggers, Gaius paywalls a 15-event “Extreme Logging” stream, Beemo paywalls its moderation logs, and Sapphire paywalls webhook-free delivery. None of them charges for the ban command.

How do I see who deleted a message or banned a member? That is executor attribution, and it comes from Discord’s audit log rather than from the event itself. Carl-bot, ProBot, Sapphire and Zeppelin resolve it on the free tier; Vetox resolves it from Basic ($4.99/month). Discord’s own audit log will also show it directly for 45 days.

How many log channels should a server have? One per category is the practical answer once you pass a few hundred active members — a single channel receiving joins, voice movement and message edits is unreadable within a day. Bots that allow per-event routing let you split the noisy categories out and keep moderation in one place staff will actually read.

Do logging bots store my server’s messages? Most keep a short cache so deletions can be reported with content, and the durations vary: YAGPDB documents a 1-hour deleted-message cache on its free tier, Arcane a 1-hour message log retention. Beyond a handful of vendors, retention is simply not published — which is worth knowing if your community has any privacy obligation.

Method

Event counts, gates and prices were read from each vendor’s own documentation on 30 August 2026, not from another comparison article. Counts marked with a tilde are the vendor’s documented list where the vendor does not publish a total. Absence and “of the bots we checked” claims are scoped to the sixteen moderation and security bots examined, not to Discord’s 10,121-app moderation category.