Compare
Reldavi vs Audit.NET
Audit.NET is mature, MIT-licensed and does the hard part of capture well. If capture is the problem you have, stop reading and use it.
Use Audit.NET if
These are not concessions. They describe most projects, and a project that fits here will be worse off paying for anything.
- Nobody outside your team will ever read the trail. An internal debugging aid does not need tamper evidence, and building one is work with no reader.
- You want the records in your own database, in a schema you control, queried with the rest of your data. Audit.NET writes wherever you point it and Reldavi does not.
- You need one of its many providers — Serilog, MongoDB, Elasticsearch, a dozen more. That breadth is the point of it and Reldavi has no equivalent.
- Budget is zero and has to stay zero. Reldavi has a free tier; a library has no tier.
Use Reldavi if
Every one of these is a thing you would otherwise build on top of Audit.NET, and the building is the expensive part rather than the capture.
- Somebody outside your company reads it. An auditor, a regulator, a customer's lawyer. That means sealed daily roots, an evidence pack that verifies on their machine, and a chain that says what is missing — none of which a capture library is trying to be.
- You cannot say what your current trail does not cover. Reldavi records which producers reported and when they stopped, so "is anything missing" has an answer other than a shrug.
- Personal data is in the changes. Masking happens before buffering rather than before display, which is the difference between protecting the data and hiding it.
- Somebody non-technical has to read it. A dashboard, a timeline per record, an export an auditor accepts, in English and Turkish. A library gives you rows.
- Retention is a contractual term. Seven years for invoices and ninety days for sessions, per resource type, enforced and evidenced.
The parts that actually differ
| Reldavi | Audit.NET | |
|---|---|---|
| Capture from EF Core | Interceptor, automatic | Interceptor, automatic — this is the part that is the same |
| Where it stores | A columnar store built for this shape | Anywhere you point it |
| Tamper evidence | Daily Merkle roots, chained, optionally anchored to an RFC 3161 authority | None — outside its scope |
| Who read it | Every read recorded like a change | Not a concept |
| Masking | Before buffering, so the value never leaves the process | Available, applied at serialisation |
| Reading it | Dashboard, search, timelines, exports, alerts | Your own, over your own table |
| Cost | Free to 100,000 events a month, then per event | Free, MIT |
The honest summary: Audit.NET solves capture and Reldavi solves what happens to the records afterwards. If you install Audit.NET and then spend two quarters building a viewer, retention, masking review and a way to prove nothing was edited, you have built most of this — and you will maintain it.
Still not sure?
The question that decides it is whether anybody outside your team will ever have to believe the trail. If the answer is no, use the library.