Hi Friend,
Swift is a very good car , proven over years (expect some minor niggles).
I own a Brio, one of my friend owns a swift and I have friends who owns figo, i10 etc.
What I have found is "Maintainence of Maruthi is very less" is just a traditional belief, as we indians are always used to. Don't expect swift spare parts to be cheap.
Indeed when my friend went to purchase figo, he compared the spare parts cost list and service cost of figo and maruti cars and indeed figo was cheaper in some areas and maruti in some other.
Maruti was cheap at one point of time before, mainly because they were the only ones manufacturing spare parts in india and rest most of the companies were importing most of the spares which added to the cost. But things have changed now over the years and is more competitive now.
Most of the companies have start manufacturing spare parts in india and is as cheap as maruti. In fact spare parts of companies like toyota and honda are more rugged and have longer life even though they cost more by few bucks.
So donot blindly go for swift just by thinking that its cheap to maintain (no its not real cheap), but do test drive both swift and brio and then decide.
Most of the modern cars do last long and don't require any maintenance (except the routine ones) unless you crash it or abuse it too much or you are too unlucky to get a defective one, in all cases its going to cost you a bomb ( any cars).
In my opinion swift is better for long drives and has a better suspension. Brio is not bad for long drive either ( have been to recent bangalore-Mysore trip) but suspension is not great as swift. The good thing in Brio is you get all security features and good quality audio at a price far less than even swift VXI (which doesnot even come with audio). Swift looks more MANLY and has more boot space, whereas brio looks smaller and cute type (but inside space is bigger than i10)
Its difficult to pin-point a particular car (else it looks as if iam biased), since both have demerits and merits. Its for you to decide.
In case you are looking for diesel, then figo titanium diesel is a great buy for just 7lac with all the features. I didn't had diesel in my mind, else my choice would have been figo given that honda have no diesel options.