Apache SkyWalking vs Middleware
Apache SkyWalking
skywalking.apache.org
Middleware
middleware.ioSide by side
| Figure | Apache SkyWalking | Middleware |
|---|---|---|
| Price from | Free | $0.30/mo |
| Free plan | Yes | Yes |
| Free trial | — | Yes |
| Open source | — | — |
| Web | Yes | Yes |
| Windows | Yes | Yes |
| macOS | Yes | Yes |
| Linux | Yes | Yes |
| iOS | — | Yes |
| Android | — | Yes |
| API | Yes | Yes |
| Self-hosted | Yes | — |
| Plans published | 1 | 3 |
| Spec score · Application Performance Monitoring | 8.4 (#7) | 9.0 (#3) |
| Spec score · Runtime Monitoring Software | 8.3 (#19) | 9.0 (#5) |
| Integrations | The site identifies OpenTelemetry OTLP, Istio, Envoy, Kubernetes, Grafana, and MCP among its integrations and ecosystem projects. | Documented integrations include AWS, Azure, Google Cloud, Vercel, databases, Datadog, Grafana, Prometheus, Logstash, Fluentd and the OpenTelemetry Collector. |
| Security | Horizon UI documents Content-Security-Policy, strict session cookies, no-store API responses, and optional login auditing. | Middleware says customer data is encrypted at rest and in transit using TLS 1.2+ and AES-256. |
| Support | The project directs users to GitHub discussions for questions and issues and provides a developer mailing list and Slack community contact instructions. | Free users receive community support, pay-as-you-go customers get a dedicated Slack or Teams channel, and custom-contract customers receive an account team and 24x7 support. |
Plans
In their own words
Apache SkyWalking
Apache SkyWalking is a free, self-hosted observability platform for cloud-native systems and AI workloads. It brings traces, metrics, logs, and profiling together to help users explore services, Kubernetes, and infrastructure through topology, telemetry, profiles, and alerts. For AI workloads, users can inspect model and MCP call latency and token rates, and review agent conversations, tool calls, and recorded file changes. The project lists agents for Java, Python, NodeJS, Go, Rust, PHP, Ruby, Nginx LUA, Kong, and client-side JavaScript. Its integrations and ecosystem include OpenTelemetry OTLP, Istio, Envoy, Kubernetes, Grafana, and MCP. BanyanDB is described as a database for ingesting, analyzing, and storing observability data. Docker installation instructions cover Linux, macOS, WSL, and Windows PowerShell. Horizon UI supports SkyWalking natively since v11 and partially for v10. Its security documentation covers Content-Security-Policy, strict session cookies, no-store API responses, and optional login auditing. Apache source releases are official artifacts, with PGP or SHA512 verification recommended; the GraalVM distribution is marked experimental.
Middleware
Middleware is a hybrid observability platform for detecting and resolving issues across infrastructure, application performance, and real-user monitoring. Its listed coverage includes infrastructure monitoring, logs, metrics, distributed tracing, database monitoring, synthetic monitoring, browser testing, and LLM observability. The AI SRE Agent and OpsAI capabilities include root cause analysis, automatic issue detection, faster issue solving, and automatic PR generation. The Free Forever plan costs nothing and includes up to 100GB of data, 1k RUM sessions, 20k synthetic checks, 10 browser test runs, and 2 million OpsAI tokens, with 14-day retention and community support. Pay As You Go costs $0.30 a month, billed according to use, with default 30-day retention. Middleware lists 450+ integrations and a Public API. It runs on Android, iOS, Linux, macOS, web, Windows, and API. The company says it encrypts customer data in transit and at rest using TLS 1.2+ and AES-256.