ApexData vs bpftrace
ApexData
apexdata.ai
bpftrace
bpftrace.orgSide by side
| Figure | ApexData | bpftrace |
|---|---|---|
| Price from | $1,000/mo | Free |
| Free plan | — | Yes |
| Free trial | — | — |
| Open source | — | — |
| Web | Yes | — |
| Linux | — | Yes |
| Self-hosted | Yes | Yes |
| Plans published | 4 | 1 |
| Spec score · eBPF Observability Tools | 7.9 (#11) | 8.6 (#4) |
| Intended users | ApexData says it is developer-focused and engineered for large Kubernetes environments. | The project says its contributors, users, and organizations rely on it for production tracing and debugging. |
| Security | The AI Investigation page says ApexData can be deployed on the customer’s cluster or VPC, that data stays in the customer’s infrastructure, and that it is SOC 2 Type II compliant. | As a security measure, bpftrace refuses to import files from world-writable directories. |
| Support | The maker advertises dedicated 24/7 support from engineers and founders, hands-on training, guided onboarding, and custom development. | The project README lists GitHub Discussions, the issue tracker, monthly office hours, and Discord as ways to get help or participate. |
Plans
ApexData
- Startup$1,000 a month
- Essentials$5,000 a month
- Professional$7,000 a month
- Enterprise$10,000 a month
In their own words
bpftrace
bpftrace is a free, high-level tracing language and general-purpose Linux tracing tool built on eBPF. It supports kernel and user-space dynamic tracing, perf events, USDT, uprobes, and tracepoints. Its language draws from awk, C, DTrace, and SystemTap. Programs can come from files, inline -e input, or standard input, and the standard library supplies builtins, functions, macros, and map-value functions. LLVM compiles scripts to eBPF bytecode; libbpf interacts with Linux’s BPF subsystem, with bcc also used in the implementation. Scripts can import bpftrace files, C headers, BPF C source, and supported directory files. Unsafe helpers require --unsafe, and imports from world-writable directories are refused. The default probe maximum is 1,024; increasing it can raise memory use, startup time, overhead, or risk freezes and crashes. Supported architectures include x86_64, arm64, s390x, arm32, loongarch64, mips64, ppc64, and riscv64. Some features need kernel headers; vmlinux BTF needs Linux 4.18 or later with CONFIG_DEBUG_INFO_BTF enabled.