AppSignal vs Backtrace
AppSignal
appsignal.com
Backtrace
backtrace.ioSide by side
| Figure | AppSignal | Backtrace |
|---|---|---|
| Price from | $23.25/mo | $50/mo |
| Free plan | Yes | Yes |
| Free trial | Yes | — |
| Open source | — | — |
| Web | Yes | Yes |
| Windows | — | Yes |
| macOS | — | Yes |
| Linux | — | Yes |
| iOS | — | Yes |
| Android | — | Yes |
| API | Yes | — |
| Self-hosted | — | Yes |
| Plans published | 2 | 5 |
| Spec score · Runtime Monitoring Software | 8.6 (#10) | 8.8 (#9) |
| Spec score · Error Monitoring Software | 8.6 (#6) | 8.8 (#4) |
| Spec score · Error Tracking | 8.6 (#6) | 8.7 (#5) |
| Founded | 2012 | 2014 |
| Integrations | The site highlights Slack, GitHub, Jira, Linear, GitLab, and PagerDuty integrations. | Backtrace integrates with workflow systems for source control, alerting, ticket tracking, and messaging; its site names Slack, Jira, PagerDuty, Datadog, Microsoft Teams, GitHub, and Discord. |
| Security | AppSignal states that it is ISO 27001 certified and GDPR and HIPAA compliant. | Sauce Labs documentation says Backtrace uses TLS for data in transit and offers 256-bit AES encryption at rest as an Enterprise feature. |
| Support | AppSignal says customers can contact a real engineer through live chat or support email. | The Professional plan includes priority support, and the contact page directs customers needing technical assistance to the support team. |
Plans
Backtrace
- DeveloperFree
- Standard — Mobile$600 a year
- Standard — Mobile and PC$900 a year
- Standard — Mobile, PC, Game Consoles, and Servers$1,200 a year
- ProfessionalPriced on request
In their own words
AppSignal
AppSignal is a cloud application-monitoring service for developers, with error tracking, performance monitoring, logs, and tracing. Error tracking groups exceptions with backtraces and the deployment linked to each issue. Performance monitoring covers response times, throughput, slow endpoints, and slow queries. Log management provides full-text search, attribute filters, saved queries, live tail, and pattern-based alerts. Distributed tracing, transaction tracing, and log correlation are available. AppSignal lists support for Ruby, Elixir, Node.js, JavaScript, Python, Go, Java, PHP, and Rust, with integrations including Slack, GitHub, Jira, Linear, GitLab, and PagerDuty. Its MCP server lets AI assistants such as Claude, Cursor, and Zed query production errors, traces, and deploys. The free plan costs nothing and includes 30K requests, 1GB logging, five-day retention, and unlimited users, teams, applications, and dashboards. Paid access is $279 a year, billed yearly at $23.25/month, with 250K requests per month. A 30-day full-featured trial requires no credit card. AppSignal says it does not charge overages or stop monitoring when limits are crossed.