AppSignal vs Google Cloud Trace
AppSignal
appsignal.com
Google Cloud Trace
cloud.google.comSide by side
| Figure | AppSignal | Google Cloud Trace |
|---|---|---|
| Price from | $23.25/mo | $0.20/mo |
| Free plan | Yes | — |
| Free trial | Yes | — |
| Open source | — | — |
| Web | Yes | Yes |
| Linux | — | Yes |
| API | Yes | Yes |
| Plans published | 2 | 1 |
| Spec score · Application Performance Monitoring | 8.6 (#4) | 7.7 (#25) |
| Spec score · Runtime Monitoring Software | 8.6 (#10) | 7.6 (#30) |
| Spec score · Distributed Tracing Tools | 8.5 (#6) | 7.8 (#14) |
| Integrations | The site highlights Slack, GitHub, Jira, Linear, GitLab, and PagerDuty integrations. | Cloud Logging entries can be associated with traces and spans, and displayed alongside trace waterfall graphs or in Logs Explorer. |
| Security controls | Its listed security measures include regular penetration tests, enforced 2FA, encrypted backups, limited data retention, and a bug bounty. | Cloud Trace supports VPC Service Controls and uses Identity and Access Management to control access to resources. |
Plans
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.
Google Cloud Trace
Google Cloud Trace has no write-up on Specifiction yet; its figures are above.