AppSignal vs Grafana Cloud Application Observability
AppSignal
appsignal.comGrafana Cloud Application Observability
grafana.comSide by side
| Figure | AppSignal | Grafana Cloud Application Observability |
|---|---|---|
| Price from | $23.25/mo | $0.03/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 | Yes |
| Plans published | 2 | 5 |
| Spec score · Application Performance Monitoring | 8.6 (#4) | 9.1 (#1) |
| Spec score · Application Performance & Observability - Midmarket Software | 8.6 (#4) | 9.1 (#1) |
| Spec score · Runtime Monitoring Software | 8.6 (#10) | 9.2 (#3) |
| Spec score · Distributed Tracing Tools | 8.5 (#6) | 9.2 (#1) |
| Spec score · Monitoring Observability | 8.6 (#6) | 9.2 (#2) |
| Company | AppSignal says its first commit was in 2012 and describes the company as remote-first, with employees working across several countries. | Grafana Labs lists its headquarters as New York, New York, USA, and its founding year as 2014. |
| Founded | 2012 | 2014 |
| Integrations | The site highlights Slack, GitHub, Jira, Linear, GitLab, and PagerDuty integrations. | Grafana Cloud connection tiles support Java, .NET, Beyla, Grafana Alloy, OTLP, and the upstream OpenTelemetry Collector. |
Plans
Grafana Cloud Application Observability
- FreeFree
- Pro$0.03 a month
- FreeFree
- Pro$0.03 a month
- EnterprisePriced 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.
Grafana Cloud Application Observability
Grafana Cloud Application Observability monitors applications and brings OpenTelemetry and Prometheus data together to help software engineers investigate anomalies and their causes. Its knowledge graph discovers services and relationships from telemetry, while the service catalog displays latency, error ratio, and request rate for each service. The RCA workbench and Entity Graph help investigate correlated problems across a stack. Metrics, logs, traces, and profiles share a unified view, with drill-down from a service into its signals. Grafana identifies Alloy as a collector with native pipelines for OpenTelemetry and Prometheus. The free plan includes up to 2,232 host hours per month and community support. Pro is listed at $0.03 a month, with a $19 monthly platform fee and $0.025 per host hour; host hours and application telemetry are billed at standard Grafana Cloud rates. Serverless usage is billed on telemetry ingested instead of host hours. The cloud service runs on Linux, macOS, Windows, and the web.