AppSignal vs Grafana Cloud Traces
AppSignal
appsignal.comGrafana Cloud Traces
grafana.comSide by side
| Figure | AppSignal | Grafana Cloud Traces |
|---|---|---|
| Price from | $23.25/mo | Free |
| Free plan | Yes | Yes |
| Free trial | Yes | — |
| Open source | — | — |
| Web | Yes | Yes |
| API | Yes | Yes |
| Plans published | 2 | 3 |
| Spec score · Distributed Tracing Tools | 8.5 (#6) | 7.8 (#15) |
| Intended users | The free plan is described as suitable for startups, hobby projects, and side projects. | Grafana describes Cloud Traces as helping teams understand request flows and troubleshoot performance issues at scale. |
| Support | AppSignal says customers can contact a real engineer through live chat or support email. | The Free tier includes community support, Pro includes 8×5 email support, and Enterprise offers premium support. |
Plans
Grafana Cloud Traces
- FreeFree
- EnterprisePriced on request
- ProPrice not published
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 Traces
Grafana Cloud Traces has no write-up on Specifiction yet; its figures are above.