AppSignal vs groundcover
AppSignal
appsignal.com
groundcover
groundcover.comSide by side
| Figure | AppSignal | groundcover |
|---|---|---|
| Price from | $23.25/mo | $30/mo |
| Free plan | Yes | Yes |
| Free trial | Yes | Yes |
| Open source | — | — |
| Web | Yes | Yes |
| Linux | — | Yes |
| API | Yes | — |
| Self-hosted | — | Yes |
| Plans published | 2 | 4 |
| Spec score · Application Performance Monitoring | 8.6 (#4) | 8.3 (#13) |
| Spec score · Application Performance & Observability - Midmarket Software | 8.6 (#4) | 8.2 (#10) |
| Spec score · Runtime Monitoring Software | 8.6 (#10) | 8.3 (#20) |
| Spec score · Monitoring Observability | 8.6 (#6) | 8.3 (#10) |
| Headquarters | Amsterdam, Netherlands and Austin, Texas (dual headquarters) | Tel Aviv, Israel |
| Integrations | The site highlights Slack, GitHub, Jira, Linear, GitLab, and PagerDuty integrations. | Listed integrations include Kubernetes, OpenTelemetry, Prometheus, AWS CloudWatch, Google Cloud Monitoring, Azure, MongoDB Atlas, Redis Cloud, Datadog, and GitHub. |
| Product | AppSignal is an all-in-one application monitoring product for developers, with error tracking and performance monitoring. | groundcover is a cloud-native observability platform powered by eBPF for monitoring production environments. |
| Support | AppSignal says customers can contact a real engineer through live chat or support email. | Standard support offers business-hours availability with stated response targets from under 8 hours for critical issues to under 72 hours for low-priority issues. |
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.
groundcover
groundcover is a cloud-native observability platform for monitoring production environments. Its eBPF sensor collects metrics, logs, and traces without code changes or manual instrumentation, processes data at the edge, and the product states that ingestion happens in real time without sampling. Bring Your Own Cloud deployment puts the backend in the customer’s cloud while groundcover manages it and hosts the UI. Fully On-Prem deployment places both backend and UI on customer premises, including cloud or physical servers. Integrations include Kubernetes, OpenTelemetry, Prometheus, AWS CloudWatch, Google Cloud Monitoring, Azure, MongoDB Atlas, Redis Cloud, Datadog, and GitHub. Agent Mode can investigate telemetry and create dashboards, monitors, gcQL queries, and OTTL pipelines. The Free plan is free forever and includes 12-hour data retention and Slack Community support; paid plans start at $30 per host per month. Billing is based on average monthly monitored Kubernetes nodes or Linux hosts, not telemetry volume. The platform is available on Linux, self-hosted, and web.