AppSignal vs Jaeger

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.

Jaeger is a free, open-source distributed tracing platform for monitoring complex systems and investigating performance problems. It helps teams locate bottlenecks, examine root causes, and map dependencies between services. Jaeger receives OpenTelemetry Protocol data and accepts Zipkin spans over HTTP in Thrift, JSON v1/v2, and Protobuf formats. Its UI includes System Architecture and Deep Dependency Graph views, while Service Performance Monitoring turns traces into aggregate metrics and time-series charts. Sampling supports head-based configurations, including centralized static or adaptive settings, and tail-based sampling. Cassandra, Elasticsearch, and OpenSearch are supported distributed storage backends; ClickHouse is experimental behind a feature gate. Jaeger v2 ships as binaries and container images, with an all-in-one mode using transient in-memory storage. It is self-hosted, so infrastructure determines capacity and scale. Jaeger v1 reached end of life on December 31, 2025.