AppSignal vs Middleware
AppSignal
appsignal.com
Middleware
middleware.ioSide by side
| Figure | AppSignal | Middleware |
|---|---|---|
| Price from | $23.25/mo | $0.30/mo |
| Free plan | Yes | Yes |
| Free trial | Yes | Yes |
| Open source | — | — |
| Web | Yes | Yes |
| Windows | — | Yes |
| macOS | — | Yes |
| Linux | — | Yes |
| iOS | — | Yes |
| Android | — | Yes |
| API | Yes | Yes |
| Plans published | 2 | 3 |
| Spec score · Application Performance Monitoring | 8.6 (#4) | 9.0 (#3) |
| Spec score · Application Performance & Observability - Midmarket Software | 8.6 (#4) | 8.9 (#3) |
| Spec score · Runtime Monitoring Software | 8.6 (#10) | 9.0 (#5) |
| Founded | 2012 | 2022 |
| Headquarters | Amsterdam, Netherlands and Austin, Texas (dual headquarters) | San Francisco, California |
| Integrations | The site highlights Slack, GitHub, Jira, Linear, GitLab, and PagerDuty integrations. | Documented integrations include AWS, Azure, Google Cloud, Vercel, databases, Datadog, Grafana, Prometheus, Logstash, Fluentd and the OpenTelemetry Collector. |
| Product | AppSignal is an all-in-one application monitoring product for developers, with error tracking and performance monitoring. | Middleware describes itself as a full-stack observability platform that detects issues across infrastructure, APM, and real user monitoring and helps resolve them with its AI SRE Agent. |
| Security | AppSignal states that it is ISO 27001 certified and GDPR and HIPAA compliant. | Middleware says customer data is encrypted at rest and in transit using TLS 1.2+ and AES-256. |
| Support | AppSignal says customers can contact a real engineer through live chat or support email. | Free users receive community support, pay-as-you-go customers get a dedicated Slack or Teams channel, and custom-contract customers receive an account team and 24x7 support. |
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.
Middleware
Middleware is a hybrid observability platform for detecting and resolving issues across infrastructure, application performance, and real-user monitoring. Its listed coverage includes infrastructure monitoring, logs, metrics, distributed tracing, database monitoring, synthetic monitoring, browser testing, and LLM observability. The AI SRE Agent and OpsAI capabilities include root cause analysis, automatic issue detection, faster issue solving, and automatic PR generation. The Free Forever plan costs nothing and includes up to 100GB of data, 1k RUM sessions, 20k synthetic checks, 10 browser test runs, and 2 million OpsAI tokens, with 14-day retention and community support. Pay As You Go costs $0.30 a month, billed according to use, with default 30-day retention. Middleware lists 450+ integrations and a Public API. It runs on Android, iOS, Linux, macOS, web, Windows, and API. The company says it encrypts customer data in transit and at rest using TLS 1.2+ and AES-256.