AppSignal vs OpenZipkin
AppSignal
appsignal.com
OpenZipkin
zipkin.ioSide by side
| Figure | AppSignal | OpenZipkin |
|---|---|---|
| Price from | $23.25/mo | Free |
| Free plan | Yes | Yes |
| Free trial | Yes | — |
| Open source | — | — |
| Web | Yes | Yes |
| API | Yes | — |
| Self-hosted | — | Yes |
| Plans published | 2 | 1 |
| Spec score · Distributed Tracing Tools | 8.5 (#6) | 7.4 (#24) |
| Spec score · Monitoring Observability | 8.6 (#6) | 7.3 (#20) |
| Support | AppSignal says customers can contact a real engineer through live chat or support email. | The project directs users to its Gitter chat for questions and says the OpenZipkin organization is primarily volunteers. |
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.