AppSignal vs Raygun Application Performance Monitoring

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.

Raygun Application Performance Monitoring (APM) monitors server-side performance and provides trend data, real-time performance information, and user-experience data. Request traces can be examined by method, request, query, and external API call, while expandable visual views help inspect asynchronous threads. Raygun can display source code from GitHub, Bitbucket, or Azure Repos. Its issue engine prioritizes performance issues and can send proactive notifications; sampling and code filtering help control noise and overhead costs. The cloud service supports transaction tracing, real user monitoring, Core Web Vitals, mobile app monitoring, interaction tracking, geographic breakdown, and error correlation, with data retention of 90+ days. APM documentation lists integrations for GitHub, Jira, PagerDuty, and Slack. Compatible environments include Node.js, Ruby, .NET, .NET Core, and Azure App Service; agent installation options are available for Windows and Linux. Raygun describes APM for customer-centric teams seeking improvements that affect end-user experience. The pricing note lists From $80/mo (annual), and a 14-day trial is available.