AppSignal vs RootCause
AppSignal
appsignal.comRootCause
therootcause.ioSide by side
| Figure | AppSignal | RootCause |
|---|---|---|
| Price from | $23.25/mo | $99/mo |
| Free plan | Yes | — |
| Free trial | Yes | Yes |
| Open source | — | — |
| Web | Yes | Yes |
| API | Yes | — |
| Self-hosted | — | Yes |
| Plans published | 2 | 3 |
| Spec score · Application Performance Monitoring | 8.6 (#4) | 7.7 (#26) |
| Spec score · Error Monitoring Software | 8.6 (#6) | 7.7 (#21) |
| Founded | 2012 | 2009 |
| Headquarters | Amsterdam, Netherlands and Austin, Texas (dual headquarters) | Stockholm, Sweden |
| Integrations | The site highlights Slack, GitHub, Jira, Linear, GitLab, and PagerDuty integrations. | The feature tour lists Jira, GitHub, and Slack integrations, with email or Slack notifications for errors. |
| Security | AppSignal states that it is ISO 27001 certified and GDPR and HIPAA compliant. | The privacy policy says the website and service use SSL with 256-bit encryption and that direct server access uses two-factor authentication. |
| Support | AppSignal says customers can contact a real engineer through live chat or support email. | Commercial plans include community forum support; Startup and Business list Premium Support, while Enterprise lists Email Support. |
Plans
RootCause
- Startup$99 a month
- Business (on-premises)$199 a month
- Enterprise (on-premises)$699 a month
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.
RootCause
RootCause has no write-up on Specifiction yet; its figures are above.