AppSignal vs SolarWinds Observability
AppSignal
appsignal.com
SolarWinds Observability
solarwinds.comSide by side
| Figure | AppSignal | SolarWinds Observability |
|---|---|---|
| Price from | $23.25/mo | $5/mo |
| Free plan | Yes | — |
| Free trial | Yes | Yes |
| Open source | — | — |
| Web | Yes | Yes |
| Windows | — | Yes |
| Linux | — | Yes |
| API | Yes | Yes |
| Self-hosted | — | Yes |
| Plans published | 2 | 9 |
| Spec score · Application Performance Monitoring | 8.6 (#4) | 7.8 (#24) |
| Spec score · Application Performance & Observability - Midmarket Software | 8.6 (#4) | 7.8 (#14) |
| Spec score · Runtime Monitoring Software | 8.6 (#10) | 7.8 (#27) |
| Spec score · Distributed Tracing Tools | 8.5 (#6) | 7.9 (#13) |
| Spec score · Monitoring Observability | 8.6 (#6) | 7.8 (#15) |
| Founded | 2012 | 1999 |
| Headquarters | Amsterdam, Netherlands and Austin, Texas (dual headquarters) | Austin, Texas, United States |
| Trial | The site offers a 30-day full-featured trial and says no credit card is needed. | SolarWinds advertises a fully functional 30-day trial for Observability SaaS and Observability Self-Hosted. |
Plans
SolarWinds Observability
- Log Observability$5 a month
- Essentials$8 a month
- Digital Experience Observability - Real User Monitoring$10 a month
- Digital Experience Observability - Synthetic$10 a month
- Advanced$14 a month
- Network and Infrastructure Observability$15.75 a month
- Premier$17.50 a month
- Application Observability$27.50 a month
- Database Observability$70 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.
SolarWinds Observability
SolarWinds Observability has no write-up on Specifiction yet; its figures are above.