Azure Application Insights vs Middleware
Azure Application Insights
azure.microsoft.com
Middleware
middleware.ioSide by side
| Figure | Azure Application Insights | Middleware |
|---|---|---|
| Price from | — | $0.30/mo |
| Free plan | — | Yes |
| Free trial | — | Yes |
| Open source | — | — |
| Web | Yes | Yes |
| Windows | Yes | Yes |
| macOS | — | Yes |
| Linux | Yes | Yes |
| iOS | Yes | Yes |
| Android | Yes | Yes |
| API | Yes | Yes |
| Plans published | 1 | 3 |
| Spec score · Application Performance Monitoring | 8.4 (#8) | 9.0 (#3) |
| Spec score · Runtime Monitoring Software | 8.4 (#16) | 9.0 (#5) |
| Founded | 1975 | 2022 |
| Headquarters | Redmond, Washington, United States | San Francisco, California |
| Integrations | Documented integrations include Azure SDK tracing, Cosmos DB SDK observability, .NET OpenTelemetry, Azure Container Apps, Azure Data Explorer, and Azure AI Foundry. | Documented integrations include AWS, Azure, Google Cloud, Vercel, databases, Datadog, Grafana, Prometheus, Logstash, Fluentd and the OpenTelemetry Collector. |
| OpenTelemetry | For supported scenarios, applications can use vendor-neutral OpenTelemetry to collect telemetry for analysis in Application Insights. | Middleware uses OpenTelemetry collectors and SDKs as its instrumentation layer and accepts existing customer OTel pipelines. |
| Security | Application Insights supports TLS 1.2 and 1.3, and Microsoft Entra authentication can restrict telemetry ingestion to authenticated identities. | Middleware says customer data is encrypted at rest and in transit using TLS 1.2+ and AES-256. |
| Support | Microsoft recommends its Azure Monitor OpenTelemetry Distro for new projects and describes it as supported by Microsoft. | 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
Azure Application Insights
- Pay-as-you-go (Azure Monitor Logs)Price not published
In their own words
Azure Application Insights
Azure Application Insights is an Azure Monitor service for collecting and analyzing application telemetry. It combines alerts, metrics, logs, workbooks, Grafana dashboards, and investigation tools such as application maps, live metrics, transaction search, availability monitoring, failure analysis, and performance views. Usage analytics cover users, sessions, events, funnels, flows, and cohorts. For.NET applications, diagnostics include profiling and a snapshot debugger for exceptions. Microsoft recommends the Azure Monitor OpenTelemetry Distro for most code-based server-side scenarios; browser telemetry uses the Application Insights JavaScript SDK. Setup paths cover web apps, virtual machines, JavaScript apps, Azure Functions, Kubernetes, and AI agents. Telemetry is stored in a Log Analytics workspace, and the service can work with applications hosted outside Azure. A daily ingestion cap can stop excess collection until the next UTC day, while sampling can reduce volume. The pricing page lists 90 days of no-charge retention, with longer retention charged by retained data volume. Ingestion is usage-based, with the first 5 GB per month per billing account free.
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.