Chronosphere Application Observability vs Middleware
Chronosphere Application Observability
chronosphere.io
Middleware
middleware.ioSide by side
| Figure | Chronosphere Application Observability | Middleware |
|---|---|---|
| Price from | Free | $0.30/mo |
| Free plan | Yes | Yes |
| Free trial | Yes | Yes |
| Open source | — | — |
| Web | Yes | Yes |
| Windows | Yes | Yes |
| macOS | Yes | Yes |
| Linux | Yes | Yes |
| iOS | — | Yes |
| Android | — | Yes |
| API | Yes | Yes |
| Plans published | 4 | 3 |
| Spec score · Application Performance Monitoring | 9.0 (#2) | 9.0 (#3) |
| Spec score · Observability Platforms | 9.0 (#2) | 8.9 (#5) |
| Spec score · Kubernetes Monitoring | 9.0 (#4) | 9.0 (#5) |
| Documentation depth | Chronosphere documentation covers trace ingestion, querying, dashboards, alerts, linking, analysis and control workflows. | Getting-started documentation covers host agents, SDKs, integrations, API keys, target URLs, operating systems and languages. |
| Founded | 2019 | 2022 |
| Headquarters | New York, New York, United States | San Francisco, California |
| Security | Chronosphere states that it is SOC 2 Type 2 and ISO 27001 audited and encrypts customer data at rest and in transit using TLS 1.2 or higher and AES 256. | Middleware says customer data is encrypted at rest and in transit using TLS 1.2+ and AES-256. |
| Security compliance | Chronosphere states that it is SOC 2 Type 2 and ISO 27001 audited. | Middleware states that it is SOC 2 Type II, GDPR, HIPAA and ISO 27001 certified and encrypts data in transit and at rest. |
| Support | Customer support includes 24/7 year-round communication through Slack, Zendesk, or email, plus optional office hours and calls. | 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. |
| What it does | Chronosphere provides cloud-native application observability for collecting, correlating and analyzing metrics, logs, traces and events. | Middleware is a cloud observability platform that collects telemetry, logs and events and presents dashboards, alerts and AI-driven root-cause analysis. |
Plans
Chronosphere Application Observability
- Chronosphere pilotFree
- PilotFree
- Chronosphere Observability PlatformPriced on request
- Custom enterprise subscriptionPriced on request
In their own words
Chronosphere Application Observability
Chronosphere Application Observability is a cloud service for helping teams find and resolve problems in cloud-native applications and microservices. Chronosphere Lens creates service views aligned with an application’s architecture. Teams can use RED metrics and service-level objectives to understand performance and service dependencies, while metrics, logs, traces, and events are correlated with system changes and their effects. Distributed tracing maps request paths across components to help locate latency and inter-service communication issues. Dynamic trace sampling is offered to balance observability insight with cost. The service accepts open telemetry formats including Prometheus and OpenTelemetry. Listed alerting connections include Slack, PagerDuty, OpsGenie, VictorOps, email, and a general-purpose webhook. Pricing for the Observability Platform is based on useful data retained and customized for each organization; no price is listed. Pilots are typically free and average 2–3 weeks, though large-scale or long-term pilots may be paid. A free trial is offered, but there is no free plan. Customer support includes year-round, 24/7 communication through Slack, Zendesk, or email, with optional office hours and calls.
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.