Chronosphere Application Observability vs Uptrace
Chronosphere Application Observability
chronosphere.io
Uptrace
uptrace.devSide by side
| Figure | Chronosphere Application Observability | Uptrace |
|---|---|---|
| Price from | Free | $39/mo |
| Free plan | Yes | Yes |
| Free trial | Yes | Yes |
| Open source | — | Yes |
| Web | Yes | Yes |
| Windows | Yes | Yes |
| macOS | Yes | Yes |
| Linux | Yes | Yes |
| API | Yes | Yes |
| Self-hosted | — | Yes |
| Plans published | 4 | 6 |
| Spec score · Application Performance Monitoring | 9.0 (#2) | 8.6 (#5) |
| Spec score · Observability Platforms | 9.0 (#2) | 8.6 (#7) |
| Documentation depth | Chronosphere documentation covers trace ingestion, querying, dashboards, alerts, linking, analysis and control workflows. | The guides index lists 50 OpenTelemetry integration guides spanning Go, Python, JavaScript, Java, PHP, Ruby, Elixir, databases, infrastructure and AI. |
| Intended users | The company describes Chronosphere as a business-to-business SaaS observability service trusted by teams from startups to Fortune 500 companies. | The self-hosted editions page describes Community as for individuals, Starter as suitable for side projects, Team as a production default, and Business for reliability and compliance. |
| 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. | Uptrace states that browser traffic uses SSL/TLS, database backups are encrypted, and most live database data is not encrypted at rest. |
| Support | Customer support includes 24/7 year-round communication through Slack, Zendesk, or email, plus optional office hours and calls. | The project directs users to Telegram, Slack and GitHub Discussions for help; paid editions add email, priority, fast-SLA or dedicated support. |
| System requirements | The public chronoctl build instructions require Go 1.26; the hosted platform itself has no published end-user hardware requirement. | The Docker quick start lists at least 2 CPU cores, 4 GB RAM and 10 GB disk, while production sizing tables scale to hundreds of terabytes and millions of time series. |
| What it does | Chronosphere provides cloud-native application observability for collecting, correlating and analyzing metrics, logs, traces and events. | Uptrace is an OpenTelemetry-based observability and APM platform combining distributed traces, logs, metrics, dashboards and alerting. |
Plans
Chronosphere Application Observability
- Chronosphere pilotFree
- PilotFree
- Chronosphere Observability PlatformPriced on request
- Custom enterprise subscriptionPriced on request
Uptrace
- CommunityFree
- Uptrace CloudFree
- Starter$39 a month
- Team$199 a month
- Business$499 a month
- EnterprisePriced 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.
Uptrace
Uptrace is an OpenTelemetry-native observability platform that unifies traces, metrics and logs. It provides UQL for querying spans and logs and a PromQL-compatible engine for metrics. Dashboards can combine spans, events, logs and metrics, configured in the UI or YAML. Metric and error monitors can send notifications through email, Slack, PagerDuty and other channels. Uptrace lists Grafana integration as a Prometheus and Tempo data source and includes a built-in MCP server for AI assistants. It offers cloud and self-hosted deployment, with Docker, Ansible and Kubernetes installation options; precompiled binaries are listed for Linux, macOS and Windows. Uptrace Cloud retains data for four weeks by default, with cold storage options for up to 100 weeks. The free Cloud plan includes 50 GB per month and 5,000 timeseries per month, while Community is free with unlimited usage and 14 days of retention. Paid plans start at $39 a month. The privacy policy says data in transit and database backups are encrypted, but most live database data is not encrypted at rest.