Maintenant vs Middleware

Maintenant is a self-hosted, single-container dashboard for monitoring Docker and Kubernetes infrastructure. It tracks containers, HTTP and TCP endpoints, cron heartbeats, TLS certificates, and CPU, memory, network, and disk metrics. It can discover containers automatically, monitor health and restart loops, and stream logs. Update Intelligence checks OCI registries for image digest changes, while security insights identify exposed ports and risky configurations. The software uses SQLite by default, can be configured to use PostgreSQL, and does not require a separate datastore service. A REST API, real-time SSE streams, and an MCP server connect it to other systems and AI assistants. Community includes webhook and Discord alerts; paid editions add email and Telegram, and Pro adds Slack, Teams, and escalation policies. Community is free forever. Personal costs €149, paid once, including one year of updates; further updates cost 59 € incl. VAT per year. Pro costs €29 a month excluding VAT, or 290 € excluding VAT per year. There is no built-in authentication, so the dashboard and admin API need protection through a reverse proxy and authentication 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.