MetricFire vs Pixie
MetricFire
metricfire.com
Pixie
px.devSide by side
| Figure | MetricFire | Pixie |
|---|---|---|
| Price from | $16/mo | Free |
| Free plan | — | Yes |
| Free trial | Yes | — |
| Open source | — | — |
| Web | Yes | Yes |
| Linux | — | Yes |
| API | Yes | — |
| Self-hosted | — | Yes |
| Plans published | 4 | 2 |
| Spec score · Cloud Monitoring | 7.8 (#12) | 7.5 (#18) |
| Founded | 2012 | 2018 |
| Integrations | The site lists integrations including AWS, Azure, Google Cloud Platform, Heroku, Telegraf, Prometheus, Redis, and PostgreSQL. | The homepage lists Minikube, EKS, GKE, AKS, and self-managed Kubernetes environments. |
| Security | MetricFire says credentials are encrypted at rest and in transit, and access uses least-privilege policies and two-factor authentication. | Pixie telemetry traffic is encrypted in transit, and the requirements page says telemetry passes through Pixie Cloud without persistence. |
| Support | All plans include email and live chat support from experienced engineers, and customers can arrange technical support meetings. | The project directs users to its Community Slack, troubleshooting guide, and GitHub issue tracker for help. |
Plans
MetricFire
- Intro$16 a month
- Basic$84 a month
- Core$429 a month
- Design Your Perfect PlanPriced on request
In their own words
MetricFire
MetricFire is a web and API service that runs Graphite and Grafana for monitoring metrics, dashboards, and alerting. Custom application metrics can arrive over TCP, UDP, HTTP POST, or StatsD without an agent or SDK. Built-in Graphite alerting connects with Slack, PagerDuty, and email. Listed integrations include AWS, Azure, Google Cloud Platform, Heroku, Telegraf, Prometheus, Redis, and PostgreSQL, alongside Kubernetes, serverless, and synthetic monitoring. Intro costs $16 a month billed annually and includes 500 metrics, six-month retention, 30-second resolution, two team users, 10 alerts, and unlimited dashboards. Basic is $84 a month billed annually with 1,000 metrics and two-year retention; Core is $429 a month billed annually with 5,000 metrics and the same listed allowances. A custom plan is available by contacting MetricFire. There is no free plan, but a 14-day trial is offered.
Pixie
Pixie is open-source Kubernetes observability and debugging software for developers. It collects metrics, events, traces, and logs without code changes, using dynamic eBPF probes and ingestors. Users can run community, team, or custom scripts to debug as code and share sessions. Its CLI provides health checks and charts, with a browser interface available when needed. Pixie supports hosted and self-hosted deployments; its Vizier data-collection component runs in the Kubernetes cluster. Requirements include Kubernetes v1.21 or later and Linux nodes, and pods that install BPF programs need privileged access to the Linux kernel. The project lists Cosmic Cloud and New Relic Cloud as free hosted versions. Pixie lists Minikube, EKS, GKE, AKS, and self-managed Kubernetes environments. Telemetry traffic is encrypted in transit. The requirements page says telemetry passes through Pixie Cloud without persistence, while the install guide says hosted-backend telemetry data is stored exclusively on the Kubernetes cluster, not in Pixie Cloud. Listed unsupported environments include EKS Fargate, GKE Autopilot, Docker Desktop, k3d, kind, and Windows. Help options include Community Slack, a troubleshooting guide, and GitHub issues.