Overview

Middleware brings infrastructure monitoring, application performance monitoring (APM), logs, metrics, database monitoring, and distributed tracing into a single observability offering. Its coverage also extends to real user monitoring (RUM), synthetic monitoring, browser testing, and LLM observability. Transaction tracing, dependency mapping, and log correlation add ways to connect application activity with related components when investigating issues.

The company describes an AI SRE Agent for detecting issues and helping resolve them. Its OpsAI capabilities include root cause analysis, automatic issue detection, faster issue solving, and automatic pull request generation. Middleware also provides a Public API, and advertises more than 450 built-in integrations spanning application monitoring, cloud, containers, databases, infrastructure and operating systems, networking, notifications, streaming, and telemetry.

Founded in 2022 and headquartered in San Francisco, Middleware says it serves organizations of all sizes. That breadth is useful for teams modernizing a varied infrastructure stack, but narrower needs may not justify adopting a platform that covers so many monitoring areas.

Key features

Coverage across signals

Combining infrastructure, APM, logs, metrics, tracing, database monitoring, and user-facing monitoring can give teams a broader place to investigate than separate tools for each signal. The range is a particular strength for organizations that need both real-user visibility and synthetic checks. Teams seeking only one monitoring function may find much of the product scope unnecessary.

OpsAI and integrations

OpsAI is positioned around identifying and diagnosing issues, speeding resolution, and generating pull requests automatically. Those capabilities may help teams that want assistance across investigation and remediation, though they do not remove the need to assess usage limits and cost. The integration catalog and Public API make Middleware relevant to environments that need connections across multiple infrastructure categories.

Security

Middleware says customer data is encrypted in transit with TLS 1.2+ and at rest with AES-256. Its security practices include regular penetration testing and vulnerability assessments, along with firewalls, intrusion detection and prevention, and traffic filtering. These controls matter to teams evaluating observability systems that handle operational data.

Pricing

Middleware uses a freemium model, with a free plan, usage-based paid pricing, and custom pricing for BYOC. A 14-day trial is also offered. The key distinction is that the free plan has defined quotas and 14-day retention, while pay-as-you-go extends default retention to 30 days and charges for usage.

Plan	Price and terms	What it includes
Free Forever	0.00 USD per free	Up to 100GB data, 1k RUM sessions, 20k synthetic checks, 10 browser test runs, and 2 million OpsAI tokens; unlimited users, community based support, and 14 day retention.
Pay As You Go	0.30 USD per month	Pay only for what you use; $1 per 1K RUM sessions, $1 per 5K synthetic checks, and $10 per 1K browser test runs. Default 30 day retention, SSO and security features, and a dedicated Slack/MS Teams channel.
BYOC	Custom pricing	Bring your own cloud, volume discounts, multi-year contract discounts, custom data retention, a dedicated account team, and 24x7 support.

Free Forever is a practical starting point for evaluation or modest workloads: unlimited users avoids a seat ceiling, but the data, session, check, browser-run, and token caps can constrain sustained use. Its 14-day retention also gives teams less time to revisit older events than the paid plan. Pay As You Go is a better fit when usage varies and teams value longer default retention, SSO, security features, and a dedicated channel; the per-unit charges for RUM, synthetic checks, and browser runs make forecasting important. Accounts can be cancelled anytime, with data retained for 30 days after cancellation for download.

BYOC is aimed at organizations that need their own cloud environment, custom retention, volume or multi-year discounts, and round-the-clock support. Its custom pricing makes it less suitable for buyers who need a known upfront rate.

Platforms

Middleware supports Android, iOS, Linux, macOS, Windows, web, and API. Its hybrid deployment model gives it scope across hosted and infrastructure-connected environments, making it relevant to teams operating across multiple platform types.

Who it's for

Middleware is best suited to organizations that want a broad observability portfolio, especially teams monitoring infrastructure and applications alongside real user experience. Its integrations and tracing, mapping, and correlation capabilities are useful where investigation crosses system boundaries. Smaller workloads can begin on the free tier, while teams with higher or unpredictable usage should compare the quotas and per-unit prices against expected volume before committing.

Pros and cons

Broad monitoring coverage: Infrastructure, APM, logs, tracing, RUM, synthetic monitoring, browser testing, and LLM observability support teams looking to consolidate signals.
Large integration catalog: More than 450 built-in integrations cover a wide range of infrastructure and telemetry categories.
Meaningful free allowances: The free plan includes unlimited users and quotas for data, RUM, synthetic checks, browser tests, and OpsAI tokens, making evaluation possible without an initial subscription price.
Usage costs require attention: RUM sessions, synthetic checks, and browser runs have separate unit charges on Pay As You Go, so growing usage can make costs harder to predict.
Free retention is shorter: Fourteen days may be limiting for teams that need to investigate issues over a longer window.
BYOC pricing is custom: Buyers seeking a published fixed price cannot compare its total cost upfront.

Alternatives

Uptrace is worth comparing for teams that want a freemium observability option with a stated 50 GB free monthly allowance and a $0.075/GB rate beyond it, plus unlimited users, services, and hosts on Uptrace Cloud.

Honeycomb may fit teams that prefer an event- and metrics-capped free plan, with up to 20M events per month, up to 100M metrics data points per month, and two triggers.

SigNoz is a relevant alternative for teams willing to manage their own infrastructure, storage, scaling, upgrades, and backups on its self-hosted community plan.

Elastic Observability is another option for buyers considering usage-based observability pricing, with serverless logs and traces ingest starting at $0.09/.

Grafana Cloud Application Observability suits teams comparing a free allowance of 2,232 host hours with a Pro plan priced at $0.025 per host hour and a $19 monthly platform fee.

groundcover may suit teams prioritizing a free forever plan with 12-hour data retention, Slack Community, no credit card requirement, and BYOC.

Dynatrace Application Monitoring is an alternative for buyers considering paid full-stack monitoring priced at $0.01 per memory-GiB-hour per 8 GiB host.

New Relic Kubernetes Monitoring is worth comparing for teams focused on Kubernetes monitoring and a free data ingest allowance of 100 GB, with $0.40/GB beyond that limit.

For broader comparisons, see Application Performance Monitoring, Observability Platforms, DevOps analytics software, Real User Monitoring, Continuous Profiling Tools, and Kubernetes Monitoring.

Verdict

Choose Middleware if your team wants infrastructure, application, and user monitoring together, backed by a broad integration catalog and OpsAI investigation capabilities. Its free plan is a useful entry point, but the quotas and 14-day retention make it a limited long-term fit for heavier workloads; pay-as-you-go charges and custom BYOC pricing warrant a close look before choosing it for scale.

	Middleware	Portainer
Free plan	Yes	Yes
Free trial	Yes	Yes
Paid from	$0.30/mo	$12.92/mo
Open source	No	No
Platforms	Android, api, iOS, Linux, macOS, Web, Windows	api, Linux, self-hosted, Web
Free plan	Yes	Yes

Middleware vs Portainer

Middleware

Portainer