Middleware vs Portainer
Middleware
middleware.io
Portainer
portainer.ioSide by side
| Figure | Middleware | Portainer |
|---|---|---|
| Price from | $0.30/mo | $12.92/mo |
| Free plan | Yes | Yes |
| Free trial | Yes | Yes |
| Open source | — | Yes |
| Web | Yes | Yes |
| Windows | Yes | — |
| macOS | Yes | — |
| Linux | Yes | Yes |
| iOS | Yes | Yes |
| Android | Yes | Yes |
| API | Yes | Yes |
| Self-hosted | — | Yes |
| Plans published | 3 | 7 |
| Spec score · Container Monitoring | 9.0 (#3) | 8.9 (#6) |
| API | Middleware's documentation lists a Public API and links to API documentation. | Portainer exposes an HTTP REST API that automates UI operations and can proxy requests to underlying Docker and Kubernetes APIs. |
| Headquarters | San Francisco, California | Auckland, New Zealand |
| Integrations | Documented integrations include AWS, Azure, Google Cloud, Vercel, databases, Datadog, Grafana, Prometheus, Logstash, Fluentd and the OpenTelemetry Collector. | The product pages identify Talos Omni integration for provisioning Kubernetes clusters and support deployment from Helm charts. |
| Praise: usability | Reviewers repeatedly describe setup as quick, the learning curve as shallow and the interface as easier to use than competing observability tools. | G2 reviewers repeatedly praise the clean interface, quick setup, simple stack deployment and reduced need for Docker command-line work. |
| Rating on Capterra | 4.6 out of 5 from 7 reviews | 4.6 out of 5 from 17 reviews |
| Rating on G2 | 4.7 out of 5 from 56 reviews | 4.8 out of 5 from 298 reviews |
| Rating on GetApp | 4.6 out of 5 from 7 reviews | 4.6 out of 5 from 17 reviews |
| Support | 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. | The Scale plan includes 9x5 next business day support, while Enterprise offers prioritized 9x5 support with a 24/7 option. |
| What it does | Middleware is a cloud observability platform that collects telemetry, logs and events and presents dashboards, alerts and AI-driven root-cause analysis. | Portainer is a self-hosted control plane that manages Docker, Docker Swarm, Kubernetes, Podman and Azure ACI environments through a web interface. |
Plans
Portainer
- Business Edition free tierFree
- Home & Student$155 a year
- Starter$1,045 a year
- Starter$1,045 a year
- Scale$2,095 a year
- Scale$2,095 a year
- EnterprisePriced on request
In their own words
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.