Middleware vs Skylight
Middleware
middleware.ioSkylight
skylight.ioSide by side
| Figure | Middleware | Skylight |
|---|---|---|
| Price from | $0.30/mo | $20/mo |
| Free plan | Yes | Yes |
| Free trial | Yes | Yes |
| Open source | — | — |
| Web | Yes | Yes |
| Windows | Yes | — |
| macOS | Yes | Yes |
| Linux | Yes | Yes |
| iOS | Yes | — |
| Android | Yes | — |
| API | Yes | Yes |
| Plans published | 3 | 3 |
| Spec score · Application Performance Monitoring | 9.0 (#3) | 7.8 (#23) |
| Product | Middleware describes itself as a full-stack observability platform that detects issues across infrastructure, APM, and real user monitoring and helps resolve them with its AI SRE Agent. | Skylight is a smart profiler for Ruby and Rails applications that turns performance data into actionable insights. |
| 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. | Skylight provides documentation for setup, instrumentation, performance tips, background jobs, and troubleshooting, and directs users with further questions to contact support. |
Plans
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.
Skylight
Skylight is a cloud profiler for Ruby and Rails applications, available through API, Linux, macOS, and web platforms. It ranks endpoints by “agony,” combining popularity with response time, and plots deployments against performance so teams can relate code changes to results. Supported Ruby frameworks include Rails, Sinatra, and Grape. Skylight analyzes Sidekiq, DelayedJob, and ActiveJob background queues, and can flag allocation-heavy code and repeated queries. Endpoint timelines present aggregated, sanitized SQL queries. GraphQL queries are grouped by name in the dashboard and endpoint event sequences. A weekly report identifies improved endpoints, slowdown warnings, and endpoints that declined over six weeks. Each account includes 100,000 free traces per month. Paid tiers start at $20 a month and adjust to monthly trace volume across apps. A 30-day trial is available without a credit card. Open-source apps may apply for free public reporting. Communications are encrypted, and access to customer information is limited to selected personnel and contractors.