Sematext Tracing vs Uptrace

Sematext Tracing is an OpenTelemetry-based distributed tracing service for monitoring and troubleshooting microservices and distributed systems. It accepts OTLP over HTTP or gRPC and works with OpenTelemetry Collectors, Jaeger, Zipkin, and compatible instrumentation. Users can filter traces by service, operation, latency, errors, or custom attributes, then inspect waterfalls and spans. Error rates, error types, and stack traces appear within the related request trace, while a Service Map depicts application dependencies and communication patterns. Performance views include latency breakdowns, P50/P95/P99 percentiles, RED metrics, and database query insights. Head-based sampling can retain errors and high-latency requests while sampling normal traffic at lower rates. Alerts can use latency thresholds, error rates, or custom span attributes. The product lists support for languages and frameworks including Java, Python, Go, .NET, Swift, Android, Spring, Django, Rails, React, Vue, and Svelte. Deployment options include Kubernetes, Docker, containers, or bare metal. Pricing is based on spans; the listed starting price is $17.10/mo (annual), and a 14-day trial is available without a credit card. There is no free plan.

Uptrace is an OpenTelemetry-native observability platform that unifies traces, metrics and logs. It provides UQL for querying spans and logs and a PromQL-compatible engine for metrics. Dashboards can combine spans, events, logs and metrics, configured in the UI or YAML. Metric and error monitors can send notifications through email, Slack, PagerDuty and other channels. Uptrace lists Grafana integration as a Prometheus and Tempo data source and includes a built-in MCP server for AI assistants. It offers cloud and self-hosted deployment, with Docker, Ansible and Kubernetes installation options; precompiled binaries are listed for Linux, macOS and Windows. Uptrace Cloud retains data for four weeks by default, with cold storage options for up to 100 weeks. The free Cloud plan includes 50 GB per month and 5,000 timeseries per month, while Community is free with unlimited usage and 14 days of retention. Paid plans start at $39 a month. The privacy policy says data in transit and database backups are encrypted, but most live database data is not encrypted at rest.