Top 10 SigNoz Alternatives for Application, Infrastructure and Network Observability

Who on your team owns the observability backend when it starts falling behind?

If the answer is a platform engineer hired to build something else, the license saving has quietly moved onto the payroll. SigNoz gives you traces, logs and metrics with no license fee, and it reads instrumented applications well. The spending moves to the cluster you now size, the storage you now pay for and the upgrades you now own.

The second pressure is coverage. An application-first platform stays silent on the switch that dropped packets, the firewall someone reconfigured overnight or the storage array queueing writes, so each gap adds a second tool to the renewal rather than a capability. This comparison covers both pressures, with every price read from the vendor's live pricing table and the ten observability tools scored on where they can be deployed as well as on what they can see.

In this blog, you will see:

• Why teams move on: Four pressures that trigger migration

• How we scored: Five weighted factors, openly stated

• Ten platforms reviewed: Features, pricing, pros and cons

• Two comparison tables: Deployment, coverage and cost basis

• Buyer checks: Questions to ask every vendor

Our Top Three Picks at a Glance

Three SigNoz alternatives cover most buying situations, depending on whether your constraint is coverage, openness or storage cost.

• Best for consolidation: Motadata ObserveOps, for organizations that want application traces, infrastructure metrics and network device telemetry running on one platform, deployed on-premises or in a cloud they choose

• Best for staying fully open source: Grafana, free to self-host, with metrics, logs and traces each handled by a component you can scale or replace on its own

• Best for cutting storage cost: OpenObserve, which writes to object storage instead of a database cluster and stays free to self-host up to 50 GB a day

What Is SigNoz and Who Uses It?

SigNoz is an open-source observability platform that collects traces, logs and metrics from instrumented applications and stores them in a single database, offered as free self-hosted software or as a managed cloud service.

SigNoz launched out of Y Combinator's Winter 2021 batch as an open-source alternative to commercial application monitoring suites, built natively on OpenTelemetry, the vendor-neutral standard for collecting telemetry from software.

• What it covers: Application traces, logs, metrics, exceptions, dashboards and alerts from services you have instrumented

• Who buys it: Engineering and platform groups in cloud-native organizations, usually moving off a per-host commercial contract

• How it runs: Free self-hosted software on your own servers, or a managed cloud service billed on data volume

That profile explains both its appeal and its limits. An application-first platform run by the engineers who write the applications works well in an environment made entirely of software. Organizations with physical networks, branch offices or regulated deployment requirements tend to reach the edge of that profile within a year.

Why do Teams Look for SigNoz Alternatives?

Teams look for SigNoz alternatives for four reasons, and none of them concern how well the product does the job it was designed for.

1. Does Running the Database Yourself Cost More Than It Saves?

Self-hosted SigNoz stores telemetry in ClickHouse, a database built for fast analytical queries over large volumes. Running it well becomes a recurring responsibility.

• Sizing and sharding: Deciding how much hardware the cluster needs as volume grows

• Retention tuning: Choosing how long each signal is kept before storage cost climbs

• Upgrade sequencing: Testing and applying database upgrades without losing query access

• Query performance: Investigating slow dashboards when data volume outgrows the configuration

Every hour spent here is an hour of engineering salary that never appears on a purchase order.

2. What Happens When the Incident Starts Below the Application?

SigNoz reads what instrumented software emits, which covers distributed tracing, logs and application metrics. Hardware and network events do not emit that data.

• Network devices: Switch ports, VLANs and routing changes report through SNMP, the protocol network hardware uses to publish status

• Physical infrastructure: Uninterruptible power supplies, storage arrays and hardware health sensors

• Configuration drift: A firewall rule or device config changed overnight without a corresponding code deployment

• Traffic patterns: Network flow data showing which conversations saturated a link

Running a second platform for those signals means two alert streams, two on-call rotations and manual correlation during an outage, which is where full-stack observability becomes the requirement rather than a preference.

3. Where Does the Money Go When There Is No License Fee?

The self-hosted edition has no license cost, so the spending moves to lines that are harder to see in a budget review.

• Compute: Servers or cloud instances running the ingest and query layers

• Storage: Object storage and disk, growing with retention windows

• Egress: Data transfer charges between regions and out to users

• Engineering hours: The salaried time spent operating all of the above

A platform engineer spending one day a week on the backend is a material annual cost, which is why observability costs are better compared as total operating spend than as list price.

4. Does the Platform Close the Ticket or Only Raise the Alert?

SigNoz detects and displays. Everything after that is a manual handoff.

• Ownership: Someone has to decide which group owns the failure

• Ticket creation: The alert is retyped into a service desk by hand

• Change control: Regulated environments need an approval trail before a fix is applied

• Closure evidence: Auditors ask for a record linking the alert to the resolution

For a ten-person engineering group that handoff is a chat message. For a bank or a telecom operator it is an audit exposure, and platforms carrying root cause analysis through to a closed ticket remove it entirely.

How We Evaluated These SigNoz Alternatives

We scored these SigNoz alternatives on five factors, weighted by how often each one decides a migration in practice.

1. Coverage across applications, infrastructure and network: 25% How much of the environment the platform reads without a second tool alongside it

2. Deployment options: 25% Whether it runs on-premises, in a private cloud, in an air-gapped facility, or only in the vendor's cloud

3. OpenTelemetry and open-standard support: 20% Whether existing instrumentation transfers without rewriting, and whether data can leave again

4. Operating burden and pricing predictability: 20% What the platform costs to run, and whether the bill can be forecast before it arrives

5. Path from alert to resolution: 10% What happens after detection, including ticketing, ownership and closure evidence

What we did not do is worth stating. We did not run the ten platforms against an identical workload, benchmark query speed at matched volumes, or measure retention cost under live traffic, since those results depend on your own data shape and your position on the observability maturity model. Pricing pages change without notice, so confirm current rates with the vendor before committing.

SigNoz Alternatives Compared at a Glance

The table below compares all ten SigNoz alternatives on deployment model, pricing basis and rating, so you can eliminate options before reading the full reviews.

Ratings come from each vendor's own listing on the relevant review platform, and the categories those platforms use vary by vendor, so treat the scores as indicative rather than directly comparable. 

Top 10 SigNoz Alternatives Reviewed in Detail

Each of the ten SigNoz alternatives below is reviewed on what it covers, what it costs and where its design works against you, starting with the platform built for organizations consolidating several tools into one.

1. Motadata ObserveOps

Best for: Organizations consolidating application, infrastructure and network telemetry with control over where it runs

Rating:

• G2 - 4.7/5

• Gartner Peer Insights - 4.6/5

• Capterra - 4.7/5

Motadata ObserveOps reads metrics, logs, network traffic flows, traces and service topology through one agent into one data store. Application monitoring covers Java, .NET, PHP, Node.js, Python, Go and Kubernetes.

What separates it from an application-first platform is the layer beneath. Switch ports, network segments, hardware alerts and device configuration changes arrive in the same system as the traces, so a slow request and the saturated link behind it appear in one investigation.

Deployment is where regulated buyers usually decide. ObserveOps runs on-premises, in a private cloud or in a public cloud, across six documented architectures including multi-site, high availability and disaster recovery.

Pricing:

• Licensing: Quote-based, scoped to the environment and the deployment architecture

• Trial: A free trial is available

Motadata publishes marketed customer outcomes including 45% less downtime and 80% MTTR reduction, meaning the average time taken to resolve an incident. Those are the vendor's own figures rather than independently audited benchmarks.

2. Grafana

Best for: Teams committed to open-source components they can scale and replace individually

Rating:

• G2 - 4.5/5

• Capterra - 4.6/5

Grafana anchors the best-known open-source observability stack, pairing its dashboards with Prometheus for metrics, Loki for logs, Tempo for traces and Mimir for long-term metric storage.

Where SigNoz puts every signal in one database, Grafana keeps them in separate components. That lets you scale each one independently, and it means four systems to configure, secure and upgrade rather than one.

Grafana Cloud removes the operational work and keeps the same dashboards and query language. Billing then meters active metric series, ingested volume, active users and host hours separately, which behaves very differently from a single per-gigabyte rate.

Pricing:

• Self-hosted: Free under an open-source license

• Cloud Free: 10,000 active metric series, 50 GB each of logs, traces and profiles, three users

• Cloud Pro: $19 per month platform fee plus usage, metrics from $6.50 per 1,000 active series and $8 per active user, billed monthly

• Cloud Enterprise: From a $25,000 annual spend commitment

• Trial: A free tier is available with no expiry

Teams weighing this stack against the wider category will find more detail in our guide to Grafana alternatives.

3. OpenObserve

Best for: Teams whose main complaint about SigNoz is storage cost and cluster overhead

Rating:

• Gartner Peer Insights - 4.7/5

OpenObserve is the closest architectural match to SigNoz here. It handles logs, metrics, traces, real user monitoring and session replay in a single program, with OpenTelemetry as the primary ingestion path.

The difference is storage. OpenObserve writes compressed columnar files, a layout built for analytical queries, to object storage such as Amazon S3, with stateless compute above it. That removes the database cluster and changes the cost curve for log-heavy workloads.

The trade-off is scope. Coverage stays within what applications and cloud services emit, so the infrastructure gap that pushes teams away from SigNoz remains here. Enterprise features are also free only up to 50 GB per day when self-hosted.

Pricing:

• Self-hosted open source: Free at any volume

• Self-Hosted Enterprise: Free up to 50 GB per day of ingestion

• Cloud Professional: $0.50 per GB ingested plus $0.01 per GB queried, billed monthly, with the $0.50 rate reflecting a 30% annual commitment discount

• Included retention: 15 months of metrics and 30 days of logs and traces, with additional non-metric retention at $0.02 per GB per 30-day period

• Trial: 14-day free trial on the cloud plan

OpenObserve moved its cloud plans to pure pay-as-you-go billing and dropped the flat monthly fee, so any comparison quoting a fixed cloud subscription describes the previous model.

4. OneUptime

Best for: Groups replacing separate vendors for telemetry, status pages and on-call paging

Rating:

• G2 - 3.7/5

OneUptime takes a broader position than the other open-source options here. It combines OpenTelemetry logs, metrics and traces with uptime monitoring, incident management, on-call scheduling and public status pages under one open license.

That breadth addresses the alert-to-resolution gap directly. The alert routes to a rotation, opens an incident, updates a status page and tracks the postmortem without leaving the platform.

Depth is the trade. Each module is lighter than the specialist tool it replaces, and the public review base is small enough that peer validation is limited.

Pricing:

• Self-hosted open source: Free at any scale

• Cloud Free: $0, covering one status page and unlimited manual monitors

• Growth: $22 per month, billed monthly or yearly

• Scale: $99 per month, billed monthly or yearly

• Enterprise: Custom, billed annually

• Usage add-ons on every plan: $1 per active monitor per month, $0.10 per GB of telemetry at 15-day retention, $0.10 per SMS, $0.10 per minute of voice alerts

• Trial: 14-day free trial on new paid accounts

5. Elastic Observability

Best for: Organizations already running Elasticsearch for logs and search

Rating:

• G2 - 4.3/5

• Gartner Peer Insights - 4.5/5

• Capterra - 4.3/5

Elastic Observability builds application monitoring, log analytics, infrastructure monitoring and synthetic testing on top of Elasticsearch and Kibana. For an organization already running that stack, the shared foundation is the argument.

Free-text investigation across very large log volumes is where it performs strongly, and engineers who think in queries rather than dashboards tend to prefer it.

Operating cost is counterweight. Self-managed clusters at observability scale need dedicated expertise, and Elastic bills on uncompressed data size measured at the end of the ingest pipeline, which runs higher than raw source volume.

Pricing:

• Self-managed: Free under the Basic license

• Cloud Hosted Standard: From $99 per month

• Cloud Hosted Gold: From $114 per month

• Cloud Hosted Platinum: From $131 per month

• Cloud Hosted Enterprise: From $184 per month

• Hosted tier basis: All four figures assume a cloud production configuration of 120 GB storage across two zones, with resource-based charges above that

• Serverless: Billed per GB ingested and per GB retained on a volume-tiered structure

• Trial: 14-day free trial

Elastic repriced its serverless plans in November 2025, and our breakdown of Elasticsearch pricing walks through where the totals land under the current model.

6. Datadog

Best for: Cloud-native environments needing very wide integration coverage with nothing to operate

Rating:

• G2 - 4.4/5

• Gartner Peer Insights - 4.6/5

• Capterra - 4.6/5

Datadog is the platform SigNoz benchmarks itself against, and the comparison is fair on capability. Infrastructure monitoring, application monitoring, logs, real user monitoring, synthetics and several hundred integrations arrive preconfigured.

An engineer can move from a container metric to a trace to the log line to the browser session without changing tools, and the correlation works without setup.

Cost is the recurring complaint. Each product meters separately, custom metrics and containers bill above the per-host allowance, and log indexing is charged apart from log ingestion.

Pricing:

• Free: Up to 5 hosts with 1-day metric retention

• Pro: From $15 per host per month billed annually, or $18 on-demand

• Enterprise: From $23 per host per month billed annually, or $27 on-demand

• Log management: From $0.10 per ingested GB, with indexing charged separately

• Trial: A free trial is available

Buyers weighing the per-host model against alternatives will find the full picture in our guide to Datadog alternatives.

7. New Relic

Best for: Developer-led groups preferring to pay for data volume and seats over hosts

Rating:

• G2 - 4.4/5

• Gartner Peer Insights - 4.6/5

• Capterra - 4.5/5

New Relic bills on two axes, data ingested and user seats, with no per-host, per-agent or per-container charge. For teams running many small services, that often produces a lower total than a host-based competitor at the same scale.

The free tier shapes adoption. It includes 100 GB of monthly ingest, one full platform user and unlimited basic users with no expiry, and many smaller groups never leave it.

Capability centres firmly on the application layer, with strong tracing and error analysis. Infrastructure coverage exists, and network device visibility is not part of the model.

Pricing:

• Free: 100 GB monthly ingest, one full platform user, unlimited basic users, no expiry

• Data ingest: $0.40 per GB beyond 100 GB on Original Data, or $0.60 per GB on Data Plus

• Standard: $10 for the first full platform user and $99 for each additional user, capped at five

• Pro: $349 per full platform user per month on annual commitment, or $418.80 pay-as-you-go

• Core users: $49 per user per month

• Enterprise: Quoted

8. Dynatrace

Best for: Large environments wanting instrumentation handled without manual configuration

Rating:

• G2 - 4.5/5

• Gartner Peer Insights - 4.6/5

• Capterra - 4.6/5

Dynatrace works in the opposite direction to an OpenTelemetry-first platform. Its agent discovers processes, services and dependencies on install and instruments them without per-service configuration.

That dependency map feeds an analysis engine that names a probable cause rather than listing correlated alerts. In environments where one failure produces hundreds of symptoms, that difference is what buyers pay for.

The costs are complexity and price. Consumption draws against an annual pool with a separate rate for each capability, and the units behave differently from one another.

Pricing:

• Foundation and Discovery: From $7 per host per month, billed at $0.01 per host-hour

• Infrastructure Monitoring: From $29 per host per month, billed at $0.04 per host-hour

• Full-Stack Monitoring: From $58 per 8 GiB host per month, billed at $0.01 per memory-GiB-hour

• Real user monitoring: $2.25 per 1,000 sessions

• Synthetic browser monitors: $4.50 per 1,000 actions

• Trial: A free trial is available

9. Honeycomb

Best for: Debugging distributed applications by querying events on any attribute

Rating:

• G2 - 4.5/5

• Gartner Peer Insights - 4.7/5

• Capterra - 4.9/5

Honeycomb starts from a different premise. It stores wide, richly attributed events and lets you slice them by any field at query time, including fields you did not plan for when instrumenting.

That answers questions dashboards struggle with. When a failure affects one customer, one region and one build at once, BubbleUp surfaces what separates the failing requests from normal traffic before you write the query.

The scope is deliberately narrow. Honeycomb analyses application events rather than infrastructure, and it bills events rather than gigabytes, so sampling strategy becomes a budgeting decision.

Pricing:

• Free: Up to 20 million events and 100 million metric data points per month

• Pro: From $150 per month for 50 million events, scaling to 750 million events and 3.75 billion metric data points, on a monthly or annual subscription

• Enterprise: Custom, starting from a base allowance of 10 billion events per year

• Telemetry pipeline: Priced separately from $0.10 per GB

• Trial: A free plan is available with no expiry

Honeycomb restructured its Pro tiers and raised its per-event rate in July 2026, so older comparisons quoting the previous three-tier structure describe a model that no longer applies.

10. Better Stack

Best for: Small groups wanting uptime monitoring, telemetry and paging from one vendor

Rating:

• G2 - 4.8/5

• Gartner Peer Insights - 4.9/5

• Capterra - 4.8/5

Better Stack packages uptime monitoring, log management, incident management, on-call scheduling and status pages into one product with a well-reviewed interface.

Incident response is where it performs best. Alerts route to a rotation with phone and SMS escalation, and status pages update automatically, so detection through to customer communication happens in one place.

Two limits matter before shortlisting. Pricing is modular, with a per-responder license plus separate packs for monitors, heartbeats and telemetry volume, and buyers report that the total is hard to forecast.

Pricing:

• Free: 10 monitors and heartbeats plus one status page

• Responder license: $34 per month, or $29 per month billed annually, per license

• Additional monitors: $25 per 50 per month, or $21 billed annually

• Telemetry bundles: From $30 per month, or $25 billed annually, for 40 GB each of traces, logs and metrics, scaling to $500, or $420 billed annually, for 700 GB each

• Enterprise: Quoted

• Trial: No trial, though a 60-day money-back guarantee applies to paid plans

Which SigNoz Alternative is Best for Your Use Case?

The right SigNoz alternative depends on where your data has to live and how much of your environment the platform needs to read, so match your constraint to the row below before comparing features.

Each of these constraints is a design choice that suits some organizations and works against others, so the platform that fits a fifteen-person product team is rarely the platform that fits a bank with forty branch offices.

Three questions settle most shortlists faster than a feature comparison. Ask each vendor directly:

1. Where can this run? Whether the platform deploys on-premises, in an air-gapped facility or only in the vendor's cloud, because data residency rules eliminate options no feature can recover. Choosing between SaaS network monitoring and an on-premises deployment usually decides the shortlist before anything else does.

2. What happens after the alert fires? Whether detection produces a tracked ticket with a named owner and a closure record, or whether someone retypes it into a service desk at two in the morning.

3. What exactly does the meter count? Whether the bill runs on hosts, gigabytes, events, seats or compute units, since two vendors quoting similar headline rates can differ several times over on the same workload. Our breakdown of SigNoz pricing shows how much the shape of a billing model changes the total.

Monitor Your Applications, Infrastructure and Network in One Platform With Motadata ObserveOps

SigNoz handles application telemetry well, and for an organization whose entire environment is instrumented software it may be the right long-term choice. The open-source category has genuinely improved, and platforms now cover ground that used to need a commercial contract.

The limit appears when the environment contains things that never emit a trace. Motadata ObserveOps brings application traces, infrastructure metrics, logs, network flows and device telemetry into one platform, deployable on-premises or in a cloud you choose, with alerts that carry through to a tracked ticket. Applying sound observability best practices is considerably easier when every signal already lives in one place.

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