SigNoz Alternatives for OpenTelemetry Observability

SigNoz is an open-source observability platform built on OpenTelemetry. It puts logs, metrics and traces in one interface and stores them in a single database, so you can jump from a slow trace to the logs for that request without switching tools. It is very much alive: the SigNoz releases page shows v0.147.0 from October 22, 2026, and the project ships often.

Teams compare it with other tools for three main reasons. Running the self-hosted edition takes time, the cloud bill grows with every gigabyte, or they need features SigNoz lacks, such as deeper infrastructure coverage or a bigger alerting and integrations catalogue. The six picks below include two open-source options you can host yourself and four hosted platforms, with list prices from each vendor's pricing page.

Prices below are as of November 6, 2026. Our method is on How we review tools.

Quick comparison

Grafana Cloud

Grafana Cloud is the hosted version of the Grafana stack: Grafana dashboards on top of Mimir for metrics, Loki for logs, Tempo for traces and Pyroscope for profiles. It takes OpenTelemetry data as SigNoz does, but because every piece is also open source, you can move between the hosted service and your own clusters without changing how you query.

The free tier needs no card and covers 10,000 active metric series, 50 GB each of logs, traces and profiles a month, three active users and 14 days of retention. The Grafana pricing page sets Pro at a $19 monthly platform fee plus usage, with metrics from $6.50 per 1,000 series and logs priced separately for processing, writing and retention.

Best for: Teams that already use Grafana dashboards or want a free hosted tier with real limits.

Pricing:

• Free: 10k metric series, 50 GB each of logs, traces and profiles a month, 3 users, 14-day retention
• Pro: $19 a month platform fee plus usage; metrics from $6.50 per 1k series; logs $0.05 per GB processed, $0.40 per GB written, $0.10 per GB retained
• Enterprise: from $25,000 a year committed spend

Watch out for:

• Extra products are billed on their own meters, such as Kubernetes Monitoring at $0.01 per host hour and Grafana Assistant at $20 per active user, so the Pro bill has many lines.
• Self-hosting the same stack means running Mimir, Loki and Tempo as separate systems, which is more work than one SigNoz install.

Official site: Grafana Cloud.

OpenObserve

OpenObserve is the pick for SigNoz users whose main pain is running the self-hosted edition. It handles logs, metrics, traces, frontend and synthetic monitoring, pipelines, alerts and dashboards, and it also covers LLM and AI observability. Downloads exist for Linux, macOS and Windows, along with Docker images and Kubernetes charts.

Licensing comes in two flavours. The open-source edition is AGPL-3.0 and free without limits. The Enterprise edition, under a separate licence, is free up to 50 GB of ingestion a day and adds federated search, query and workload management, SSO, role-based access and immutable audit logs. A managed cloud is also available with a 14-day trial.

Best for: Small teams that want to self-host logs, metrics and traces with little operational overhead.

Pricing:

• Open source (AGPL-3.0): free, no usage limits
• Enterprise edition: free up to 50 GB a day of ingestion; beyond that, contact sales
• Cloud: 14-day free trial; pricing on a separate page

Watch out for:

• The OpenObserve downloads page says the open-source edition has no role-based access, so every user has full access, and no SSO.
• SSO and RBAC in Enterprise require running in high-availability mode.

Official site: OpenObserve.

Uptrace

Uptrace is the most similar product to SigNoz in scope: an OpenTelemetry-native tool for traces, logs and metrics, sold both as a cloud service and as software you run yourself. The self-hosted Community Edition is free with no limits and lives on GitHub. A paid on-premises edition adds Terraform and Ansible automation, custom retention and a dedicated support engineer.

Where it differs is unit price at scale. The Uptrace pricing page gives 50 GB and 5,000 timeseries free each month, then traces and logs from $0.075 per GB, falling to $0.016 per GB at high volume. SigNoz charges a flat $0.30 per GB on Teams.

Best for: Teams sending large trace volumes who want lower per-GB prices than SigNoz.

Pricing:

• Cloud free tier: 50 GB of spans and logs and 5,000 timeseries a month
• Traces and logs: from $0.075 per GB, down to $0.016 per GB at scale
• Metrics: from $0.025 per million datapoints
• Cold storage: $0.01 per GB-month for spans
• Community Edition: free; on-premises paid edition: price on request

Watch out for:

• The bill has many parts: GB ingested, timeseries, cold storage and $0.01 per GB even for sampled-out data. Model your volume before you commit.
• The paid on-premises edition has no public price, only a demo booking.

Official site: Uptrace.

New Relic

New Relic is a full commercial platform with APM, infrastructure, logs, browser and mobile monitoring, and synthetics, and it accepts OpenTelemetry data as well as its own agents. Its pricing model is the opposite of per-host: you pay per GB ingested and per full platform user, and basic users who only view data are free and unlimited.

The free tier is large for a commercial tool. The New Relic pricing page lists 100 GB of ingest a month, one full platform user, unlimited basic users and 500 synthetic checks. Past that, data costs $0.40 per GB, or $0.60 with the Data Plus option.

Best for: Small teams that want mature APM and can stay under 100 GB a month, or have few engineers who need full access.

Pricing:

• Free: 100 GB ingest a month, 1 full platform user, unlimited basic users
• Data beyond free: $0.40 per GB; Data Plus $0.60 per GB
• Standard: first full user $10, then $99 per user, up to 5 users
• Pro: $349 per full user per month on an annual commitment, or $418.80 pay as you go

Watch out for:

• On the free tier, ingest stops and platform access is lost once you pass 100 GB in a month, until you upgrade or the month resets.
• Full users are expensive past Standard's five-user cap, so a 20-engineer team pays more for seats than for data.

Official site: New Relic.

Honeycomb

Honeycomb is built around wide events with many fields, which suits questions like which customer, build and region share the slow requests. Its query engine is fast on high-cardinality fields such as user IDs, where traditional metrics tools struggle, and features like BubbleUp compare outliers with the baseline for you. OpenTelemetry is a first-class input.

Pricing counts events, not gigabytes. The Honeycomb pricing page gives the free plan 20 million events and 100 million metrics data points a month. Pro starts at $150 a month for 50 million events and scales to 750 million, with monthly or annual billing.

Best for: Engineering teams that debug production by slicing traces across many dimensions.

Pricing:

• Free: 20M events and 100M metrics data points a month, 2 triggers
• Pro: from $150 a month per 50M events, up to 750M events, 100 triggers, 2 SLOs
• Enterprise: custom, from 10 billion events a year

Watch out for:

• The free plan has only two triggers and no SLOs, and Pro includes just two SLOs.
• It is cloud only, so it does not replace self-hosted SigNoz for teams that must keep data in their own network.

Official site: Honeycomb.

Datadog

Datadog is the platform SigNoz often positions itself against, and for good reason: it has the widest product range here, from infrastructure, APM and logs to security, real user monitoring, synthetics and CI visibility, plus integrations for almost any service. Its agent collects host data out of the box, and it accepts OpenTelemetry too.

Prices are per product. The Datadog pricing page lists Infrastructure Pro from $15 per host a month billed annually, or $18 on demand, and APM from $31 per host a month annually with infrastructure. Log ingestion starts at $0.10 per GB, and indexing for 15-day search costs $1.70 per million events on an annual plan.

Best for: Larger companies that want one vendor for monitoring, security and testing.

Pricing:

• Free: up to 5 hosts, 1-day metric retention
• Infrastructure Pro: $15 per host per month billed annually, $18 on demand
• APM: $31 per host per month billed annually with infrastructure, $36 on demand
• Logs: $0.10 per GB ingested; $1.70 per million events indexed (15 days) annually, $2.55 on demand

Watch out for:

• Logs are billed twice, once to ingest and again per million events you index, which is where many Datadog bills grow.
• The free tier keeps metrics for one day and lists no log allowance.

Official site: Datadog.

How to choose

When to stay with SigNoz

Stay with SigNoz if you like one open-source tool for logs, metrics and traces with simple per-GB pricing. Teams costs $49 a month including $49 of usage, and the SigNoz pricing page offers startups under three years old, with fewer than 30 staff and under $6 million raised, the plan at $19 a month for the first year. Few hosted rivals use one flat per-GB rate for both traces and logs.

Frequently asked questions