{
 "source": "O11y Watch",
 "generated": "2026-10-24",
 "license": "CC BY 4.0",
 "note": "Copied from vendor pricing pages; \"not stated\" means the page does not state it. Verify at source_url.",
 "categories": [
  {
   "id": "apm",
   "name": "APM & full-stack",
   "description": "Application performance, traces, metrics and all-in-one platforms.",
   "best_free": "newrelic",
   "take": "New Relic’s perpetual tier lists 100 GB ingest/month plus one full platform user — the largest stated allowance among verified APM vendors. Grafana Cloud is the pick if you want an open stack (10k active series, 14-day retention). Datadog’s free plan caps at 5 hosts with 1-day metric retention, which is fine for evaluation and little else.",
   "vendors": [
    "appsignal",
    "atatus",
    "dash0",
    "datadog",
    "dynatrace",
    "groundcover",
    "honeycomb",
    "last9",
    "middleware",
    "newrelic",
    "scoutapm",
    "signoz",
    "splunk",
    "uptrace"
   ],
   "page": "https://o11y-watch.pages.dev/category/apm.html"
  },
  {
   "id": "logs",
   "name": "Logs",
   "description": "Log ingestion, search and retention.",
   "best_free": "axiom",
   "take": "Axiom’s $0 plan (500 GB/mo loading compute, 25 GB storage, no card) is the most generous verified logging offer. Logz.io, Papertrail, Mezmo and Coralogix are trial or paid only per their pages, so budget accordingly if you pick them.",
   "vendors": [
    "axiom",
    "coralogix",
    "elastic",
    "grafana",
    "graylog",
    "loggly",
    "logzio",
    "mezmo",
    "observe",
    "openobserve",
    "papertrail",
    "parseable",
    "sematext",
    "sumologic"
   ],
   "page": "https://o11y-watch.pages.dev/category/logs.html"
  },
  {
   "id": "errors",
   "name": "Error tracking",
   "description": "Exception capture, grouping and alerting.",
   "best_free": "sentry",
   "take": "Sentry and Honeybadger both list 5,000 errors/month for one user; Honeybadger adds unlimited projects and 50 MB/day of performance & logs, which edges it for solo devs. Sentry wins on ecosystem. GlitchTip (1,000 events, unlimited projects) is the small Sentry-compatible fallback.",
   "vendors": [
    "airbrake",
    "bugsink",
    "bugsnag",
    "exceptionless",
    "glitchtip",
    "honeybadger",
    "raygun",
    "rollbar",
    "sentry",
    "trackjs"
   ],
   "page": "https://o11y-watch.pages.dev/category/errors.html"
  },
  {
   "id": "uptime",
   "name": "Uptime, cron & status pages",
   "description": "External checks, heartbeat/cron monitors and public status pages.",
   "best_free": "uptimerobot",
   "take": "UptimeRobot lists 50 monitors at 5-minute intervals, but only for non-commercial use. For a commercial side project, Hyperping (20 monitors) or Instatus (15 monitors, 2-min checks) are the strongest verified free plans; Healthchecks.io (20 jobs) is the cron-monitoring pick.",
   "vendors": [
    "statuspage",
    "betterstack",
    "checkly",
    "cronitor",
    "healthchecks",
    "hyperping",
    "instatus",
    "ohdear",
    "oneuptime",
    "openstatus",
    "pingdom",
    "site24x7",
    "statuscake",
    "statusgator",
    "updown",
    "uptimerobot"
   ],
   "page": "https://o11y-watch.pages.dev/category/uptime.html"
  },
  {
   "id": "incident",
   "name": "On-call & incidents",
   "description": "Paging, escalation and incident response.",
   "best_free": "pagerduty",
   "take": "PagerDuty’s free plan covers 5 users with one schedule and escalation policy — enough for a tiny team’s rotation. incident.io’s free plan is the better choice if you live in Slack/Teams and need a status page too. Rootly lists no free tier.",
   "vendors": [
    "firehydrant",
    "ilert",
    "incidentio",
    "pagerduty",
    "rootly",
    "squadcast",
    "zenduty"
   ],
   "page": "https://o11y-watch.pages.dev/category/incident.html"
  },
  {
   "id": "llm",
   "name": "LLM observability",
   "description": "Tracing, evals and cost tracking for LLM apps.",
   "best_free": "langfuse",
   "take": "Langfuse Hobby lists 50k units/month with all platform features (limited) and no card — the broadest verified free LLM tier. Helicone Hobby (10,000 requests, 1 GB) is simpler for gateway-style logging. Arize AX Free (25k spans, 1 GB/mo, no card) and Opik Free Cloud (25k spans/mo) are solid runners-up; LangSmith Developer caps you at 1 seat and 5k base traces, and Lunary now requires payment for new workspaces.",
   "vendors": [
    "arize",
    "braintrust",
    "helicone",
    "laminar",
    "langfuse",
    "langsmith",
    "lunary",
    "opik",
    "portkey",
    "wandb"
   ],
   "page": "https://o11y-watch.pages.dev/category/llm.html"
  },
  {
   "id": "product",
   "name": "Product analytics & replay",
   "description": "Session replay and product analytics with error capture.",
   "best_free": "posthog",
   "take": "PostHog is the only verified free option here: 1M analytics events and 5K recordings per month, and usage stops at the limits rather than billing you. LogRocket lists a free trial only.",
   "vendors": [
    "logrocket",
    "posthog"
   ],
   "page": "https://o11y-watch.pages.dev/category/product.html"
  }
 ]
}