Blackfire.io

What Blackfire.io is

Blackfire.io is a cloud service for monitoring, profiling, testing, alerting, recommendations, browser monitoring, and analytics for PHP and Python applications. Its profiler measures function calls and helps identify the causes of performance bottlenecks. For PHP and Python, listed profiling dimensions include wall time, CPU, I/O, memory, network usage per function, SQL requests, and HTTP requests.

Teams can analyze application performance in development, testing, staging, and production, and add Blackfire to test pipelines through SDK and CI/CD integrations. The listed integrations also include hosting platforms and configuration management, including an officially maintained Docker integration. Notifications can go through webhooks, email, or third-party services such as GitHub and Slack. Continuous profiling is listed for PHP, Python, Go, Node.js, Ruby, Rust, and Java.

Blackfire lists a free plan and paid plans. Development costs €33.25/month billed yearly and includes one user, one Sandbox environment, profiling, and manual assertions. Production costs €158.25/month billed yearly or €189.90 monthly, and includes three users, a production environment plus a Sandbox, one million monitoring traces, 5GB of continuous profiling, and one million Front-end Observability. Blackfire says it does not collect user session data, database data, or source code, and anonymizes SQL queries and HTTP calls before transmission unless the Debug add-on is used.

Who it suits

Blackfire.io suits developers and teams working on PHP or Python applications who need profiling and performance monitoring across development and production stages. Its CI/CD integrations also suit teams that want to include performance analysis in testing pipelines.

Limits

Development costs €33.25/month billed yearly and includes one user, one Sandbox environment, profiling, and manual assertions. Blackfire says regular usage should not exceed 1,000 profiles per day per user, and its documentation lists a limit of 350 builds per day per user.

Getting started

1. Visit blackfire.io.
2. Choose the free plan or a paid plan.
3. Use the listed API, extension, Linux, macOS, web, or Windows access route.
4. Connect Blackfire to a testing pipeline using its SDK or CI/CD integrations.
5. Use profiling to examine application performance in development, testing, staging, or production.

Verdict

Choose Blackfire.io if you need profiling and performance analysis for PHP or Python across application stages, with pipeline integrations. Look elsewhere if you need distributed tracing or standalone HIPAA compliance; Blackfire's HIPAA-compliant agent offering is available only through Upsun.