Free and open first
Best Monitoring Observability in 2026
- 30 apps
- Research read 7 Oct 2026
- How the order is worked out
- 1
Checkmk
Free plan Open source AndroidAPIiPhone+5Checkmk offers broad infrastructure coverage and several monitoring methods, with a free Community option for smaller environments.
- 2
Better Stack
Free plan AndroidAPIiPhone+1Better Stack combines incident response and monitoring with telemetry, error tracking, and status pages.
- 3
Elastic Observability
by Elastic ObservabilityFree plan APILinuxMac+3Elastic Observability combines telemetry analysis, monitoring, and deployment options, with usage-based Serverless rates listed by data type.
- 4
Grafana Cloud Application Observability
Free plan AndroidAPIExtension+5Grafana Cloud Application Observability brings several telemetry types and service-level views together for application investigation.
- 5
AppSignal
Free plan APIWebAppSignal covers errors, performance, logs and tracing, with a free plan and annual-billed paid access.
- 6
Axiom
Free plan APIWebChoose Axiom if you want a cloud platform that brings logs, traces, metrics, and events together, with a permanent free Personal plan for individual developers and small projects.
- 7
Honeycomb
Free plan AndroidAPIiPhone+2Honeycomb combines telemetry ingestion with investigation tools for tracing and related data. Free has stated monthly data allowances; larger deployments can consider Pro or custom Enterprise plans.
- 8
groundcover
by groundcoverFree plan LinuxSelf-hostedWebgroundcover combines eBPF-based telemetry collection with cloud and on-premises deployment options. Compare the retention, support, and per-host plan details with your monitoring needs.
- 9
Icinga
Free plan APILinuxSelf-hosted+2Icinga offers self-hosted monitoring with a free edition and options for distributed setups, certificate monitoring, and integrations.
- 10
Jaeger
Free plan APILinuxMac+3Jaeger provides distributed tracing, service graphs, and trace-derived performance metrics as a self-hosted open-source project.
- 11
Nagios XI
Free plan APILinuxMac+3Nagios XI offers self-hosted monitoring, a limited free edition, and perpetual paid licenses priced by node count.
- 12
Prometheus
Free plan LinuxMacSelf-hosted+2Prometheus provides a free monitoring and alerting toolkit with flexible metric collection and querying. Its stated accuracy limitation makes it unsuitable for per-request billing workloads.
- 13
SigNoz
Free plan AndroidAPIiPhone+2SigNoz brings monitoring signals, querying, alerting, dashboards, and tracing into one observability tool.
- 14
VictoriaMetrics
by VictoriaMetricsFree plan APILinuxMac+3VictoriaMetrics offers open-source and managed deployment paths for metrics, logs, and traces. Cloud buyers should review tier limits and hourly usage metering alongside the listed starting prices.
- 15
Zabbix
Free plan APILinuxMac+3Zabbix covers a broad range of monitoring sources and methods, with synthetic browser checks and a free plan. Subscription support and server or proxy allowances vary by tier.
- 16
OpenZipkin
Free plan Self-hostedWebOpenZipkin provides trace search, summaries, and a service dependency diagram for self-hosted latency investigation.
- 17
Scout APM
Free plan APIWebPick Scout APM if your team wants application monitoring that combines performance data, errors, and alerts, with agents for its listed languages.
- 18
ManageEngine Applications Manager
Free plan AndroidiPhoneLinux+2Applications Manager offers tracing, mapping, real user monitoring and log correlation in a hybrid product.
- 19
New Relic Session Replay
Free plan AndroidiPhoneWebNew Relic Session Replay is offered as part of a wider telemetry and monitoring platform, with access varying by plan.
- 20
Chronosphere Observability Platform
Free trial APIWebChronosphere provides broad telemetry collection with controls for shaping data before storage.
- 21
Observe
Free trial APILinuxMac+2Observe combines telemetry collection, distributed tracing, integrations, and AI-assisted incident work in one platform.
- 22
SolarWinds Observability
Free trial APILinuxSelf-hosted+2SolarWinds Observability covers multiple monitoring domains in one service, with deployment choices and integrations for common application and database technologies.
- 23
Splunk Observability Cloud
Free plan Web - 24
Sentry Session Replay
Free plan AndroidiPhoneWeb - 25
Datadog Product Analytics
Paid AndroidiPhoneWeb
#1Places #1, #2, #3, #4, #5 on this list can be bought by the makers of the software on it. See the price