Best alternatives to SigNoz in 2026

When something breaks in a piece of software running on a server, engineers need a way to see what happened — which request failed, how long it took, what the system was doing at that moment. That's called "observability," and most companies pay a separate tool for each piece of it (one for logs, one for performance, one for errors). SigNoz puts all of that in one free, open-source tool you can run on your own servers instead of paying per gigabyte to a vendor. SigNoz is an open-source observability platform built natively on OpenTelemetry, the industry-standard instrumentation format. It stores traces, metrics and logs together in a single ClickHouse-backed datastore, so an engineer can jump from a slow API call to its logs to the underlying infrastructure metrics without switching tools. It covers APM (P99 latency, Apdex, database call tracking), distributed tracing at scale (up to 1 million spans per trace), Kubernetes and infrastructure monitoring, and LLM observability for OpenAI, Gemini and Anthropic-backed applications. The self-hosted Community Edition is MIT-licensed and free; SigNoz Cloud starts at $49/month, with usage-based pricing for traces/logs ($0.30/GB) and metrics ($0.10/million samples), scaling to Enterprise at roughly $4,000/month.