Observability pricing that’s built for scale
$0 per host, $0 per container, $0 per user
Community
Free for everyone
Best for small projects
Explore every feature
Community support
Free account
Limited data ingest rate
Limited data retention
Teams
Grows with your team
Easy onboarding
Complete system visibility
Lightstep support
Pay as you go
$85 / active service / month
*And lower cost than anywhere else
Enterprise
Built for scale
How Lightstep reduces your monitoring spend
Hosts, containers, and seats are free
If you run one instance or one thousand instances of a service, it’s still just providing a single service to the rest of your application. Lightstep’s Active Service pricing model does not penalize your organization for achieving scale.
While other vendors charge for hosts, containers, or even total RAM allocation, Lightstep does not.
A more efficient time series database
Lightstep built a next-generation time series database to enable Change Intelligence, and offer the best pricing for metrics on the market.
The Largest Incumbent Metrics Provider | Lightstep |
---|---|
|
|
Even better: Lightstep measures the number of Active Time Series (ATS) on an hourly basis. This means that even if your team deploys many times per month and your “host” label changes every time, the number of Active Time Series stays flat — so you can adopt CI/CD and other DevOps best practices without increasing your monitoring bill.
Hybrid architecture reduces span data costs
It’s no secret that distributed tracing data – ”span” data, that is – can be a firehose: a span contains structured data for every inbound and outbound request for every microservice in an application, and that adds up. Lightstep’s Satellite architecture pushes data ingress close to the application itself, making it possible to handle more data than other solutions at a fraction of the cost.
Large Observability Provider X | Large Observability Provider Y | Lightstep |
---|---|---|
|
|
|
Features
Differentiators | Community | Team | Enterprise |
---|---|---|---|
Monitoring | |||
Unlimited infrastructure, application, runtime, cloud, third-party metrics ingestion | Limited | ||
Unlimited tracing (complete visibility from mobile / web to database) | Limited | ||
Dashboards | |||
Alerting | |||
SLI tracking | Limited | ||
Trace data | 4MB / minute | $0.06 / GB | Volume discounts |
Monthly charge per active time series | $0 (limited to 7,500 max) | $0.012 | Volume discounts |
Investigating | |||
Change Intelligence insights | Limited | ||
Real-time querying | |||
Grouping/filtering on any tag combinations | |||
Service and operation maps | |||
Inferred service maps | |||
Deviation and baseline comparisons | |||
Historical querying | Limited | ||
Flexibility | |||
Unlimited cardinality | |||
Data retention | 28 days | 90 days | Custom |
API access | Limited | ||
Custom webhooks | Limited | ||
Integrations | |||
Pagerduty, Slack, OpsGenie | |||
Envoy / Istio | |||
OpenTelemetry, OpenTracing | |||
Easy ingest | |||
AWS / Cloudwatch | |||
Prometheus / Grafana | |||
Datadog / statsd | |||
Jaeger / Zipkin | |||
Enteprise ready | |||
SOC 2 certified | |||
GDPR compliant | |||
Admin and user controls | Limited | ||
Sign in with Google | |||
SAML | Not supported | Not supported | |
RBAC | Not supported | ||
Support | |||
In-app chat | |||
Designated shared Slack support channel | Not supported | ||
Team training support | Not supported | Limited | Full support |