# Apache SkyWalking vs Blackfire

**Leader by vioscaleAI score:** Blackfire

| Attribute | Apache SkyWalking | Blackfire |
|---|---|---|
| **vioscaleAI score** | 52.9 (55% (medium)) | 64.2 (70% (medium)) |
| activity.commits_last_30d | 21 | - |
| adoption.dependent_repos | 106 | - |
| adoption.github_stars | 24,968 | - |
| content.faq | `[{"answer":"An open-source observability platform combining distributed tracing, metrics, logs, and profiling in one interface. Provides automatic instrumentation across 10+ languages, interactive service topology visualization, database monitoring, and an AI assistant for answering observability questions in natural language. It is indexed under APM Tools.","source":"https://skywalking.apache.org/","question":"What is Apache SkyWalking?","confidence":0.6},{"answer":"Apache SkyWalking is open source, so it can be self-hosted and used at no licence cost. It is released under the Apache-2.0 licence. Pricing changes often, so verify at source before relying on it.","source":"https://skywalking.apache.org/","question":"Is Apache SkyWalking free to use?","confidence":0.6},{"answer":"Apache SkyWalking supports the web and a command-line interface. Platforms we have not confirmed are simply not listed here rather than ruled out.","source":"https://skywalking.apache.org/","question":"What platforms does Apache SkyWalking support?","confidence":0.6},{"answer":"Yes. Apache SkyWalking can be deployed cloud / SaaS and self-hosted, so it does not have to run on the vendor's infrastructure.","source":"https://skywalking.apache.org/","question":"Can Apache SkyWalking be self-hosted?","confidence":0.6},{"answer":"We have confirmed 14 integrations for Apache SkyWalking, including Apache APISIX, Grafana, OpenTelemetry Collector, Amazon Bedrock, OpenAI, WeChat Mini Program, Alipay Mini Program and Kafka, plus 6 more. This is what we could verify from public sources, so the vendor may support others we have not indexed.","source":"https://skywalking.apache.org/","question":"What does Apache SkyWalking integrate with?","confidence":0.6},{"answer":"Yes. Apache SkyWalking is published under the Apache-2.0 licence, a permissive licence that generally allows commercial use and modification. Licence terms can change between releases, so verify against the repository for the version you intend to use.","source":"https://github.com/apache/skywalking","question":"Is Apache SkyWalking open source?","confidence":0.95}]` | `[{"answer":"A tool for testing and scraping web services, with a domain-specific language for crawling HTTP services, validating responses, and extracting data from HTML, XML, and JSON. It is indexed under APM Tools.","source":"https://www.blackfire.io","question":"What is Blackfire?","confidence":0.6},{"answer":"Blackfire is a paid product; published pricing starts at €33.25 per month. It is sold across 2 plans (Production and Development). There is no free tier. Prices are published openly on the vendor's own pricing page. Pricing changes often, so verify at source before relying on it.","source":"https://www.blackfire.io/pricing/","question":"How much does Blackfire cost?","confidence":0.6},{"answer":"Blackfire supports the web and a command-line interface. Platforms we have not confirmed are simply not listed here rather than ruled out.","source":"https://www.blackfire.io/pricing/","question":"What platforms does Blackfire support?","confidence":0.6},{"answer":"We have only confirmed a cloud / SaaS deployment for Blackfire, so it appears to be vendor-hosted. If a self-hosted option exists we have not found it documented publicly.","source":"https://www.blackfire.io/pricing/","question":"Can Blackfire be self-hosted?","confidence":0.6},{"answer":"We have confirmed 6 integrations for Blackfire, including PHPUnit, Symfony Functional Tests, Behat, GitHub Education, CI/CD pipelines and Upsun. This is what we could verify from public sources, so the vendor may support others we have not indexed.","source":"https://www.blackfire.io/pricing/","question":"What does Blackfire integrate with?","confidence":0.6},{"answer":"We have independently confirmed SOC 2, ISO 27001 and HIPAA for Blackfire. Certifications we do not list are ones we have not been able to verify from public sources, which is not the same as Blackfire not holding them. Always confirm compliance directly before you rely on it.","source":"https://www.blackfire.io/compliance/","question":"What security certifications does Blackfire have?","confidence":0.7}]` |
| deployment.options | `{"cloud":true,"self_hosted":true}` | `{"cloud":true}` |
| description.long | An open-source system for monitoring and analyzing distributed applications with comprehensive tracing, service topology visualization, and multi-signal observability for microservices and AI workloads. | A tool for testing and scraping web services, with a domain-specific language for crawling HTTP services, validating responses, and extracting data from HTML, XML, and JSON. |
| features.capabilities | `{"rum":true,"hosting":"both","languages":"10+ language agents supported","service_map":true,"otel_support":"ingest","db_monitoring":true,"code_profiling":true,"error_analytics":true,"anomaly_detection":true,"distributed_tracing":true,"auto_instrumentation":true}` | `{"rum":true,"hosting":"cloud","languages":"PHP, Python","db_monitoring":true,"code_profiling":true,"distributed_tracing":true,"auto_instrumentation":true}` |
| integrations.count | 18 | 6 |
| integrations.list | `[{"name":"Apache APISIX"},{"name":"Grafana"},{"name":"OpenTelemetry Collector"},{"name":"Amazon Bedrock"},{"name":"OpenAI"},{"name":"WeChat Mini Program"},{"name":"Alipay Mini Program"},{"name":"Kafka"},{"name":"MySQL"},{"name":"PostgreSQL"},{"name":"Redis"},{"name":"Envoy"},{"name":"DeepSeek"},{"name":"Claude Sonnet"},{"name":"Zipkin","direction":"inbound"},{"name":"OpenTelemetry","direction":"inbound"},{"name":"Prometheus","direction":"inbound"},{"name":"Zabbix","direction":"inbound"},{"name":"Fluentd","direction":"inbound"},{"name":"Flink","native":true},{"name":"Kong","native":true},{"name":"Apache RocketMQ","native":true},{"name":"Apache ActiveMQ","native":true},{"name":"Pulsar","native":true},{"name":"ClickHouse","native":true},{"name":"MongoDB","native":true},{"name":"Nginx","native":true},{"name":"Kubernetes","native":true},{"name":"Cilium","native":true},{"name":"BookKeeper","native":true},{"name":"ChatGPT","direction":"bidirectional"},{"name":"Telegraf","native":true,"category":"metrics"},{"name":"Apache Pulsar","native":true,"category":"message_queue"}]` | `[{"name":"PHPUnit"},{"name":"Symfony Functional Tests"},{"name":"Behat"},{"name":"GitHub Education"},{"name":"CI/CD pipelines"},{"name":"Upsun"}]` |
| language.primary | Java | - |
| license.spdx | Apache-2.0 | - |
| platform.support | `{"cli":true,"web":true,"linux":true}` | `{"cli":true}` |
| pricing | `{"type":"open_source","sourceUrl":"https://skywalking.apache.org/","retrievedAt":"2026-10-14T22:35:59.641Z"}` | `{"type":"subscription","plans":[{"free":false,"name":"Production","summary":"€158.25/month billed yearly (2 months free) or €189.90/month","features":["Profiling","Performance Monitoring","Continuous Profiling","Alerting","Continuous Testing","Integrations","Manual Assertions","Multi-dimensional profiling","Distributed profiling / Subprofiles","Automatic profiling","Synthetic Monitoring","Notifications","Performance tests","Performance recommendations","Quality recommendations","Security recommendations","Debug extension","Magento recommendation","Browser extension","CLI","SDK"],"minSeats":3,"commitment":"annual","components":[{"kind":"fixed","amount":158.25,"period":"month","currency":"EUR"}],"description":"Full-featured plan for companies monitoring production data","contactSales":false,"includedLimits":{"users":"3","environments":"2","monitoring_traces":"1M/month","continuous_profiling":"5GB/month","front_end_observability":"1M/month"}},{"free":false,"name":"Development","summary":"€33.25/month billed yearly (yearly only)","features":["Profiling","Manual assertions","Upsun integration"],"minSeats":1,"commitment":"annual","components":[{"kind":"fixed","amount":33.25,"period":"month","currency":"EUR"}],"description":"Low-cost option for fine-tuning applications before production","contactSales":false,"includedLimits":{"users":"1","environments":"1"}}],"addOns":[{"name":"Additional User","components":[{"kind":"per_unit","unit":"user","amount":24.92,"period":"month","currency":"EUR"}]},{"name":"Additional Environment","components":[{"kind":"fixed","amount":58.25,"period":"month","currency":"EUR"}]},{"name":"Additional Monitoring Traces (1M)","components":[{"kind":"fixed","amount":41.67,"period":"month","currency":"EUR"}]},{"name":"Additional Continuous Profiling (1GB)","components":[{"kind":"fixed","amount":10,"period":"month","currency":"EUR"}]},{"name":"Additional Front-end Observability (1M)","components":[{"kind":"fixed","amount":41.67,"period":"month","currency":"EUR"}]},{"name":"Quality Recommendations","components":[{"kind":"fixed","amount":10.75,"period":"month","currency":"EUR"}]},{"name":"Security Recommendations","components":[{"kind":"fixed","amount":10.75,"period":"month","currency":"EUR"}]},{"name":"Debug Extension","components":[{"kind":"fixed","amount":10.75,"period":"month","currency":"EUR"}]},{"name":"Magento Recommendations (Dev)","components":[{"kind":"fixed","amount":14.08,"period":"month","currency":"EUR"}]},{"name":"Magento Recommendations (Prod)","components":[{"kind":"fixed","amount":49.92,"period":"month","currency":"EUR"}]}],"summary":"From €33.25/month (Development, annual) to €158.25/month (Production, annual with 2 months free). Demo environment available; free plan for GitHub Student Developer Pack members.","currency":"EUR","freeTier":false,"sourceUrl":"https://www.blackfire.io/pricing/","retrievedAt":"2026-08-13T20:44:31.043Z","startingPrice":{"amount":33.25,"period":"month","currency":"EUR"},"billingPeriods":["month","year"]}` |
| pricing.free_tier | yes | no |
| pricing.model | open_source | commercial |
| pricing.price_level | free | mid |
| pricing.transparent | yes | yes |
| release.cadence_days | 93 | - |
| release.history | `[{"url":"https://github.com/apache/skywalking/releases/tag/v11.0.0","date":"2026-08-28T02:40:59Z","type":"stable","version":"v11.0.0"},{"url":"https://github.com/apache/skywalking/releases/tag/v10.4.0","date":"2026-04-01T12:51:05Z","type":"stable","version":"v10.4.0"},{"url":"https://github.com/apache/skywalking/releases/tag/v10.3.0","date":"2025-11-10T11:40:02Z","type":"stable","version":"v10.3.0"},{"url":"https://github.com/apache/skywalking/releases/tag/v10.2.0","date":"2025-03-24T11:52:09Z","type":"stable","version":"v10.2.0"},{"url":"https://github.com/apache/skywalking/releases/tag/v10.1.0","date":"2024-09-29T13:30:12Z","type":"stable","version":"v10.1.0"},{"url":"https://github.com/apache/skywalking/releases/tag/v10.0.1","date":"2024-05-30T03:42:06Z","type":"stable","version":"v10.0.1"},{"url":"https://github.com/apache/skywalking/releases/tag/v10.0.0","date":"2024-05-13T01:02:53Z","type":"stable","version":"v10.0.0"},{"url":"https://github.com/apache/skywalking/releases/tag/v9.7.0","date":"2023-12-01T18:19:39Z","type":"stable","version":"v9.7.0"},{"url":"https://github.com/apache/skywalking/releases/tag/v9.6.0","date":"2023-09-03T14:33:23Z","type":"stable","version":"v9.6.0"},{"url":"https://github.com/apache/skywalking/releases/tag/v9.5.0","date":"2023-06-18T16:20:59Z","type":"stable","version":"v9.5.0"},{"url":"https://github.com/apache/skywalking/releases/tag/v9.4.0","date":"2023-03-09T04:01:37Z","type":"stable","version":"v9.4.0"},{"url":"https://github.com/apache/skywalking/releases/tag/v9.3.0","date":"2022-12-04T03:44:41Z","type":"stable","version":"v9.3.0"},{"url":"https://github.com/apache/skywalking/releases/tag/v9.2.0","date":"2022-09-01T12:54:27Z","type":"stable","version":"v9.2.0"},{"url":"https://github.com/apache/skywalking/releases/tag/v9.1.0","date":"2022-06-10T03:01:22Z","type":"stable","version":"v9.1.0"},{"url":"https://github.com/apache/skywalking/releases/tag/v9.0.0","date":"2022-04-09T12:13:55Z","type":"stable","version":"v9.0.0"},{"url":"https://github.com/apache/skywalking/releases/tag/v8.9.1","date":"2021-12-11T13:57:42Z","type":"stable","version":"v8.9.1"},{"url":"https://github.com/apache/skywalking/releases/tag/v8.9.0","date":"2021-12-05T07:33:26Z","type":"stable","version":"v8.9.0"},{"url":"https://github.com/apache/skywalking/releases/tag/v8.8.1","date":"2021-10-02T16:39:31Z","type":"stable","version":"v8.8.1"},{"url":"https://github.com/apache/skywalking/releases/tag/v8.8.0","date":"2021-09-27T09:58:25Z","type":"stable","version":"v8.8.0"},{"url":"https://github.com/apache/skywalking/releases/tag/v8.7.0","date":"2021-08-02T12:25:39Z","type":"stable","version":"v8.7.0"}]` | - |
| reliability.status_page | - | yes |
| security.disclosure_policy | - | yes |
| security.hipaa | - | yes |
| security.iso27001 | - | yes |
| security.pci | - | yes |
| security.scorecard | 7 | - |
| security.soc2 | - | yes |
| security.vulnerabilities | `{"count":0,"source":"https://advisories.ecosyste.ms/api/v1/advisories?ecosystem=maven&package_name=org.apache.skywalking%3Azipkin-receiver-plugin&per_page=100","last_12m":0,"max_severity":null}` | - |

## Capabilities (APM Tools)

| Capability | Apache SkyWalking | Blackfire |
|---|:--:|:--:|
| **Instrumentation** |  |  |
| Auto-instrumentation | ✓ | ✓ |
| Distributed tracing | ✓ | ✓ |
| **Insight** |  |  |
| Service map | ✓ | - |
| Code / continuous profiling | ✓ | ✓ |
| Database monitoring | ✓ | ✓ |
| Error analytics | ✓ | - |
| Real-user monitoring | ✓ | ✓ |
| SLO / error-budget tracking | - | - |
| **Intelligence** |  |  |
| Anomaly / root-cause AI | ✓ | - |
| **Standards** |  |  |
| OpenTelemetry support | OTLP ingest | - |
| **Core** |  |  |
| Language agents | 10+ language agents supported | PHP, Python |
| **Deployment** |  |  |
| Hosting | Cloud + self-hosted | Cloud only |

*Source: vioscaleAI. Generated 2026-10-16T19:22:09.294Z. "-" = undocumented, not absent.*