# Apache SkyWalking vs Tideways

**Leader by vioscaleAI score:** Apache SkyWalking

| Attribute | Apache SkyWalking | Tideways |
|---|---|---|
| **vioscaleAI score** | 52.9 (55% (medium)) | 44.3 (65% (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":"PHP application performance monitoring, profiling, and error tracking. Tideways shows where performance breaks down in production in real time. It is indexed under APM Tools.","source":"https://tideways.com","question":"What is Tideways?","confidence":0.6},{"answer":"Tideways is a paid product; published pricing starts at €29 per month. It is sold across 3 plans (Team, Business and Enterprise). 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://tideways.com","question":"How much does Tideways cost?","confidence":0.6},{"answer":"Tideways supports the web, macOS, Linux and a command-line interface. Platforms we have not confirmed are simply not listed here rather than ruled out.","source":"https://tideways.com","question":"What platforms does Tideways support?","confidence":0.6},{"answer":"We have only confirmed a cloud / SaaS deployment for Tideways, so it appears to be vendor-hosted. If a self-hosted option exists we have not found it documented publicly.","source":"https://tideways.com","question":"Can Tideways be self-hosted?","confidence":0.6},{"answer":"We have confirmed 5 integrations for Tideways, including Slack, Microsoft Teams, PagerDuty, OpsGenie and Splunk On-Call. This is what we could verify from public sources, so the vendor may support others we have not indexed.","source":"https://tideways.com","question":"What does Tideways integrate with?","confidence":0.6},{"answer":"We have independently confirmed GDPR for Tideways. Certifications we do not list are ones we have not been able to verify from public sources, which is not the same as Tideways not holding them. Always confirm compliance directly before you rely on it.","source":"https://tideways.com/security","question":"What security certifications does Tideways 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. | PHP application performance monitoring, profiling, and error tracking. Tideways shows where performance breaks down in production in real time. |
| 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","db_monitoring":true,"code_profiling":true,"error_analytics":true,"distributed_tracing":true,"auto_instrumentation":true}` |
| integrations.count | 18 | 7 |
| 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":"Slack"},{"name":"Microsoft Teams"},{"name":"PagerDuty"},{"name":"OpsGenie"},{"name":"Splunk On-Call"},{"name":"Email","native":true,"direction":"outbound"},{"name":"Webhooks","native":true,"direction":"outbound"}]` |
| language.primary | Java | - |
| license.spdx | Apache-2.0 | - |
| market.availability | - | `{"hqCountry":"DE","primaryMarkets":["DE","EU"],"availabilityScope":"global","availableCountries":[],"notAvailableCountries":[]}` |
| platform.support | `{"cli":true,"web":true,"linux":true}` | `{"cli":true,"web":true}` |
| pricing | `{"type":"open_source","sourceUrl":"https://skywalking.apache.org/","retrievedAt":"2026-10-14T22:35:59.641Z"}` | `{"type":"subscription","plans":[{"free":false,"name":"Basic","features":["Profiling","Monitoring","Error Tracking","Basic Integrations (Email, Slack, Microsoft Teams)"],"description":"Entry-level monitoring with limited visibility","contactSales":false,"includedLimits":{"retention_days":"5","traces_per_minute":"5"}},{"free":false,"name":"Standard","features":["Profiling","Monitoring","Error Tracking","Advanced Integrations (PagerDuty, OpsGenie, Splunk On-Call, Webhooks)"],"description":"Mid-tier monitoring with extended visibility and advanced integrations","contactSales":false,"includedLimits":{"retention_days":"14","traces_per_minute":"10"}},{"free":false,"name":"Pro","features":["Profiling","Monitoring","Error Tracking","Advanced Integrations"],"description":"Enterprise plan with custom contracts and full visibility","contactSales":true,"includedLimits":{"retention_days":"30","traces_per_minute":"25"}}],"addOns":[{"name":"Teams Add-On","components":[{"kind":"fixed","amount":25,"period":"month","currency":"USD"}]},{"name":"Consulting - Performance Analysis","components":[{"kind":"one_time","amount":199,"currency":"USD"}]}],"summary":"Subscription-based plans from Basic to Pro; free trial available. Pricing scales with project size and transaction throughput. Annual discounts available.","currency":"USD","freeTier":false,"sourceUrl":"https://tideways.com/profiler/pricing-2023","retrievedAt":"2026-10-06T22:21:56.402Z","billingPeriods":["month","year"]}` |
| pricing.free_tier | yes | no |
| pricing.model | open_source | commercial |
| pricing.price_level | free | unknown |
| 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.gdpr | - | yes |
| security.pci | - | yes |
| security.scorecard | 7 | - |
| security.trust_center | - | https://tideways.com/security |
| 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 | Tideways |
|---|:--:|:--:|
| **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 |
| **Deployment** |  |  |
| Hosting | Cloud + self-hosted | Cloud only |

*Source: vioscaleAI. Generated 2026-10-16T21:35:24.142Z. "-" = undocumented, not absent.*