AppDynamics vs Blackfire
No clear leader: Blackfire (64.2) and AppDynamics (60.5) are within the 5-point margin; treat as a tie. The attribute-by-attribute breakdown below, with a source and date on every value, is the honest way to compare them.
Capabilities
Feature-by-feature on the axes that matter for apm tools. “-” means undocumented, not absent.
What each one is
The product in its own terms, so the numbers below have context.
AppDynamics
A full-stack application performance monitoring platform that provides real-time visibility into application issues, enables root-cause diagnosis across the entire technology stack, and correlates performance with business outcomes.
Blackfire
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.
Pricing
List pricing as published by each vendor, with the date we read it. Always verify at the source before you buy.
Blackfire
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.
- Production€158.25/month billed yearly (2 months free) or €189.90/month
- Profiling
- Performance Monitoring
- Continuous Profiling
- Alerting
- Continuous Testing
- +16 more
- Development€33.25/month billed yearly (yearly only)
- Profiling
- Manual assertions
- Upsun integration
Platform & deployment
Where each product runs and how it can be hosted. A dash means undocumented, not unsupported.
Integrations
What each product connects to. Counts come from the vendor's own integration directory where one exists.
AppDynamics
- OpenTelemetry
Blackfire
- PHPUnit
- Symfony Functional Tests
- Behat
- GitHub Education
- CI/CD pipelines
- Upsun
AppDynamics or Blackfire: which one depends on you
A composite score cannot know your constraints. Describe them and both get re-weighted against what you actually need, with the evidence behind every position.
Free to run, no account needed to start. How the evaluation works
Comparison generated from independently-sourced facts. Every value links to its source and retrieval date. See the method.