Blackfire vs Elastic APM
On the evidence we track, Blackfire leads this comparison with a composite score of 64/100. Scores are only directly comparable because these tools share a category; the full breakdown and every source is below.
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.
Blackfire
LeaderA 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.
Elastic APM
Application performance monitoring solution built on OpenTelemetry that automatically instruments applications, visualizes service dependencies, and identifies performance issues through distributed tracing and root cause analysis.
Pricing
List pricing as published by each vendor, with the date we read it. Always verify at the source before you buy.
Blackfire
LeaderFrom €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
Elastic APM
Free open source self-managed. Platinum and Enterprise tiers available via contact sales. 14-day free trial for Elastic Cloud.
- Open SourceFree
- Elasticsearch search engine and vector database
- Kibana visualization and analytics interface
- Data ingestion with OTel, Logstash, and Beats
- Basic authentication and RBAC
- TLS encryption
- +2 more
- PlatinumContact sales
- SSO, LDAP/Active Directory, field/document-level security
- Automated anomaly detection for logs and metrics
- ELSER semantic search models
- Cross-cluster replication for high availability
- Service maps from APM data
- +4 more
- EnterpriseContact sales
- Searchable snapshots for long-term low-cost storage
- Attack Discovery automated alert triage
- Universal Profiling for code-level performance data
- Cross-cluster search with advanced security
- Elastic Agent Builder for RAG and search development
- +6 more
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.
Blackfire
Leader- PHPUnit
- Symfony Functional Tests
- Behat
- GitHub Education
- CI/CD pipelines
- Upsun
Elastic APM
- OpenAI
- Anthropic
- Jina AI
- Amazon Bedrock
- Aryn
- LlamaIndex
- Red Hat
- Microsoft Azure AI
- Hugging Face
- Mistral
- Cohere
- Google Vertex AI
- NVIDIA
- Alibaba Cloud
- IBM watsonx
- Unstructured.io
- LangChain
- Apache Spark
- Apache Hive
- Slack
- Jira
- ServiceNow
- PagerDuty
- Microsoft Teams
- +5 more
Blackfire or Elastic APM: 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.