# Blackfire vs Elastic APM

**Leader by vioscaleAI score:** Blackfire

| Attribute | Blackfire | Elastic APM |
|---|---|---|
| **vioscaleAI score** | 64.2 (70% (medium)) | 49.8 (57% (medium)) |
| activity.commits_last_30d | - | 32 |
| adoption.dependent_repos | - | 6 |
| adoption.github_stars | - | 1,271 |
| content.faq | `[{"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}]` | `[{"answer":"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. It is indexed under APM Tools.","source":"https://www.elastic.co/pricing/self-managed","question":"What is Elastic APM?","confidence":0.6},{"answer":"Elastic APM does not publish its prices. Pricing is quoted on request, across 3 plans (Open Source, Platinum and Enterprise), so the figure depends on your seat count and requirements. We record this as a pricing-transparency signal rather than guessing a number. Pricing changes often, so verify at source before relying on it.","source":"https://www.elastic.co/pricing/self-managed","question":"How much does Elastic APM cost?","confidence":0.6},{"answer":"Elastic APM 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.elastic.co/pricing/self-managed","question":"What platforms does Elastic APM support?","confidence":0.6},{"answer":"Yes. Elastic APM can be deployed cloud / SaaS, on-premise, air-gapped and self-hosted, so it does not have to run on the vendor's infrastructure.","source":"https://www.elastic.co/pricing/self-managed","question":"Can Elastic APM be self-hosted?","confidence":0.6},{"answer":"We have confirmed 28 integrations for Elastic APM, including OpenAI, Anthropic, Jina AI, Amazon Bedrock, Aryn, LlamaIndex, Red Hat and Microsoft Azure AI, plus 20 more. This is what we could verify from public sources, so the vendor may support others we have not indexed.","source":"https://www.elastic.co/pricing/self-managed","question":"What does Elastic APM integrate with?","confidence":0.6},{"answer":"Elastic APM is available worldwide. The vendor is headquartered in the United States.","source":"https://www.elastic.co/pricing/self-managed","question":"Where is Elastic APM available?","confidence":0.75}]` |
| deployment.options | `{"cloud":true}` | `{"cloud":true,"on_prem":true,"air_gapped":true,"self_hosted":true}` |
| description.long | 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. | 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. |
| features.capabilities | `{"rum":true,"hosting":"cloud","languages":"PHP, Python","db_monitoring":true,"code_profiling":true,"distributed_tracing":true,"auto_instrumentation":true}` | `{"hosting":"both","languages":"Java, .NET, Python, Node.js, PHP, iOS, Android","service_map":true,"otel_support":"native","slo_tracking":true,"code_profiling":true,"error_analytics":true,"anomaly_detection":true,"distributed_tracing":true,"auto_instrumentation":true}` |
| integrations.count | 6 | 28 |
| integrations.list | `[{"name":"PHPUnit"},{"name":"Symfony Functional Tests"},{"name":"Behat"},{"name":"GitHub Education"},{"name":"CI/CD pipelines"},{"name":"Upsun"}]` | `[{"name":"OpenAI"},{"name":"Anthropic"},{"name":"Jina AI"},{"name":"Amazon Bedrock"},{"name":"Aryn"},{"name":"LlamaIndex"},{"name":"Red Hat"},{"name":"Microsoft Azure AI"},{"name":"Hugging Face"},{"name":"Mistral"},{"name":"Cohere"},{"name":"Google Vertex AI"},{"name":"NVIDIA"},{"name":"Alibaba Cloud"},{"name":"IBM watsonx"},{"name":"Unstructured.io"},{"name":"LangChain"},{"name":"Apache Spark"},{"name":"Apache Hive"},{"name":"Slack"},{"name":"Jira"},{"name":"ServiceNow"},{"name":"PagerDuty"},{"name":"Microsoft Teams"},{"name":"IBM Resilient"},{"name":"xMatters"},{"name":"Tableau"},{"name":"Elasticsearch-Hadoop"},{"name":"Vectorize.io","native":true}]` |
| language.primary | - | Go |
| market.availability | - | `{"hqCountry":"US","primaryMarkets":[],"availabilityScope":"global","availableCountries":[],"notAvailableCountries":[]}` |
| platform.support | `{"cli":true}` | `{"cli":true,"web":true}` |
| pricing | `{"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"]}` | `{"type":"hybrid","plans":[{"free":true,"name":"Open Source","features":["Elasticsearch search engine and vector database","Kibana visualization and analytics interface","Data ingestion with OTel, Logstash, and Beats","Basic authentication and RBAC","TLS encryption","APM, logging, and metrics","Community support and documentation"],"description":"Free, self-managed Elasticsearch Stack including core APM, logging, and security features","contactSales":false},{"free":false,"name":"Platinum","features":["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","Tail-based trace sampling","Service Level Objectives (SLOs)","APM root cause correlation","Premium support (24/7/365)"],"description":"Advanced security, machine learning anomaly detection, and high availability features","contactSales":true},{"free":false,"name":"Enterprise","features":["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","Jina AI models for semantic search and reranking","Inference Service Management for third-party LLMs","Hybrid search capabilities","Elastic Workflows for incident response automation","AI Assistant for Observability guidance","Endpoint detection and response actions"],"description":"Full-stack capabilities including searchable snapshots, AI-assisted investigation, universal profiling, and advanced orchestration","contactSales":true}],"summary":"Free open source self-managed. Platinum and Enterprise tiers available via contact sales. 14-day free trial for Elastic Cloud.","currency":"USD","freeTier":true,"sourceUrl":"https://www.elastic.co/pricing/self-managed","retrievedAt":"2026-08-14T13:46:29.895Z","freeTrialDays":14}` |
| pricing.free_tier | no | yes |
| pricing.model | commercial | commercial |
| pricing.price_level | mid | low |
| pricing.transparent | yes | no |
| release.history | - | `[{"url":"https://github.com/elastic/apm-server/releases/tag/v9.5.5","date":"2026-10-06T14:01:54Z","type":"stable","version":"v9.5.5"},{"url":"https://github.com/elastic/apm-server/releases/tag/v9.4.8","date":"2026-10-06T14:01:48Z","type":"stable","version":"v9.4.8"},{"url":"https://github.com/elastic/apm-server/releases/tag/v8.19.23","date":"2026-10-06T14:01:56Z","type":"stable","version":"v8.19.23"},{"url":"https://github.com/elastic/apm-server/releases/tag/v8.19.22","date":"2026-09-23T15:20:57Z","type":"stable","version":"v8.19.22"},{"url":"https://github.com/elastic/apm-server/releases/tag/v9.5.4","date":"2026-09-15T18:19:18Z","type":"stable","version":"v9.5.4"},{"url":"https://github.com/elastic/apm-server/releases/tag/v9.4.7","date":"2026-09-15T18:19:19Z","type":"stable","version":"v9.4.7"},{"url":"https://github.com/elastic/apm-server/releases/tag/v9.5.3","date":"2026-09-03T10:08:29Z","type":"stable","version":"v9.5.3"},{"url":"https://github.com/elastic/apm-server/releases/tag/v9.4.6","date":"2026-09-01T12:51:14Z","type":"stable","version":"v9.4.6"},{"url":"https://github.com/elastic/apm-server/releases/tag/v8.19.21","date":"2026-09-01T12:53:49Z","type":"stable","version":"v8.19.21"},{"url":"https://github.com/elastic/apm-server/releases/tag/v9.5.2","date":"2026-08-20T16:43:27Z","type":"stable","version":"v9.5.2"},{"url":"https://github.com/elastic/apm-server/releases/tag/v9.5.1","date":"2026-08-11T17:57:36Z","type":"stable","version":"v9.5.1"},{"url":"https://github.com/elastic/apm-server/releases/tag/v9.4.5","date":"2026-08-11T17:57:57Z","type":"stable","version":"v9.4.5"},{"url":"https://github.com/elastic/apm-server/releases/tag/v8.19.20","date":"2026-08-11T18:23:19Z","type":"stable","version":"v8.19.20"},{"url":"https://github.com/elastic/apm-server/releases/tag/v9.5.0","date":"2026-08-04T11:47:38Z","type":"stable","version":"v9.5.0"},{"url":"https://github.com/elastic/apm-server/releases/tag/v9.4.4","date":"2026-07-21T12:56:55Z","type":"stable","version":"v9.4.4"},{"url":"https://github.com/elastic/apm-server/releases/tag/v9.3.8","date":"2026-07-21T12:56:44Z","type":"stable","version":"v9.3.8"},{"url":"https://github.com/elastic/apm-server/releases/tag/v8.19.19","date":"2026-07-21T13:28:16Z","type":"stable","version":"v8.19.19"},{"url":"https://github.com/elastic/apm-server/releases/tag/v9.4.3","date":"2026-06-30T15:47:38Z","type":"stable","version":"v9.4.3"},{"url":"https://github.com/elastic/apm-server/releases/tag/v8.19.18","date":"2026-06-30T16:56:00Z","type":"stable","version":"v8.19.18"},{"url":"https://github.com/elastic/apm-server/releases/tag/v9.3.7","date":"2026-06-30T16:47:08Z","type":"stable","version":"v9.3.7"}]` |
| reliability.status_page | yes | yes |
| security.disclosure_policy | yes | - |
| security.hipaa | yes | - |
| security.iso27001 | yes | - |
| security.pci | yes | - |
| security.scorecard | - | 6.9 |
| security.soc2 | yes | - |
| security.trust_center | - | https://www.elastic.co/legal/ethics-and-compliance |
| security.vulnerabilities | - | `{"count":0,"source":"https://advisories.ecosyste.ms/api/v1/advisories?ecosystem=go&package_name=github.com%2Felastic%2Fapm-server%2Fapprovaltest&per_page=100","last_12m":0,"max_severity":null}` |

## Capabilities (APM Tools)

| Capability | Blackfire | Elastic APM |
|---|:--:|:--:|
| **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 | - | OTel-native |
| **Core** |  |  |
| Language agents | PHP, Python | Java, .NET, Python, Node.js, PHP, iOS, Android |
| **Deployment** |  |  |
| Hosting | Cloud only | Cloud + self-hosted |

*Source: vioscaleAI. Generated 2026-10-17T05:44:28.291Z. "-" = undocumented, not absent.*