Elastic APM vs Skylight
No clear leader: Skylight (53.9) and Elastic APM (49.8) 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.
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.
Skylight
A service that tracks how Ruby applications perform in production, showing developers where their code spends time and what changes affect response speeds, with tools to spot slow endpoints and prevent performance regressions.
Pricing
List pricing as published by each vendor, with the date we read it. Always verify at the source before you buy.
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
Skylight
Free tier with 100,000 monthly traces; paid tiers starting at $20/month
- FreeFree
- Pay-as-you-goStarting at $20/month
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.
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
Skylight
- Sidekiq
- DelayedJob
- ActiveJob
- Sinatra
- Grape
- GraphQL
- MCP
- GitHub
- Rails
Elastic APM or Skylight: 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.