# Blackfire vs Elastic APM

**Leader by Vioscale score:** Blackfire

| Attribute | Blackfire | Elastic APM |
|---|---|---|
| **Vioscale score** | 64.2 (72% (medium)) | 49.6 (60% (medium)) |
| activity.commits_last_30d | - | 29 |
| adoption.dependent_repos | - | 6 |
| adoption.github_stars | - | 1,272 |
| deployment.options | `{"cloud":true}` | `{"cloud":true,"on_prem":true,"air_gapped":true,"self_hosted":true}` |
| description.long | Blackfire is an Application Performance Management platform offering both monitoring and profiling solutions for PHP and Python applications. It helps teams identify performance bottlenecks, optimize code, and prevent production crises with automated profiling and actionable recommendations. | 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"}]` |
| language.primary | - | Go |
| market.availability | - | `{"hqCountry":"US","primaryMarkets":[],"availabilityScope":"global","availableCountries":[],"notAvailableCountries":[]}` |
| platform.support | `{"cli":true,"web":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/v9.5.2","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"},{"url":"https://github.com/elastic/apm-server/releases/tag/v9.3.6","date":"2026-06-23T14:09:52Z","type":"stable","version":"v9.3.6"},{"url":"https://github.com/elastic/apm-server/releases/tag/v8.19.17","date":"2026-06-23T13:59:11Z","type":"stable","version":"v8.19.17"},{"url":"https://github.com/elastic/apm-server/releases/tag/v9.4.2","date":"2026-05-28T14:59:37Z","type":"stable","version":"v9.4.2"},{"url":"https://github.com/elastic/apm-server/releases/tag/v9.3.5","date":"2026-05-28T14:59:37Z","type":"stable","version":"v9.3.5"},{"url":"https://github.com/elastic/apm-server/releases/tag/v8.19.16","date":"2026-05-28T14:59:39Z","type":"stable","version":"v8.19.16"},{"url":"https://github.com/elastic/apm-server/releases/tag/v9.4.1","date":"2026-05-12T18:02:21Z","type":"stable","version":"v9.4.1"},{"url":"https://github.com/elastic/apm-server/releases/tag/v9.4.0","date":"2026-05-05T15:20:48Z","type":"stable","version":"v9.4.0"},{"url":"https://github.com/elastic/apm-server/releases/tag/v9.3.4","date":"2026-04-30T15:24:23Z","type":"stable","version":"v9.3.4"},{"url":"https://github.com/elastic/apm-server/releases/tag/v8.19.15","date":"2026-04-30T15:24:36Z","type":"stable","version":"v8.19.15"}]` |
| 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.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: Vioscale. Generated 2026-09-01T17:38:21.106Z. "-" = undocumented, not absent.*