# Blackfire vs Tideways

**Leader by Vioscale score:** Blackfire

| Attribute | Blackfire | Tideways |
|---|---|---|
| **Vioscale score** | 64.2 (72% (medium)) | 47 (72% (medium)) |
| deployment.options | `{"cloud":true}` | `{"cloud":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. | PHP application performance monitoring, profiling, and error tracking. Tideways shows where performance breaks down in production in real time. |
| features.capabilities | `{"rum":true,"hosting":"cloud","languages":"PHP, Python","db_monitoring":true,"code_profiling":true,"distributed_tracing":true,"auto_instrumentation":true}` | `{"rum":true,"hosting":"cloud","languages":"PHP","db_monitoring":true,"code_profiling":true,"error_analytics":true,"distributed_tracing":true,"auto_instrumentation":true}` |
| integrations.count | 6 | 7 |
| integrations.list | `[{"name":"PHPUnit"},{"name":"Symfony Functional Tests"},{"name":"Behat"},{"name":"GitHub Education"},{"name":"CI/CD pipelines"},{"name":"Upsun"}]` | `[{"name":"Slack"},{"name":"Microsoft Teams"},{"name":"PagerDuty"},{"name":"OpsGenie"},{"name":"Splunk On-Call"}]` |
| platform.support | `{"cli":true,"web":true}` | `{"cli":true,"mac":true,"web":true,"linux":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":"subscription","plans":[{"free":false,"name":"Team","summary":"29€/month billed annually","features":["Profiler, Monitoring, Error Tracking","Unlimited projects, services, transactions, users","Basic Alerting","Integrations: E-Mail, Slack, Microsoft Teams"],"commitment":"annual","components":[{"kind":"fixed","amount":29,"period":"month","currency":"EUR"}],"description":"Basic profiling and monitoring","contactSales":false,"includedLimits":{"lookback_days":"5","trace_triggers":"100","historical_data":"6 weeks","spans_per_trace":"500","traces_per_minute":"1","requests_per_month":"250K"}},{"free":false,"name":"Business","summary":"89€/month billed annually","features":["All Team features","Distributed Profiling","Traces in History","Advanced Tracepoint Triggers","Advanced Alerting","Integrations: PagerDuty, OpsGenie, Splunk On-Call, Webhooks"],"commitment":"annual","components":[{"kind":"fixed","amount":89,"period":"month","currency":"EUR"}],"description":"Advanced profiling, distributed tracing, and alerting","contactSales":false,"includedLimits":{"lookback_days":"30","trace_triggers":"5000","historical_data":"15 months","spans_per_trace":"1500","traces_per_minute":"5","requests_per_month":"250K"}},{"free":false,"name":"Enterprise","summary":"Contact for pricing","features":["Unlimited historical data","Technical Account Manager","Priority Support","SSO with Azure Active Directory","Wire Transfer, AWS Marketplace, custom payment terms"],"description":"Custom deployment for high request volumes","contactSales":true,"includedLimits":{"historical_data":"Unlimited","requests_per_month":">1 billion"}}],"addOns":[{"name":"Premium Onboarding Workshop","components":[{"kind":"one_time","amount":249,"currency":"EUR"}]}],"summary":"From 29€/month. 14-day free trial.","currency":"EUR","freeTier":false,"sourceUrl":"https://tideways.com","retrievedAt":"2026-08-03T13:12:26.312Z","freeTrialDays":14,"startingPrice":{"amount":29,"period":"month","currency":"EUR"},"billingPeriods":["month","year"]}` |
| pricing.free_tier | no | no |
| pricing.model | commercial | commercial |
| pricing.price_level | mid | mid |
| pricing.transparent | yes | yes |
| reliability.status_page | yes | yes |
| security.disclosure_policy | yes | - |
| security.gdpr | - | yes |
| security.hipaa | yes | - |
| security.iso27001 | yes | - |
| security.pci | yes | yes |
| security.soc2 | yes | - |

## Capabilities (APM Tools)

| Capability | Blackfire | Tideways |
|---|:--:|:--:|
| **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 | - | - |
| **Core** |  |  |
| Language agents | PHP, Python | PHP |
| **Deployment** |  |  |
| Hosting | Cloud only | Cloud only |

*Source: Vioscale. Generated 2026-09-01T16:39:42.294Z. "-" = undocumented, not absent.*