# Elastic APM vs Instana

**Leader by Vioscale score:** Instana

| Attribute | Elastic APM | Instana |
|---|---|---|
| **Vioscale score** | 49.6 (60% (medium)) | 58.9 (40% (low)) |
| activity.commits_last_30d | 29 | - |
| adoption.dependent_repos | 6 | - |
| adoption.github_stars | 1,272 | - |
| deployment.options | `{"cloud":true,"on_prem":true,"air_gapped":true,"self_hosted":true}` | `{"cloud":true,"hybrid":true,"on_prem":true}` |
| description.long | 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. | A monitoring and observability platform that automatically discovers and monitors applications and infrastructure, providing real-time full-stack visibility with AI-powered incident investigation and performance optimization. |
| features.capabilities | `{"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}` | `{"rum":true,"hosting":"both","languages":"300+ technologies supported","service_map":true,"otel_support":"ingest","db_monitoring":true,"code_profiling":true,"error_analytics":true,"anomaly_detection":true,"distributed_tracing":true,"auto_instrumentation":true}` |
| integrations.count | 28 | 300 |
| integrations.list | `[{"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":"ServiceNow"},{"name":"AWS"},{"name":"Azure"},{"name":"Google Cloud"},{"name":"Oracle Cloud"},{"name":"IBM Cloud"},{"name":"Kubernetes"},{"name":"VMware Tanzu"},{"name":"Cloud Foundry"},{"name":"VSphere"},{"name":"PostgreSQL"},{"name":"MySQL"},{"name":"MongoDB"},{"name":"Redis"},{"name":"Cassandra"},{"name":"Oracle Database"},{"name":"IBM Db2"},{"name":"Microsoft SQL Server"},{"name":"SAP HANA"},{"name":"Apache Spark"},{"name":"Hadoop YARN"},{"name":"Apache HBase"},{"name":"ClickHouse"},{"name":"OpenSearch"},{"name":"GraphQL"},{"name":"AWS EC2"},{"name":"AWS RDS"},{"name":"AWS S3"},{"name":"Google Compute Engine"},{"name":"Redis Enterprise"},{"name":"JBoss Data Grid"},{"name":"Ceph"}]` |
| language.primary | Go | - |
| market.availability | `{"hqCountry":"US","primaryMarkets":[],"availabilityScope":"global","availableCountries":[],"notAvailableCountries":[]}` | `{"primaryMarkets":[],"availabilityScope":"global","availableCountries":[],"notAvailableCountries":[]}` |
| platform.support | `{"cli":true,"web":true}` | `{"web":true}` |
| pricing | `{"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}` | `{"type":"subscription","plans":[{"free":false,"name":"Essentials","features":["Infrastructure monitoring","Automatic infrastructure dynamic map","Cloud, hybrid and on-premise discovery","Kubernetes and orchestration monitoring"],"description":"Infrastructure monitoring and discovery","contactSales":true},{"free":false,"name":"Standard","features":["Distributed end-to-end tracing","Website and mobile observability","Code-level visibility","Synthetic monitoring","Business process monitoring","AI/LLM observability","Agentic AI root cause analysis","Incident summarization"],"description":"Full-stack observability including applications","contactSales":true}],"addOns":[{"name":"Managed PoPs","components":[{"per":{"qty":1,"unit":"execution"},"kind":"metered","amount":0.0003,"currency":"USD"}]},{"name":"Logs in context","components":[{"per":{"qty":1,"unit":"gb"},"kind":"metered","amount":0.35,"currency":"USD"}]}],"currency":"USD","freeTier":true,"sourceUrl":"https://www.ibm.com/products/instana/pricing","retrievedAt":"2026-08-14T13:42:22.590Z","freeTrialDays":14,"billingPeriods":["year"]}` |
| pricing.free_tier | yes | yes |
| pricing.model | commercial | quote |
| pricing.price_level | low | low |
| pricing.transparent | no | 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 | - |
| security.disclosure_policy | - | yes |
| security.gdpr | - | 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 | Elastic APM | Instana |
|---|:--:|:--:|
| **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 | OTLP ingest |
| **Core** |  |  |
| Language agents | Java, .NET, Python, Node.js, PHP, iOS, Android | 300+ technologies supported |
| **Deployment** |  |  |
| Hosting | Cloud + self-hosted | Cloud + self-hosted |

*Source: Vioscale. Generated 2026-09-01T17:35:49.779Z. "-" = undocumented, not absent.*