# Instana vs Skylight

| Attribute | Instana | Skylight |
|---|---|---|
| **Vioscale score** | 58.9 (40% (low)) | 59 (49% (low)) |
| deployment.options | `{"cloud":true,"hybrid":true,"on_prem":true}` | `{"cloud":true}` |
| description.long | 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. | Skylight visualizes performance data to help identify and fix bottlenecks in Ruby and Rails apps. It includes endpoint analysis, SQL profiling, deploy tracking, and background job monitoring. |
| features.capabilities | `{"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}` | `{"rum":false,"hosting":"cloud","languages":"Ruby, Rails, Sinatra, Grape","db_monitoring":true,"code_profiling":true,"error_analytics":true,"anomaly_detection":true,"auto_instrumentation":true}` |
| integrations.count | 300 | 7 |
| integrations.list | `[{"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"}]` | `[{"name":"Sidekiq"},{"name":"DelayedJob"},{"name":"ActiveJob"},{"name":"Sinatra"},{"name":"Grape"},{"name":"GraphQL"},{"name":"MCP"}]` |
| market.availability | `{"primaryMarkets":[],"availabilityScope":"global","availableCountries":[],"notAvailableCountries":[]}` | `{"primaryMarkets":["US"],"availabilityScope":"global","availableCountries":[],"notAvailableCountries":[]}` |
| platform.support | `{"web":true}` | `{"web":true}` |
| pricing | `{"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"]}` | `{"type":"hybrid","plans":[{"free":true,"name":"Free","components":[{"kind":"fixed","amount":0,"period":"month","currency":"USD"}],"description":"100,000 traces per month","contactSales":false,"includedLimits":{"traces":"100k/month"}},{"free":false,"name":"Pay-as-you-go","summary":"Starting at $20/month","components":[{"kind":"fixed","amount":20,"period":"month","currency":"USD"}],"description":"Automatic tier adjustment based on monthly traces","contactSales":false}],"summary":"Free tier with 100,000 monthly traces; paid tiers starting at $20/month","currency":"USD","freeTier":true,"sourceUrl":"https://www.skylight.io/pricing","retrievedAt":"2026-08-13T20:48:14.422Z","freeTrialDays":30,"startingPrice":{"amount":20,"period":"month","currency":"USD"},"billingPeriods":["month"]}` |
| pricing.free_tier | yes | yes |
| pricing.model | quote | freemium |
| pricing.price_level | low | mid |
| pricing.transparent | no | yes |
| reliability.status_page | - | yes |
| security.disclosure_policy | yes | - |
| security.gdpr | yes | yes |
| security.soc2 | yes | - |

## Capabilities (APM Tools)

| Capability | Instana | Skylight |
|---|:--:|:--:|
| **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 | OTLP ingest | - |
| **Core** |  |  |
| Language agents | 300+ technologies supported | Ruby, Rails, Sinatra, Grape |
| **Deployment** |  |  |
| Hosting | Cloud + self-hosted | Cloud only |

*Source: Vioscale. Generated 2026-09-01T15:17:55.157Z. "-" = undocumented, not absent.*