# Instana vs Tideways

**Leader by Vioscale score:** Instana

| Attribute | Instana | Tideways |
|---|---|---|
| **Vioscale score** | 58.9 (40% (low)) | 47 (72% (medium)) |
| 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. | PHP application performance monitoring, profiling, and error tracking. Tideways shows where performance breaks down in production in real time. |
| 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":true,"hosting":"cloud","languages":"PHP","db_monitoring":true,"code_profiling":true,"error_analytics":true,"distributed_tracing":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":"Slack"},{"name":"Microsoft Teams"},{"name":"PagerDuty"},{"name":"OpsGenie"},{"name":"Splunk On-Call"}]` |
| market.availability | `{"primaryMarkets":[],"availabilityScope":"global","availableCountries":[],"notAvailableCountries":[]}` | - |
| platform.support | `{"web":true}` | `{"cli":true,"mac":true,"web":true,"linux":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":"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 | yes | no |
| pricing.model | quote | commercial |
| pricing.price_level | low | mid |
| pricing.transparent | no | yes |
| reliability.status_page | - | yes |
| security.disclosure_policy | yes | - |
| security.gdpr | yes | yes |
| security.pci | - | yes |
| security.soc2 | yes | - |

## Capabilities (APM Tools)

| Capability | Instana | 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 | OTLP ingest | - |
| **Core** |  |  |
| Language agents | 300+ technologies supported | PHP |
| **Deployment** |  |  |
| Hosting | Cloud + self-hosted | Cloud only |

*Source: Vioscale. Generated 2026-09-01T17:00:33.627Z. "-" = undocumented, not absent.*