Buying snapshot
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| Decision point | What Uptrace states |
|---|---|
License | AGPL-3.0 (open-source GitHub repository) |
Deployment | Uptrace Cloud (fully managed), self-hosted from GitHub, or an on-premises installation with a license |
Cloud billing basis | Spans and logs by data size (GB); metrics per million ingested datapoints. No seat or host limits: unlimited users, services and hosts |
Cloud data location | Hetzner datacenters in Germany with redundant backups in Finland; Uptrace says telemetry never leaves the EU |
Support and uptime | 16/5 support across EU and US business hours; Uptrace Cloud lists a 99.9% uptime SLA |
Single sign-on | SAML and OIDC; documented for Google, Okta and Keycloak |
Payment | Billing through Paddle; credit card (automatic) or bank transfer (manual) |
Our take
If your services already send OpenTelemetry data and you want one place for traces, metrics and logs that is billed by volume rather than by seat or host, Uptrace is worth a trial. Pick Cloud if EU hosting suits you, and self-host if your data must stay in your own network.
Evaluate Uptrace
Popular comparisons
See all 5 Uptrace comparisons
Where it stands out
Works with existing pipelines. Uptrace ingests from OpenTelemetry, Prometheus, Vector, FluentBit, CloudWatch and more, and shows traces, metrics and logs in a single UI, so you can keep your current collectors.
Prometheus and Grafana compatibility. Existing Prometheus queries run on its PromQL-compatible engine, and Grafana can use Uptrace as a Prometheus and Tempo data source.
Control over what you store. YAML-based rules rename, delete or parse attributes and drop or sample spans before data reaches Uptrace, which helps keep a volume-based bill in check.
Setup as code. Orgs, projects, monitors and channels can be managed with Terraform, and dashboards as YAML.
AI assistant access. A built-in Model Context Protocol server lets assistants such as Claude Code, Cursor, Continue and GitHub Copilot query spans, traces, metrics, alerts and dashboards using your existing Uptrace session token.
Efficient storage, by Uptrace's account. The project states more than 10K spans per second on a single core and that a 1KB span can be compressed to about 40 bytes.
Product screenshot
Trade-offs to weigh
Self-hosting means running two databases. Uptrace stores telemetry in ClickHouse and also requires PostgreSQL for metadata such as metric names and alerts, so the free edition still carries that operating work.
Distance to EU servers. Uptrace lists ingestion round-trip latency of 90–150ms from the US, 130–170ms from Singapore, 120–170ms from India and 120–190ms from Brazil. Sending from AWS or GCP also incurs outbound fees; Uptrace says OTel Arrow cuts bandwidth 30–70% versus standard OTLP.
Check how the budget cap works. Uptrace says it will never bill above a monthly ceiling you set, but also says that if you exceed your cap, ingestion continues and usage above your plan is charged at the standard per-GB rate at the end of the billing cycle. Confirm which applies before relying on the cap.
Pricing and plan conditions
Uptrace says an average span is about 500 bytes plus custom attributes, which lets you estimate GB volume from span counts. For metrics, its example puts 1,000 timeseries over 28 days at one datapoint per minute at about 40 million datapoints (1,000 * 28 * 24 * 60); a 30s collection interval doubles that. Cloud keeps all data for 4 weeks (28 days) by default. You are charged at month end, or once you hit $400, whichever comes first.
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| Option | Published price | Conditions |
|---|---|---|
Community Edition (self-hosted) | Free forever | No limits; you run the infrastructure |
Uptrace Cloud free tier | Free up to 50 GB and 5,000 timeseries per month | Separate free trial: 1.2 TB of spans/logs and 100,000 timeseries, no credit card |
Cloud spans and logs | From $0.075/GB | Applies above the monthly free allowance; volume discounts apply automatically. Uptrace also states rates start at $0.10/GB and drop to $0.016/GB at scale |
Cloud metrics | Starts at $0.025 per 1M datapoints | Rate decreases with volume |
Longer retention: spans (including logs and errors) | $0.01 per GB-month | Cold storage (S3 or HDD) for up to 100 weeks. Uptrace's example: retaining 1,000 GB of spans beyond 4 weeks costs $10/month |
Longer retention: metrics (active timeseries) | $0.20 per 1,000 timeseries-month | Cold storage for up to 100 weeks |
Dropped data (sampling) | $0.01 per GB | Uptrace's example: dropping 1,000 GB costs $10. No sampling, no charge |
On-premises | Requires a license; free evaluation period | Terraform and Ansible automation, custom retention policies, a dedicated support engineer, SOC 2 certification on request |
Public signals
About these signals
Verified factual signals from public sources. They indicate observable activity or interest, not total adoption, product quality, or cost.
5 GitHub commits 90d4.3k GitHub stars0 vulnerabilities across 2 packages
See all signals from 8 sources
Three-month score against stable baseline terms—not search volume or adoption.
npm · @uptrace/node@2.4.0 · PyPI · uptrace@1.45.0
Alternatives
Uptrace positions itself against Datadog and New Relic. Its own example prices a monthly setup of 150 engineers, 225 APM hosts (10TB), 20TB logs ingest and 350 infra hosts (750k timeseries) at $2,039 on Uptrace, $24,635 on New Relic and $42,468 on Datadog. This is the vendor's comparison, so get quotes for your own volumes before relying on it.
Alternatives to Uptrace
The reviewed substitutes for Uptrace among the observability platforms, and what would make each one the better answer.
Direct alternatives
Reviewed substitutes: products bought for the same job, where a team picks one.
- Observe
- Observe and Uptrace both keep large amounts of telemetry at low cost so teams can search and correlate it. Uptrace uses OpenTelemetry and ClickHouse and can be self-hosted, while Observe is a commercial cloud platform built on a data lake with a context graph and an AI SRE.Applies to: Choosing between these two for the apm observability decision.
- AppDynamics
- Uptrace and AppDynamics both monitor application performance through traces, metrics and errors. Uptrace is OpenTelemetry-native, built on ClickHouse and available self-hosted or as Uptrace Cloud, while AppDynamics is Cisco's enterprise APM with business transaction tracing for critical applications in cloud and on-prem setups.Applies to: Choosing between these two for the apm observability decision.
- Better Stack
- Uptrace and Better Stack offer tracing, metrics, logs and alerting for teams watching their own services. Uptrace is built on OpenTelemetry and ClickHouse and can be self-hosted, while Better Stack is a hosted service that extends monitoring into on-call, incident response and public status pages.Applies to: Choosing between these two for the apm observability decision.
- Coralogix
- Uptrace and Coralogix both store logs, metrics and traces with a strong focus on keeping observability costs predictable. Uptrace runs on ClickHouse and OpenTelemetry and can be self-hosted, while Coralogix is a SaaS platform that analyzes data in stream and adds security monitoring.Applies to: Choosing between these two for the apm observability decision.
- Dynatrace
- Dynatrace and Uptrace both provide application performance monitoring with traces, metrics and logs. Uptrace is built on OpenTelemetry and ClickHouse and can be self-hosted or used as a cloud service, while Dynatrace is a commercial enterprise platform with its own agent, AI root-cause analysis and application security.Applies to: Choosing between these two for the apm observability decision.
Other approaches
A different approach to the same problem. Each substitutes only for the workload named beside it.
- Datadog
- Datadog is preferred over Uptrace for cloud-scale monitoring workloads where teams specifically want a platform spanning infrastructure, applications, and logs. **Datadog** is a cloud-scale monitoring and observability platform for infrastructure, applications, and logs. It is designed for IT, Dev, and Ops teams that need to turn high volumes of operational data into actionable insight at scale.
- Elastic Observability
- Elastic Observability is an alternative to Uptrace for teams standardizing on Elastic Observability’s paid service tiers and AI-oriented troubleshooting approach. **Elastic Observability** is an open-source, AI-powered observability offering positioned around storing more data, troubleshooting faster, and resolving issues proactively.
- New Relic
- New Relic is chosen instead of Uptrace for cloud and hybrid application teams that require SaaS-delivered code-level diagnostics and real-time monitoring. **New Relic** is a SaaS-based application performance management provider for cloud, datacenter, and hybrid environments, with code-level diagnostics and real-time monitoring.