Elastic APMvs
Elastic Stack
Elastic Stack: Search, Observability, and Security Solutions
Elastic APM
Application Performance Monitoring from Elastic
As of 30 August 2026, Elastic APM is free to use. Elastic APM is an application performance monitoring system built on the Elastic Stack. Softwr lists it under Logging. Elastic APM is made by Elastic, launched in 2011, available on Web, API.
Overview
What Elastic APM does
Elastic APM is an application performance monitoring system built on the Elastic Stack.
What people use it for
- Distributed tracing across microservices
- Auto-instrumenting Java, .NET, Python, Go, Node.js, Ruby, PHP and C++ services
- OpenTelemetry-native collection through the Elastic distributions
- Correlating latency and errors with machine learning
- Monitoring LLM calls alongside application traces
The honest half
Where it falls short
Concrete and checkable, so you can decide whether any of them matter to you. This is the half of a review a vendor will not write about Elastic APM.
- Pricing is not published on the product page; cost follows the underlying Elastic deployment rather than being quoted per host or per service
- Self-managed deployment means running and scaling Elasticsearch yourself
- Serverless does not carry every capability the hosted option does
Cross-shopped
What people choose instead of Elastic APM
Each pairing was judged by two reviewers asking whether a buyer would genuinely weigh the two against each other. The ones that failed were deleted rather than published.
- Elastic APMvsDatadog Logs
Datadog Logs: Log Management and Analytics
- Elastic APMvsNew Relic
New Relic: Observability made simple
- Elastic APMvsCoralogix
Coralogix: Continuous Log Insights and Visibility
Pricing
What Elastic APM costs
Taken from the vendor's own pricing page. Prices move, so check before you buy.
Free
Free
- Performance monitoring
- Error tracking
- Transaction tracing
Capabilities
Features
Performance monitoring
Error tracking
Transaction tracing
Custom metrics
API
Integration with API
Webhooks
Integration with Webhooks
REST
Integration with REST
Web support
Available on web
Api support
Available on api
Answered, with sources
Questions people ask
Each answer names the page it came from, so you can check it rather than take our word for it.
Is Elastic APM pricing published?
Elastic APM pricing is not published on the product page. Pricing is available through the main Elastic pricing page or by contacting Elastic sales directly.
SourceDoes Elastic APM offer a free trial?
Yes. Elastic APM offers a free trial through Elastic Cloud Serverless registration. A guided demo is also available in the Elastic demo gallery.
SourceWhat deployment options are available for Elastic APM?
Elastic APM can be deployed on Elastic Cloud Serverless (zero operational overhead), Elastic Cloud Hosted (deploy on any cloud), or self-managed Elasticsearch.
SourceBehind it
Who makes Elastic APM
- Company
- Elastic
- Based in
- United States
Keep looking
Where to go from Elastic APM
- Elastic APM alternativesEvery product people weigh against it
- Elastic APM pricingPlans, floors and what the tiers exclude
- Elastic APM badgesWhich rules it meets, and the figure behind each
- All Logging softwareThe full category
- Best Logging softwareThe shortlist, and how it was cut
Best Logging software for
Compare Elastic APM with
- New Relic
- Datadog Logs
- Coralogix
- Grafana Loki
- Dynatrace
- AppDynamics
- Retrace
- Cronitor
- InfluxDB
- Checkly
- CloudWatch
- Airbrake
- Better Stack
- Bugsnag
- Fluent Bit
- Graylog
- Dynatrace Logs
- Fluentd
Other Logging software
Continuous Log Insights and Visibility
Free, then $0.42/GB (logs ingestion)10 researched notesMonitoring for cron jobs, websites, and background tasks
Free, then $2/monitor/month11 researched notesPurpose-built time series database for metrics and events
Free, then $0.0025/MB ingested12 researched notesActive reliability platform combining uptime monitoring, API testing, and incident response
Free plan11 researched notesAI-native observability and incident response platform.
Free, then $25/mo12 researched notes
Softwr does not host reviews and shows no star rating for Elastic APM, because a rating we did not collect is not ours to publish. What is here is the pricing and platform detail from the vendor’s own pages, limitations we could state concretely, and alternatives a reviewer confirmed people weigh against it. Tell us if any of it is wrong.
More on Elastic APM
Elastic APM alternatives
What people switch to, and what they give up
Elastic APM pricing
Every tier, and where the cost actually lands
Compare Elastic APM
Put it head to head with anything we hold
Elastic APM badge
Its rating, and an embed for your own site
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