SigNoz

SigNoz is an open-source, OpenTelemetry-native observability platform that puts logs, metrics, traces, exceptions and alerts behind a single UI. We rate it 87/100 — it is the most credible self-hostable alternative to Datadog and New Relic in 2026, and the obvious pick for teams that have already standardized on OpenTelemetry.

What is SigNoz?

SigNoz was founded by Pranay Prateek and Ankit Nayan in 2020, went through Y Combinator's W21 batch, and raised a $6.5M seed round led by SignalFire. The project is open-source under an Apache 2.0–style license, has crossed 22,000+ GitHub stars on github.com/SigNoz/signoz, and ships both as a self-hosted Docker stack and as a fully managed cloud at signoz.io.

The pitch is direct: most APM vendors charge per host, per user, per custom metric and per log GB, and the bill compounds. SigNoz collapses traces, metrics and logs into one tool, stores them in ClickHouse — the same column store used by Uber and Cloudflare — and lets you keep the data on your own infrastructure for free.

Key Features of SigNoz

• OpenTelemetry-native ingestion: SigNoz speaks OTLP directly. There is no proprietary agent — you instrument your services with the standard opentelemetry SDK and point the OTLP exporter at SigNoz, which means zero vendor lock-in.
• One UI for traces, logs and metrics: jump from a slow span in a flame graph to the exact log line that produced it without leaving the page. Teams replace Prometheus + Loki + Jaeger + Grafana with a single tool.
• ClickHouse storage: queries over hundreds of millions of rows return in seconds. Compression typically lands logs and traces at a fraction of Elasticsearch storage cost.
• Alerts on any signal: threshold and anomaly-detection alerts can fire on metrics, traces or logs and route to Slack, PagerDuty, OpsGenie, Opsgenie webhooks, MS Teams or email.
• LLM observability: built-in support for tracking LLM calls, token usage and costs — a feature many traditional APMs only added recently.
• SigNoz MCP server: lets agentic coding tools like Claude Code and Cursor query production telemetry directly from the IDE, which is increasingly useful for AI-assisted debugging.

What Users Say About SigNoz

The community sentiment is genuinely warm but not uncritical. On Reddit's r/devops and r/selfhosted, the most-upvoted threads praise the OTel-first design and the cost savings — multiple teams report 60–70% reductions versus Datadog after migrating, and one widely-shared blog post documents a 500-microservice deployment that cut its observability bill by 70% on SigNoz 1.0. Product Hunt launches drew 800+ upvotes and consistent comments about how quickly the docker-compose stack gets you to a working dashboard.

The complaints are also consistent. The most common pain point is operational: self-hosting SigNoz means self-hosting ClickHouse, and on GitHub there are recurring issues about ClickHouse memory pressure, the bundled cluster topology forcing Zookeeper, and otel-collector start-order races on reboot. The UI is described as functional but "clunky" compared to Datadog, and SSO and advanced RBAC are gated to the Enterprise tier.

SigNoz Pricing

SigNoz is unusual in that the self-hosted Community edition is genuinely the full product — not a stripped-down loss leader. Cloud pricing is usage-based with no per-seat and no per-host fees, which is the opposite of Datadog's model.

Plan	Price	Key Limits
Community (self-hosted)	$0	Unlimited hosts, users, retention. You operate ClickHouse and the collector yourself.
Cloud Teams	From $49/month	$49 base includes ingestion. Then $0.30/GB logs & traces, $0.10 per million metric samples at 1-month retention. Unlimited users and hosts.
Enterprise	From $4,000/month	SSO/SAML, advanced RBAC, audit logs, dedicated support, regional data residency.

Who Should Use SigNoz?

Best for: platform and SRE teams that have already adopted OpenTelemetry, startups and mid-market companies looking to escape Datadog or New Relic bills, and any team that needs to keep telemetry inside its own VPC for compliance or cost reasons.

Not ideal for: very small teams without the appetite to operate ClickHouse (use Cloud instead), or large enterprises that need extremely deep integration catalogs, mature RUM/synthetics, and turnkey SSO/audit out of the box on day one.

Pros and Cons

Pros:

• True OpenTelemetry-first design — no proprietary agent, no lock-in.
• Self-hosted is the full product, not a feature-gated demo.
• ClickHouse-backed query speed at hundreds of millions of rows.
• Cloud pricing has no per-seat or per-host fees, a real differentiator versus Datadog.
• Active development, 22k+ GitHub stars, healthy contributor base, dedicated MCP server for AI coding agents.

Cons:

• Self-hosting requires real ClickHouse expertise; memory tuning is the most-cited friction point in the issue tracker.
• The UI is improving but still feels rougher than Datadog or Grafana Cloud.
• SSO, advanced RBAC and audit logs are Enterprise-only.
• RUM, synthetic monitoring and the integrations catalog are smaller than incumbent vendors'.

Alternatives to SigNoz

If you want a fully managed, batteries-included experience and budget is not the constraint, Datadog remains the benchmark. If you prefer to assemble your own stack from open-source pieces, the classic combination is Grafana + Prometheus + Loki + Tempo. For a newer storage-optimized open-source option focused on logs, OpenObserve is worth comparing. Among self-hostable APMs, SigNoz is the closest single-product analog to Datadog APM.

Verdict: Is SigNoz Worth It?

Yes — for the right team. SigNoz is the rare open-source project that has matched commercial APM functionality on the parts that matter most (traces, metrics, logs, alerts, exceptions) while staying fully OpenTelemetry-native and giving you the option of either zero-cost self-hosting or honest usage-based cloud pricing. The operational cost of running ClickHouse is real and is the main reason it scores 87 instead of higher. If your team can absorb that, or if you're happy to use the $49 Cloud tier, SigNoz delivers materially better economics than Datadog without compromising on the core observability workflow.

Frequently Asked Questions

Is SigNoz free?

Yes. The self-hosted Community edition is free and is the full product, not a limited demo. SigNoz Cloud starts at $49/month for the Teams plan.

What platforms does SigNoz support?

SigNoz runs on Linux, macOS and Windows via Docker, on Kubernetes via the official Helm chart, and is also available as a managed cloud service. Instrumentation works for any language with an OpenTelemetry SDK, including Go, Java, Python, Node.js, .NET, Ruby, PHP and Rust.

How does SigNoz compare to Datadog?

SigNoz covers the core APM, logs, traces and metrics use cases that most teams use Datadog for, at a fraction of the cost — typically 60–70% lower in real-world migrations. Datadog still wins on the breadth of integrations, RUM, synthetics, security monitoring and the polish of the UI. SigNoz wins on price, OpenTelemetry-native design and data ownership.

Is SigNoz open source?

Yes. The source is published at github.com/SigNoz/signoz and the project is permissively licensed. Both the query service and the bundled OpenTelemetry collector distribution are open.

Does SigNoz support OpenTelemetry?

Yes — SigNoz is built natively on OpenTelemetry. The default ingestion path is OTLP, and SigNoz contributes upstream to OpenTelemetry collector components.