SigNoz

What SigNoz actually is

SigNoz is an observability platform — logs, metrics and traces in one product — that you can either self-host from the open-source repository or buy as a managed cloud service. It came out of Y Combinator's Winter 2021 batch, founded by Pranay Prateek (ex-Microsoft) and Ankit Nayan, and the founding story is the usual open-source one: the team wanted Datadog-class tooling without Datadog's pricing model or proprietary instrumentation, couldn't find it, and built it natively on OpenTelemetry. That last part is the design decision everything else follows from. SigNoz ships no instrumentation SDKs of its own; you instrument with OpenTelemetry, and SigNoz stores, indexes and correlates the resulting telemetry in ClickHouse.

In product terms it is a single application covering application performance monitoring (APM), distributed tracing, log management, metrics, exceptions, dashboards and alerting — threshold, anomaly and Apdex alerts on any signal. The correlation story is the practical headline: traces link to their logs, logs link back to traces by trace ID, and dashboards jump between metrics and the offending requests. For teams debugging production incidents, having that loop in one tool instead of three is the reason to look at it.

The commercial entity is small but funded and legible: about $6.5M raised through a YC pre-seed and a SignalFire-led seed announced in September 2023, a team split between San Francisco and Bengaluru, and a customer list that includes Cisco, FiscalNote and Flutterwave alongside startups. The GitHub project is the community edition (self-hosted), while SigNoz Cloud is the managed offering with a Teams tier aimed at fast-scaling companies and an Enterprise tier for compliance-heavy buyers. See how we group tools like this in our monitoring category.

Pricing: what you really pay

SigNoz's pricing page is one of the clearer ones in this market: usage-based, with no per-user and no per-host billing, and no surcharge for custom metrics. The Teams plan is listed at $49/month, which includes $49 of usage — the page also shows a $199 figure struck through next to it, so the current entry price appears to be a promotion from a $199 base, and we would budget for that possibility. The $49 minimum buys access to all features, unlimited teammates, any number of monitors, support via in-product chat, email and Slack, SOC2 Type II and HIPAA compliance, and data-center choice between the US, EU and India. Eligible startups get a separate program at $19/month for the first 12 months, including $19 of usage.

Beyond the included usage, the meter rates are: logs at $0.30/GB ingested, traces at $0.30/GB ingested, and metrics at $0.10 per million samples. Retention is tiered and priced through those same rates — 15 days for logs and traces at the base, up to one year; metrics start at one month and run to 13 months. The pricing page works a concrete example for metrics: 10,000 time series reporting every 30 seconds is roughly 864 million samples per month and about $86.40/month. That kind of worked example is exactly what we want vendors to publish; it makes a bill computable before you sign up.

Enterprise starts at $4,000/month (custom), and the shape of what you get is different rather than just bigger: a dedicated cloud deployment, or BYOC (SigNoz managed inside your own cloud account), or self-hosted SigNoz with enterprise support while your team runs the infrastructure. Enterprise adds volume discounts, annual contracts, HIPAA/BAA options, a dedicated Slack channel, guided migration, team training and an SLA with downtime developer pairing. Note what is missing from the Teams tier by comparison: migration help for Datadog dashboards and a dedicated Slack channel are gated at spends above $999/month.

There is also an automated Datadog dashboard migration tool and a claims-backed savings pitch ("up to 80% on your Datadog bill"). Treat the 80% as a vendor estimate — our own view is that the honest comparison depends entirely on your ingestion mix, and SigNoz's published per-GB rates make it possible to compute rather than trust.

Performance & infrastructure

SigNoz Cloud runs in three regions — US, EU and India — which is a genuinely useful footprint for data-residency requirements, and the Teams tier carries SOC2 Type II and HIPAA compliance. The company states a proven ingestion track record of over 10TB of telemetry per day on its cloud platform. Storage is ClickHouse, chosen for columnar efficiency on high-volume telemetry, and the query layer is exposed through a visual query builder with ClickHouse auto-complete as well as API keys for programmatic access.

The self-hosted path is real and is the reason many teams try SigNoz in the first place: the community edition is open source (the SigNoz/signoz repository), deployable on your own infrastructure, with SSO support included even at that tier. The trade is explicit in SigNoz's own comparison table: community edition means you own infrastructure, storage, scaling, upgrades and backups, and you get community Slack support only. SAML, multiple ingestion keys, per-key rate limits and email/in-product support arrive with the cloud Teams tier.

Feature maturity is good in the core loop — APM, logs, traces, exceptions, dashboards, alerts — and thinner at the edges of enterprise administration: fine-grained RBAC is in beta, audit logs and multi-tenancy are marked coming soon, and custom per-source log retention is also coming soon. The platform is OpenTelemetry-native by construction, so instrumentation breadth follows OTel's language coverage (from Rust to Elixir to mobile and serverless), and there is an MCP server and an AI assistant ("Noz") bundled into the Teams tier — recent additions we would treat as convenience features rather than reasons to buy.

Where it falls short

The self-hosted community edition is where the honest caveats live. Running ClickHouse-backed observability at scale is a real operational job: storage sizing, ingestion pipelines, upgrades and backups are yours, and SigNoz says so plainly. Teams that underestimate this end up with a monitoring stack that is itself unmonitored.

On the cloud side, the pricing is transparent but not simple to forecast when telemetry is noisy — logs and traces meter per ingested GB before you see any benefit, and retention multipliers move the bill more than most people expect. The $49 entry price is also a moving target given the struck-through $199 on the pricing page. And the absence of any published uptime SLA below Enterprise stands out: the SLA with downtime developer pairing is an Enterprise-only line item, so Teams-tier customers have contractual recourse of the ordinary kind only.

Ecosystem breadth is narrower than Datadog's. The OTel-native approach covers instrumented applications very well, but the long tail of turnkey integrations (the hundreds of SaaS datasources Datadog collects) is not there, and the enterprise administration features are still filling in. Finally, the company is small and venture-backed; that is fine, but it is the right frame for a five-year commitment.

Who should pick this

We would pick SigNoz Cloud when a team wants one tool for metrics, logs and traces with a bill it can compute from published rates, needs US/EU/India data residency, and wants OpenTelemetry instrumentation that does not lock them into a vendor's SDK. It is a strong fit for engineering organizations leaving Datadog or New Relic over price — the migration tooling and the absence of per-seat and per-host billing address exactly that pain — and for teams already standardized on OTel.

We would pick the self-hosted community edition when data must stay on your own infrastructure and you have the ClickHouse operations muscle to run it; the Enterprise BYOC option is the middle path for compliance-heavy organizations that want SigNoz to operate it inside their cloud account. We would skip it if you need hundreds of turnkey SaaS integrations, a contractual uptime SLA on a small budget, or enterprise RBAC/audit features today — those are either Enterprise-tier or still on the roadmap.

Key takeaways

• OpenTelemetry-native observability (logs, metrics, traces, APM, alerts) in one ClickHouse-backed product, open-source core, managed cloud on top.
• Teams tier: $49/month including $49 of usage (a $199 base is shown struck through), then $0.30/GB logs and traces, $0.10/million metric samples; retention tiers priced through the same meters.
• No per-user or per-host pricing; SOC2 Type II and HIPAA on cloud, data centers in the US, EU and India.
• Enterprise from $4,000/month with dedicated/BYOC/self-hosted options; uptime SLA is Enterprise-only.
• Self-hosting is free but operationally real: storage, scaling, upgrades and backups are your problem.
• Our pick for teams priced out of Datadog who want transparent, computable observability costs; watch retention multipliers and the promo-vs-list price on the entry tier.

Sources

• https://signoz.io/pricing/
• https://signoz.io/pricing/metrics-cost-estimation/
• https://signoz.io/
• https://signoz.io/about-us/
• https://www.ycombinator.com/companies/signoz
• https://signoz.io/blog/signoz-funding/