Instrument your services,
or just watch them.
SigNoz is built on OpenTelemetry: you instrument your applications and it gives you an excellent place to send the data. Ultraviolet starts from the other end — a collector on every node sees every service without anyone instrumenting anything.
The short version
Choose SigNoz if
- You've invested in OpenTelemetry instrumentation and want a backend built around it.
- Open source matters to you, or its free self-hosted edition covers what you need.
- You'd like the option of a managed cloud, priced by the data you send.
Choose Ultraviolet if
- You want every service on a node covered without instrumenting each one — including third-party and legacy software.
- You want session replay and synthetic checks in the same product.
- You'd rather have one price per node than a bill that follows data volume.
Side by side
| Ultraviolet | SigNoz | |
|---|---|---|
| Where your telemetry is stored | UltravioletYour cluster, on your disks | SigNozSelf-hosted, or SigNoz Cloud, or your cloud account managed by SigNoz |
| Getting data in | UltravioletA collector on every node sees every service — no code changes | SigNozOpenTelemetry SDKs; no-code eBPF instrumentation runs as a sidecar per workload |
| OpenTelemetry | UltravioletAccepted alongside what the collector sees | SigNozBuilt on it, end to end |
| Source code | UltravioletCommercial | SigNozOpen source (MIT), with enterprise features under a separate license |
| Price | Ultraviolet$25 per node per month, everything included | SigNozSelf-hosted Community free; Cloud from $49/month, then $0.30/GB of logs or traces |
| Real user monitoring | UltravioletWeb Vitals, errors, sessions and session replay | SigNozBrowser traces and Web Vitals through OpenTelemetry; no session replay |
| Synthetic monitoring | UltravioletHTTP, TCP, DNS, gRPC and heartbeat checks | SigNozNot offered (HTTP health checks through the collector) |
How data gets in
SigNoz is OpenTelemetry-native: applications send traces, metrics and logs through OpenTelemetry SDKs and collectors, and you get exactly the spans and attributes you instrumented. For software you can't change, SigNoz documents OpenTelemetry's eBPF instrumentation, which runs as a sidecar container next to each workload you want to observe.
Ultraviolet runs one collector per node. It sees every service on that node — yours, third-party, legacy — as soon as it starts, with requests, connections, traces and CPU profiles and nothing to add per workload. Applications that are already instrumented with OpenTelemetry can send to it too, and their spans join the same traces.
What it costs
SigNoz's self-hosted Community edition is free and open source; its self-hosted Enterprise edition is priced on request. SigNoz Cloud starts at $49 a month, then charges $0.30 per GB of logs or traces and $0.10 per million metric samples. Ultraviolet is $25 per node per month, with nothing metered by volume — keeping more data costs disk in your own environment.
Where Ultraviolet covers more
The browser side. SigNoz takes browser traces and Web Vitals through OpenTelemetry. Ultraviolet adds sessions, JavaScript errors and session replay, masked by default, and joins a user's request to the backend trace it caused.
Synthetic checks. Ultraviolet runs HTTP, TCP, DNS, gRPC and heartbeat checks from inside your cluster and from other locations, alerting and feeding service-level objectives. SigNoz doesn't offer synthetic monitoring.
Where SigNoz is the better choice
Open source, OpenTelemetry first. SigNoz's core is MIT licensed, with a large community, and it's built around the standard many teams are standardising on. If your services are already instrumented, it fits them naturally — and its self-hosted edition costs nothing.
Trying both
Both run in your own environment and can run side by side while you compare. Ultraviolet's live demo runs on a real cluster with real traffic, no sales call needed.
Claims about SigNoz were checked against its public documentation and pricing on October 15, 2026. Products and prices change — we're happy to walk through a current, specific comparison on a call.
- SigNoz pricing
- SigNoz zero-code eBPF instrumentation
- SigNoz frontend traces with OpenTelemetry
- SigNoz license
SigNoz is a trademark of its owner. Ultraviolet Observability is not affiliated with SigNoz.
Run it in your own cluster this week.
A 30-minute call, then an evaluation core on your infrastructure. You will see your own services, traces and logs — from your own traffic — before you decide anything.
- No data leaves your environment, including during the trial
- Helm install, works fully air-gapped
- You talk to the engineers who built it