AppSignal alternative: Vigil
Updated · prices checked September 2026
Teams look for an AppSignal alternative when growing traffic pushes the request-based tier up, or when they need more uptime checks, private status pages or Kubernetes health than an APM provides. Vigil is priced by monitors and servers, not requests. If APM depth for Ruby or Elixir is what you rely on, AppSignal is the better tool.
Why people look for a AppSignal alternative
AppSignal pricing September 2026
- Free: 50k requests a month, 1 GB of logging, 5-day retention.
- Paid plans are priced by request volume, starting at $279/year ($23.25/month billed yearly) for 250k requests a month, with 1 GB of logging.
- Unlimited users, teams, apps, hosts and dashboards on every plan.
- Add-ons: long-term log storage $89/month, HIPAA compliance $89/month. No overage charges; they only discuss an upgrade after you exceed limits 2 of 3 months.
Source: as of September 2026, from appsignal.com/plans. Vendors change prices; the AppSignal site is authoritative.
Vigil pricing
- Free: 20 monitors at 5-minute checks, 1 server, 1 status page, 3 team members, 7 days of history, Telegram/Slack/Discord alerts. Commercial use allowed. Free forever.
- Starter $19/month: 50 monitors at 1-minute intervals, 3 servers, 3 status pages, unlimited team members, 30 days of history.
- Pro $49/month: 200 monitors at 1-minute intervals, 15 servers, unlimited team members, 10 status pages with custom domain, password and white-label, 2,000,000 log lines, 5 Kubernetes clusters, RUM, 150 AI analyses, 90 days of history.
- Business $149/month: 1,000 monitors, 100 servers, unlimited team members, 10 identity providers (SSO, SAML, SCIM), 10 private locations, 1-year history.
- Every feature, including SSO, SLOs and private locations, is on every plan; the plans differ only in numbers.
- New accounts start on a 14-day Pro trial with no card, then stay on Free unless you choose a plan. Yearly billing gets 2 months free, no overage charges.
- Self-hosted $149/month per instance on your own server or air-gapped network.
- Add-ons on paid plans from $4: +50 monitors ($5), +5 servers ($5), +5 status pages ($4), +1M log lines ($4).
Flat monthly prices, no per-host, per-GB or per-run meters. Full plan matrix.
Feature and price comparison
✓ included · ~ partial or paid add-on · ✕ not offered. Vigil figures are for the $49 Pro plan unless stated.
| AppSignal | Vigil | |
|---|---|---|
| Uptime / API monitors and fastest interval | ~ Uptime checks from four locations, part of the APM plan | ✓ 20 Free (5-minute checks) / 50 Starter / 200 Pro / 1,000 Business. 1-minute checks on paid plans, 12 monitor types (Uptime, API check, API flow, Browser check, Heartbeat, TCP port, Domain & DNS, App health, Dependency, Content change, Price / number, Keyword) |
| Servers (infrastructure agent) | ✓ Host metrics: CPU, memory, disk I/O, load, network | ✓ 1 / 3 / 15 / 100 servers included. Single-file agent for Linux and macOS, PowerShell agent for Windows: CPU, memory, disks, network, processes, services, Docker, packages, vulnerabilities, disk forecasts |
| Logs | ✓ 1 GB a month included; long-term storage $89/month | ✓ 10k / 250k / 2M / 10M lines included. File and journald shipping, full-text search, live tail, log-alert rules |
| APM / traces | ✓ Full APM for many languages with anomaly detection; deeper than Vigil's | ~ Any OpenTelemetry SDK can send traces, metrics and logs over OTLP; Vigil's own lightweight SDKs cover Python and Node. Endpoints with p95 and Apdex, stored slow traces, slow queries, N+1 detection, service map. Not a full APM suite: no profiling |
| Kubernetes | ~ Kubernetes integration for metrics; check their docs | ✓ 1 cluster on Free and Starter, 5 on Pro, unlimited on Business. DaemonSet manifest; incidents for CrashLoopBackOff, OOMKilled, NotReady, pressure |
| Real User Monitoring | ~ Front-end JavaScript error tracking | ✓ Web Vitals p75, page views, JS errors. 1 site Free, 2 sites / 100k views Starter, 10 sites / 1M views Pro, 50 sites / 10M views Business |
| Status pages: private, custom domain, white-label | ~ Free public status page for uptime checks; no private pages | ✓ Private by default, password or private-link sharing, custom domain with automatic HTTPS, white-label and custom CSS on every paid plan. 1 / 3 / 10 / 50 pages |
| Team seats | ✓ Unlimited users | ✓ 3 on Free, unlimited on every paid plan. Owner / admin / member / viewer roles |
| Alert channels (incl. Telegram) | ✓ Email, Slack, PagerDuty, webhooks and many more integrations | ✓ Telegram, Slack, Discord, Teams, Google Chat, Matrix, ntfy, Gotify, Pushover, webhooks (HMAC, templates), email, phone push. Tickets to PagerDuty, Opsgenie, Jira, ServiceNow, Zendesk (1 ticketing channel on Free, more on paid plans). No SMS or phone calls on the hosted service; the self-hosted edition pages by SMS and call through your own Twilio account |
| Self-hosted option | ✕ SaaS only | ✓ Full product on your server or air-gapped network, $149/month per instance, one-line installer, signed releases |
| AI incident analysis | ✕ No incident root-cause analysis; check their site for current AI features | ✓ One-click root cause, fix and postmortem draft from the incident's evidence. 5 / 30 / 150 / 1,000 analyses a month |
| Error tracking | ✓ Built in, with its own language integrations | ✓ Any Sentry SDK works: create a project and point the SDK's DSN at Vigil. Issues grouped by fingerprint with stack traces, breadcrumbs, users and releases; alerts on new issues, regressions and spikes. 1k / 20k / 200k / 2M events a day and 1 / 3 / 15 / 100 projects. No session replay or profiling |
| Cron job / heartbeat monitoring | ✓ Check-ins for cron jobs and processes | ✓ Heartbeats count as monitors (20 / 50 / 200 / 1,000). Fixed period with grace time or a cron expression with timezone; /start for run time, /fail, /<exit-code>; POSTed job output kept as a log; maximum run time |
| Small team: 3 servers, 50 monitors, 5 people | From $23.25/month (billed yearly) for 250k requests, unlimited users and hosts; the tier depends on your traffic | ✓ $19/month on Starter (3 servers, 50 monitors, unlimited team members included) |
Small-team estimate uses public list prices and the cheapest tier that covers 3 servers, 50 monitors at 1-minute intervals and 5 people. Where a vendor meters by run, GB or hour we show the arithmetic so you can redo it with your own numbers.
What AppSignal does well
- Real APM (errors, performance, slow request alerts, anomaly detection) for Ruby, Elixir, Node.js, Python, Go, Java, PHP and more.
- Host monitoring, uptime checks from four locations with a free public status page, and cron check-ins included.
- Fair pricing: unlimited users and hosts, no surprise invoices.
Where Vigil is ahead
Limits of AppSignal that Vigil does not have:
- Priced by request volume, so a busy app moves up tiers even with a small team.
- Uptime and status pages are basic next to its APM; no private status pages.
- No Kubernetes cluster health or RUM Web Vitals, and no self-hosted option.
When to pick AppSignal instead
Pick AppSignal if application performance monitoring is the core need, especially for Ruby on Rails or Elixir, and you want errors, host metrics and check-ins in the same fair-priced tool.
What Vigil does not do
- Browser checks use a short line-by-line script run in headless Chromium (with screenshots), not full Playwright test code kept in git.
- No SMS or phone-call alerting on the hosted service (the self-hosted edition can page by SMS and call through your own Twilio account); hosted alerts go to chat apps, phone push, email, webhooks and ticketing tools.
- On-call is simple: rotations, overrides, escalation and acknowledgements, without the scheduling depth of PagerDuty or incident.io.
- Vigil's own APM SDKs are Python and Node; other languages send traces through any OpenTelemetry SDK over OTLP. There is no profiling, and it is not a substitute for a full APM suite.
- Checks run from Vigil's servers plus private locations you host; there is no menu of dozens of public regions.
Moving from AppSignal to Vigil
1. Export what you have
List your AppSignal monitors (their API or UI export). You need a name, URL or host, interval and the expected status or keyword for each.
2. Apply as code
Write them as Vigil's YAML and apply with PUT /api/v1/config; the same endpoint exports everything back, so monitors can live in git. Or create them one by one through the REST API (monitors, incidents, maintenance, deploy markers).
3. Reconnect alerts
Add Telegram, Slack, Discord, Teams, ntfy, Pushover, email or webhook channels; set escalation to a second channel set. Point your cron jobs at the new heartbeat URLs and install the server agent with one command.
Run both side by side during the trial: Vigil's alert ingestion accepts Alertmanager and Grafana-style webhooks, so existing alerts can appear on a Vigil status page while you move over.
Frequently asked
Is Vigil's APM as good as AppSignal's?
No. Vigil records endpoint latency, error rates, traces and a service map from its own Python and Node SDKs or any OpenTelemetry SDK. AppSignal is a deeper APM with automatic instrumentation for many languages.
Can I use AppSignal's SDK with Vigil?
No. Vigil's error tracking takes Sentry SDK events; you would add the Sentry SDK and point it at your Vigil DSN.
How is Vigil priced?
By plan limits, not traffic: Starter $19 (50 monitors, 3 servers), Pro $49 (200 monitors, 15 servers), Business $149 (1,000 monitors, 100 servers), unlimited team members, no overage charges.
Can I use both?
Yes. Keep AppSignal for APM and use Vigil for uptime, API flows, heartbeats, status pages and on-call. Vigil can also take alert webhooks from other tools.
Ready to leave AppSignal?
Start free: every new account gets 14 days of Pro, no card. When the trial ends the account stays on Free (20 monitors) unless you choose a plan, and everything you set up stays.
Vigil vs AppSignal · All comparisons: Better Stack · UptimeRobot · Freshping · Uptime Kuma · Pingdom · StatusCake · Hyperping · Checkly · Atlassian Statuspage · Instatus · OpenStatus · Cronitor · Healthchecks.io · Sentry · GlitchTip · BugSnag · Rollbar · Honeybadger · PagerDuty · Opsgenie · Datadog · New Relic · Grafana Cloud · Dynatrace