CubeAPM vs. IBM Instana

Overview
ProductRatingMost Used ByProduct SummaryStarting Price
CubeAPM
Score 8.2 out of 10
N/A
CubeAPM is a full-stack observability platform built on OpenTelemetry that enables engineering teams to monitor services, infrastructure, logs, and metrics from a single pane of glass. Teams can self-host CubeAPM inside their own cloud or on-premises environment, or use it as a managed deployment. It delivers full-stack visibility with smart sampling, alerting, tracing, and unlimited data retention at a flat usage-based price of $0.15 per GB. Many teams face a trade-off in…
$0.15
per month per GB
IBM Instana
Score 8.1 out of 10
N/A
Instana, an IBM company since the December 2020 acquisition, provides APM services for SOA, microservices, containerized applications and Kubernetes, and cloud native applications, as well as discovery and monitoring for IT assets.
$75
per month per Managed Virtual Server (MVS)
Pricing
CubeAPMIBM Instana
Editions & Modules
Pro
$0.15
per month Per GB
Essentials
$20
per month per Managed Virtual Server (MVS)
Standard
$75
per month per Managed Virtual Server (MVS)
Self-Hosted
$93.80
per month per Managed Virtual Server (MVS)
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
CubeAPMIBM Instana
Free Trial
YesYes
Free/Freemium Version
NoNo
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
NoNo
Entry-level Setup FeeNo setup feeNo setup fee
Additional DetailsCubeAPM follows a transparent & predictable usage-based pricing model starting at $0.15 per GB of data ingested per month. Unlike traditional APM tools that charge by host or agent, CubeAPM pricing scales linearly with data volume—no hidden fees, overages, or lock-ins. Teams can deploy self-hosted or managed versions with unlimited data retention and predictable monthly billing. Enterprise plans include ISO 27001-certified infrastructure, dedicated support, and volume-based discounts.
More Pricing Information
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User Ratings
CubeAPMIBM Instana
Likelihood to Recommend
-
(0 ratings)
8.0
(47 ratings)
Likelihood to Renew
-
(0 ratings)
8.2
(1 ratings)
Usability
-
(0 ratings)
8.2
(3 ratings)
Support Rating
-
(0 ratings)
4.5
(1 ratings)
User Testimonials
CubeAPMIBM Instana
Likelihood to Recommend
Lighthusky Technologies Pvt Ltd
most of the needs are covered.
Read full review
IBM
With enterprise IT assets in a multitude of ecosystems, cloud infrastructures and sometimes still left stuck in a legacy on prem architecture, IBM Instana makes it easy to get the right data to drive development and / or DevSecOps processes with tangible input from the target environment itself.
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Pros
Lighthusky Technologies Pvt Ltd
  • Alerting on set matrices
  • View graphs for needed matrices of our Application
  • with lower cost w.r.t the service we were using previously.
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IBM
  • Can monitor application(s) and system(s) with very large throughput of transactions by the second ( it gets everything !!!)
  • Provide strong drill down for your applications and will tell you where the points of failure of an application's is ( servers , network , Databases , etc you name it )
  • Very easy to set up and have it up and running when using the SaaS solution. There's an on premise solution which works just as well but requires more effort and preparation from an infrastructure point of view for your teams to implement.
  • Continuously improve their features and their agents auto-update and keep up. All while not interfering with your applications.
  • Let's you create your own dashboards and visualizations that can be tailored for different kind of users with the data collected.
  • Create your own events and smart alerts so you can know on the spot if something is happening or is likely to happen that needs addressing on your applications / systems
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Cons
Lighthusky Technologies Pvt Ltd
  • if posible more details on DB query, Like NR used to give details of even Index used for that slow query. This might make easy to solve slow DB query ( wrong-index issue)
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IBM
  • It's very difficult to create custom dashboards, only a handful of scenarios can be visualized to dashboards.
  • Extracting information from Instana to further analysis into excel for example is something that can be improved. Using an API to get data is very limiting.
  • Open telemetry features which allow to send application data to Instana is not working as documented.
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Likelihood to Renew
Lighthusky Technologies Pvt Ltd
No answers on this topic
IBM
Instana has been able to fulfill our all requirement and provide out of box solution for multiple component like AWS RDS Monitoring and real time alerting setup on basis of that. it is also easy to integrate with other open-source alerting and monitoring tools which makes it easier to incorporate into our solutions
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Usability
Lighthusky Technologies Pvt Ltd
We uses it.
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IBM
IBM Instana totally alters our monitoring approach since it increases the stability of the system and simplifies the process of problem solving. And since it helps to lower the degree of alert exhaustion that we experience, it is a total game changer for us.
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Support Rating
Lighthusky Technologies Pvt Ltd
No answers on this topic
IBM
IBM instana support team is good but when we ask them for support, they keep asking same thing again and again and mostly there is no solution
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Alternatives Considered
Lighthusky Technologies Pvt Ltd
Satisfactory
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IBM
As a DevOps engineer, I've explored various Application Performance Monitoring (APM) tools, including New Relic for real-time insights, AppDynamics for code-level visibility, Dynatrace for AI-driven monitoring, Datadog for comprehensive observability, Splunk for log management, Stackify Retrace for error tracking, and Raygun for crash reporting. Each tool offers distinct features, and the choice depends on specific use cases, technology stacks, and organizational needs. Thorough evaluations, considering factors like ease of use, integration capabilities, and scalability, help in selecting the most suitable APM solution for effective application monitoring in a DevOps environment.
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Return on Investment
Lighthusky Technologies Pvt Ltd
  • Gave us the needed feature which we were using with lower cost
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IBM
  • Increase up time by early failure identification and performance optimization based on findings in Instana.
  • Enhance user experience by mapping user issues with backend failures
  • Automated actions help fixing known issues without human intervention
  • increase support team efficiency by root cause analysis which decrease the incident solving time
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ScreenShots

CubeAPM Screenshots

Screenshot of the CubeAPM Home pageScreenshot of an APM pageScreenshot of log managementScreenshot of the Real User Monitoring dashboardScreenshot of Infrastructure MonitoringScreenshot of Error Tracking