OpenObserve vs SigNoz

Yes, if you like SigNoz's open-source, OpenTelemetry-native approach but want simpler operations and cheaper storage. Both cover logs, metrics, traces, dashboards, and alerts. The core difference is architecture: SigNoz stores data in ClickHouse on disks, while OpenObserve stores compressed Parquet on object storage (S3/GCS/Azure/MinIO) with stateless compute. That means no database cluster to operate and much lower long-term retention costs. OpenObserve also adds built-in RUM with session replay and VRL-powered pipelines.

SigNoz Cloud starts at $49/month and bills usage at $0.30/GB for logs and traces and $0.10 per million metric samples, with 15-day default retention on logs and traces (longer retention costs more). OpenObserve Cloud is also usage-based, but because data lives on object storage, extended retention doesn't require tiered surcharges — and self-hosting OpenObserve keeps storage at commodity S3 prices (~$0.023/GB). For most workloads the gap widens the longer you retain data.

Easier than most migrations, because both platforms are OpenTelemetry-native. Your instrumentation stays exactly as it is — you add an OTLP exporter for OpenObserve to your existing OTel Collector and dual-ship while you validate. The real work is recreating dashboards and alert rules, which most teams complete in days to a few weeks depending on how many they have. There is no proprietary agent to rip out.

SigNoz is a solid product: genuinely open source, OTel-native, with a polished APM experience and an approachable query builder. If your team is deeply invested in ClickHouse SQL for trace analytics, that's a real strength. What you take on with SigNoz self-hosted is operating ClickHouse (plus ZooKeeper) — sharding, rebalancing, disk management — and its frontend monitoring lacks session replay. OpenObserve trades the ClickHouse dependency for object storage and stateless nodes, and includes RUM and pipelines out of the box.

Yes. OpenObserve is open source and you can self-host it as a single binary, a single container, or an HA cluster via Helm on Kubernetes. Unlike SigNoz self-hosted, there is no external database to run: OpenObserve embeds its storage engine and writes to local disk or your own object storage bucket. Enterprise features like SSO and RBAC are available for self-hosted deployments as well.

Three reasons. Cost: S3-class storage runs around $0.023/GB versus significantly more for the block storage (plus replicas) ClickHouse needs. Operations: disks fill up, need resizing, and shard rebalancing is manual work; object storage is effectively infinite and fully managed. Durability: your telemetry sits in your own bucket in an open format (Apache Parquet), replicated by the cloud provider — losing a node never means losing data.

Yes. OpenObserve is SOC2 Type II certified and ISO 27001 compliant. We process over 2 PB of data daily across thousands of deployments, including Fortune 100 enterprises. Enterprise features include RBAC, SSO, sensitive data redaction, and dedicated support.