SIGNOZ VS AWS CLOUDWATCHAWS CloudWatch
Alternative
Alternative
Open-source observability with transparent pricing. Get logs, metrics, and traces in
one place without CloudWatch's fragmented consoles and 12+ billing components.
Why Teams Switch From CloudWatch
Unpredictable costs after free tier
Four separate consoles during incidents
High context-switching tax
Per-query billing on every search
Architecture & Approach
across separate services (Metrics, Logs, X-Ray, Application Signals), each with its own
storage, console, and query language. SigNoz stores all telemetry in a single ClickHouse
database with a unified query interface.
| Feature | SigNoz | AWS CloudWatch |
|---|---|---|
| Query Interface | Single UI for all correlated signals (Logs, Metrics and Traces) | Separate consoles (CloudWatch, Logs Insights, X-Ray, Application Signals) |
| Billing model | Usage-based (GB ingested), predictable scaling using cost meter | Per-service, per-query, per-API call charges, unpredictable |
| Telemetry standard | OpenTelemetry-native | Proprietary (migrating to OpenTelemetry via ADOT) |
| Query language | Supports Query builder, PromQL and ClickHouse QL | Different query language per signal Logs Insights QL, Metrics statistics, X-Ray filter expressions, OpenSearch PPL/SQL |
| Data storage | ClickHouse columnar database | Separate stores per service (Metrics, Logs, X-Ray, Application Signals) |
| Retention | Hot storage (15-180 days), Cold storage (upto 2 years) | Metrics: 3 hours to 15 months with auto-aggregation. Logs: $0.03/GB/month. X-Ray: 30 days max |
| Deployment Options | SigNoz Cloud or Self-hosted | AWS managed per region |
Pricing
You shouldn't pay to look at your own data
CloudWatch's
billing
complexity
CloudWatch pricing details 1. Data costs
Log ingestion at $0.50/GB (67% more than SigNoz), storage at $0.03/GB/month, and $0.005/GB scanned per query. Searching 1TB of logs costs $5 per search.
2. Metric costs
Custom metrics at $0.30/metric/month where each dimension combination creates a separate billable metric. A metric tracking 1,000 user IDs becomes 1,000 metrics at $300/month.
3. Observability infrastructure
Dashboards at $3/month after first 3, alarms at $0.10-$0.30/month, X-Ray traces at $0.000005 per trace recorded and retrieved, Application Signals at $0.20/GB ingested.
4. API and monitoring overhead
GetMetricData charges when third-party tools poll metrics. Detailed monitoring converts free metrics into billable custom metrics. Container Insights adds per-cluster/node/pod charges. Cross-account observability adds data transfer fees.
Simple
usage-based
pricing
SigNoz eliminates query costs, dashboard fees, and API charges. Pay only for data volume ingested.
Use the calculator below to estimate costs, then track actual usage with Cost Meter to catch unexpected bursts before they impact your bill.
Traces
Logs
MetricsDeployment & Data Residency
Your Data, Your Infrastructure, Your Rules.
Fragmented AWS CloudWatch
Opaque Infrastructure Costs
SigNoz Cloud
A fully managed observability backend. We handle the ClickHouse infrastructure, scaling, and security patches. Includes built-in SOC2 Type II and HIPAA compliance with data centers in US, EU, and India regions to minimize latency and meet residency requirements.
Zero-ops deployment. Up and running in <5 minutes.
Managed Data Residency
Bring Your Own Cloud. SigNoz manages the Control Plane (UI and alerting logic), but the Data Plane (ClickHouse and OTel Collectors) stays entirely within your VPC. You get SaaS convenience while ensuring 100% of your telemetry data never leaves your network.
Ideal for security-sensitive workloads that prohibit external data egress.
Enterprise Self-Hosted
Designed for high-volume Kubernetes environments. Features include OIDC/SAML SSO, granular RBAC, and Audit Logs. Includes dedicated engineering support for architectural reviews and performance tuning of large-scale ClickHouse clusters.
Supports air-gapped environments and custom long-term retention policies.
Community Edition
Built on open standards and trusted by thousands of developers globally. Use the same high-performance architecture as our Cloud and Enterprise versions on your own infrastructure. No seat limits and no hidden fees, just pure observability with 25k+ GitHub stars.
OTel-native with total visibility into the source code.
Developers
Love
SigNoz
Your data stays where you want
Use SigNoz cloud with your data staying in the US, EU, or India, or self-host.
Cloud
Fully managed, SOC 2-compliant, ideal for teams who want to start quickly without managing infrastructure.
Self-Host
For tighter security & data residency requirements. It is Apache 2.0 open source, built on open standards.
10 million+
OSS Downloads
25k+
GitHub Stars
Every single time we have an issue, SigNoz is always the first place to check. It was super straightforward to migrate - just updating the exporter configuration, basically three lines of code.Karl Lyons Senior SRE, Shaped
Charlie Shen
Lead DevOps Engineer, Brainfish
I've studied more than 10 observability tools in the market. We eventually landed on SigNoz, which says a lot. Compared to Elastic Cloud, it's a breeze with SigNoz.
Niranjan Ravichandra
Co-founder & CTO, Cedana
Getting started with SigNoz was incredibly easy. We were able to set up the OpenTelemetry collector quickly and start monitoring our systems almost immediately.
Poonkuyilan V
IT Infrastructure Lead, The Hindu
Recently, we configured alerts for pod restarts and were able to quickly identify and resolve the root cause before it escalated. Additionally, SigNoz's tracing capabilities helped us spot unwanted calls to third-party systems, allowing us to optimize our applications.
Avneesh Kumar
VP of Engineering, Mailmodo
We have started saving almost six hours on a daily basis, which we can now invest in other tech debts and backlogs. The best thing about SigNoz is that it's open source. I can go into the source code and look at what's happening. That's a great confidence booster for long-term usage.
Khushhal Reddy
Senior Backend Engineer, Kiwi
SigNoz is something we use daily. If I have ten tabs open, six of them are SigNoz. We used traces and it helped us take 30 seconds down to 3 seconds.
