StackShareStackShare
Follow on
StackShare

Discover and share technology stacks from companies around the world.

Follow on

© 2025 StackShare. All rights reserved.

Product

  • Stacks
  • Tools
  • Feed

Company

  • About
  • Contact

Legal

  • Privacy Policy
  • Terms of Service
  1. Stackups
  2. DevOps
  3. Performance Monitoring
  4. Performance Monitoring
  5. Blackfire.io vs Instrumental

Blackfire.io vs Instrumental

OverviewComparisonAlternatives

Overview

Instrumental
Instrumental
Stacks16
Followers15
Votes7
Blackfire.io
Blackfire.io
Stacks66
Followers67
Votes14

Blackfire.io vs Instrumental: What are the differences?

Blackfire.io: Blackfire Profiler automatically instruments your code to gather data about consumed server resources like memory, CPU time, and I/O. Blackfire achieves a new level of accuracy by aggregating several profile samples and getting rid of non relevant data. Get even deeper and review the interactions with your entire stack (SQL database engines, cache servers, ...); Instrumental: Visualize any aspect of your application performance, measure production code in real-time, and share with your entire team. Instrumental is a real-time application and server monitoring platform. With over a million datapoints processed every second, we're one of the highest scale monitoring services.

Blackfire.io and Instrumental can be categorized as "Performance Monitoring" tools.

Some of the features offered by Blackfire.io are:

  • Profile a page at a mouse click thanks to the Blackfire web browser extension
  • Browse through the function calls and identify performance bottlenecks thanks to the Blackfire intuitive UI
  • Because Blackfire is only triggered when you profile a request, there is no overhead for other requests

On the other hand, Instrumental provides the following key features:

  • Application monitoring - we accept any volume of arbitrary data, making it easy to set up graphs to measure the performance of your application in real time
  • Server monitoring - Ruby apps can use our instrumental tools gem to monitor information like CPU statistics, memory usage, disk space, and all the other things you'll need to monitor your servers. Language support - Ruby is supported using a custom library, and all other languages are supported with our Statsd backend
  • RESTful API - upon authentication, data is collected and returned in strict JSON format

"Deep insights into PHP request cycle" is the primary reason why developers consider Blackfire.io over the competitors, whereas "Best, fastest, and easiest-to-use Interface" was stated as the key factor in picking Instrumental.

Share your Stack

Help developers discover the tools you use. Get visibility for your team's tech choices and contribute to the community's knowledge.

View Docs
CLI (Node.js)
or
Manual

Detailed Comparison

Instrumental
Instrumental
Blackfire.io
Blackfire.io

Instrumental is a real-time application and server monitoring platform. With over a million datapoints processed every second, we're one of the highest scale monitoring services.

Monitor, profile and test your application even before it is released in production. Get actionable insights to improve your code rather than spend time figuring out what’s wrong. Ensure optimal performance and user experience for your web

Application monitoring - we accept any volume of arbitrary data, making it easy to set up graphs to measure the performance of your application in real time; Server monitoring - Ruby apps can use our instrumental tools gem to monitor information like CPU statistics, memory usage, disk space, and all the other things you'll need to monitor your servers. Language support - Ruby is supported using a custom library, and all other languages are supported with our Statsd backend; RESTful API - upon authentication, data is collected and returned in strict JSON format; Powerful query language - easily retrieve and graph a set of metrics matching a particular pattern; Highly scalable - Instrumental processes billions of data points per day; Built for teams - add team members, manage roles and permissions, and easily share graphs; Alerts - you can be notified via email, text message or at an http endpoint you control; Embedded graphs - create a graph and use it outside of the service with an embedded link;
Monitoring HTTP and CLI; Alerting; Profiling Web Pages, CLI scripts, API Calls; Timeline & Callgraph visualizations; Wall Time, CPU, I/O, Memory, Network, HTTP calls, SQL requests dimensions; Distributed Profiling; Assertions; Profiling Automations; Integrations with CI/CD; Periodic profiling; Test reports; Performance, Quality & Security Checks; Supports all PHP versions from 5.3, Python 2.7 and 3.x, , Go 1.9 and higher; PHP, Python and Go SDK
Statistics
Stacks
16
Stacks
66
Followers
15
Followers
67
Votes
7
Votes
14
Pros & Cons
Pros
  • 3
    Best, fastest, and easiest-to-use Interface
  • 2
    Simple, powerful, reasonably priced
  • 1
    Offers free metrics
  • 1
    Custom metrics done right
Pros
  • 7
    Deep insights into PHP request cycle
  • 5
    Performance profiling
  • 2
    Intuitive UI
Integrations
No integrations available
GitLab
GitLab
GitHub
GitHub
Bitbucket
Bitbucket
Firefox
Firefox
Fastly
Fastly
Postman
Postman
Chef
Chef
Typo3
Typo3
Django CMS
Django CMS
HipChat
HipChat

What are some alternatives to Instrumental, Blackfire.io?

New Relic

New Relic

The world’s best software and DevOps teams rely on New Relic to move faster, make better decisions and create best-in-class digital experiences. If you run software, you need to run New Relic. More than 50% of the Fortune 100 do too.

Datadog

Datadog

Datadog is the leading service for cloud-scale monitoring. It is used by IT, operations, and development teams who build and operate applications that run on dynamic or hybrid cloud infrastructure. Start monitoring in minutes with Datadog!

Raygun

Raygun

Raygun gives you a window into how users are really experiencing your software applications. Detect, diagnose and resolve issues that are affecting end users with greater speed and accuracy.

AppSignal

AppSignal

AppSignal gives you and your team alerts and detailed metrics about your Ruby, Node.js or Elixir application. Sensible pricing, no aggressive sales & support by developers.

AppDynamics

AppDynamics

AppDynamics develops application performance management (APM) solutions that deliver problem resolution for highly distributed applications through transaction flow monitoring and deep diagnostics.

Stackify

Stackify

Stackify offers the only developers-friendly innovative cloud based solution that fully integrates application performance management (APM) with error and log. Allowing them to easily monitor, detect and resolve application issues faster

Skylight

Skylight

Skylight is a smart profiler for your Rails apps that visualizes request performance across all of your servers.

Librato

Librato

Librato provides a complete solution for monitoring and understanding the metrics that impact your business at all levels of the stack. We provide everything you need to visualize, analyze, and actively alert on the metrics that matter to you.

Keymetrics

Keymetrics

PM2 is a production process manager for Node.js applications with a built-in load balancer. It allows you to keep applications alive forever, to reload them without downtime and to facilitate common system admin tasks.

Dynatrace

Dynatrace

It is an AI-powered, full stack, automated performance management solution. It provides user experience analysis that identifies and resolves application performance issues faster than ever before.

Related Comparisons

GitHub
Bitbucket

Bitbucket vs GitHub vs GitLab

GitHub
Bitbucket

AWS CodeCommit vs Bitbucket vs GitHub

Kubernetes
Rancher

Docker Swarm vs Kubernetes vs Rancher

gulp
Grunt

Grunt vs Webpack vs gulp

Graphite
Kibana

Grafana vs Graphite vs Kibana