Blackfire
Application performance monitoring (APM) tools
Monitoring software
- Features
- Ease of use
- Ease of management
- Quality of support
- Affordability
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€33.25 per month
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What is Blackfire
Blackfire is an application performance profiling and monitoring tool focused on PHP applications and common PHP frameworks. It helps developers and performance engineers identify bottlenecks using code-level profiling, performance assertions, and comparisons across builds or environments. Typical use cases include diagnosing slow requests, preventing performance regressions in CI/CD, and tuning production workloads with low-overhead sampling. It differentiates from broader observability suites by emphasizing deterministic profiling workflows and performance testing gates rather than full-stack monitoring breadth.
Code-level PHP profiling
Blackfire provides function-level profiling for PHP, enabling teams to pinpoint where CPU time and memory are spent within a request. It supports common PHP runtimes and frameworks, which makes it practical for web application performance work. The focus on profiling complements log- and trace-centric tools by providing more direct evidence of hot paths in code.
Performance regression gating
Blackfire supports performance assertions and comparisons that can be used in automated pipelines. Teams can set budgets (for example, response time, memory, or specific call-path metrics) and fail builds when regressions occur. This makes performance a testable requirement rather than an ad-hoc investigation activity.
Low-overhead production monitoring
Blackfire includes production-oriented monitoring modes designed to reduce overhead compared with always-on deep profiling. It can collect performance signals from live traffic and help prioritize which endpoints or transactions to profile in depth. This is useful for teams that need actionable performance data without deploying a full observability platform.
Primarily PHP-centric scope
Blackfire’s core value is strongest for PHP applications; organizations with polyglot stacks may need additional tools for other languages. This can increase operational complexity when standardizing observability across teams. It is less suited as a single pane of glass for infrastructure, logs, and multi-language tracing.
Not a full observability suite
Blackfire focuses on profiling and application performance workflows rather than comprehensive log management, distributed tracing across many services, or infrastructure monitoring. Teams often pair it with separate tools for error tracking, log analytics, and metrics dashboards. Buyers expecting an all-in-one monitoring platform may find coverage gaps.
Requires instrumentation and tuning
Using Blackfire typically involves installing agents/probes and configuring environments, permissions, and sampling/profiling strategies. Effective use also requires teams to interpret profiling data and translate it into code changes, which can be a learning curve. In some environments (locked-down hosting, certain container setups), deployment constraints can add friction.
Plan & Pricing
| Plan | Price | Key features & notes |
|---|---|---|
| Production | €158.25 per month (billed yearly) or €189.90 per month (monthly) | Included: Profiling, Performance Monitoring, Continuous Profiling (5GB/month), Alerting, Continuous Testing, Integrations, Manual Assertions. Includes 3 users, 1 environment, 1M monitoring traces (add-on scalability listed). Add-ons and extras: additional user €24.92/month, additional environment €58.25/month, additional monitoring traces (1M) €41.67/month, additional continuous profiling (1GB) €10/month, front-end observability (1M) €41.67/month; debug/magento/security/quality add-ons listed with prices on site. |
| Development | €33.25 per month (billed yearly; only yearly available) | Included: Profiling, Manual assertions. Includes 1 user. Add-ons: additional user €33.25/month, some add-ons available (prices vary). Development plan has reduced feature set vs Production (no Monitoring traces, limited Continuous Profiling/Front-end Observability when not included). |
Seller details
Blackfire SAS
Paris, France
2013
Private
https://www.blackfire.io/
https://x.com/blackfireio
https://www.linkedin.com/company/blackfire
