# Last9 vs SigNoz: A Managed SigNoz Alternative > Last9 vs SigNoz compared on AI and MCP, what the AI costs and where it runs, who runs the storage and upgrades, deployment in your own cloud, pricing, metric cardinality, and ingest-time control, with where each one fits. Source: https://last9.io/compare/signoz/ Both have an AI assistant and an MCP server. Last9 runs its agent on your model provider, with no charge per investigation, inside your own cloud account, on one licence, and Last9 runs the platform for you. SigNoz is open source and OpenTelemetry-native: your team runs it free on ClickHouse, or buys SigNoz Cloud. - **Gartner Cool Vendor 2025:** Named a Gartner® Cool Vendor in AI for SRE and Observability, cited for its unified telemetry platform. - **Your model, your cloud:** The Last9 agent runs on your model provider, with no per-investigation charge, in your own cloud account. - **One licence:** No meter per GB or per metric sample, and no ClickHouse for your team to run. The infrastructure runs on your own cloud bill. ## Last9 vs SigNoz at a glance The questions engineering teams ask when they compare the two. | | **Last9** | **SigNoz** | |---|---|---| | Does it have an MCP server for coding agents? | ✓ Yes, hosted, since March 2025, for any MCP client. An agent can act through it: add drop rules and edit dashboards | ✓ Yes, open source for self-hosted installs, and hosted on SigNoz Cloud since May 2026. An agent can edit alerts, dashboards, saved views, and notification channels through it | | What does the AI cost? | ✓ No per-query or per-investigation charge | Noz, the AI teammate, is free while in beta, on SigNoz Cloud. SigNoz has not published its price after beta | | Can the AI use our model provider, in our own cloud? | ✓ Yes. The Last9 agent runs on your model provider or inference endpoint, and Last9 runs in your own cloud account | No documented option. Noz runs on SigNoz Cloud, and SigNoz publishes no way to point it at your own model provider | | Who runs the storage, upgrades, and scaling? | ✓ Last9 does, in your own cloud account: it sizes the cluster, tunes it, and runs the upgrades | Your team, if self-hosted: ClickHouse, the collectors, and the schema migrations each upgrade runs. SigNoz Cloud runs it in SigNoz's own cloud | | Can it run in our own cloud account? | ✓ Yes. Last9 runs in your own cloud account, on AWS or GCP in any region, and manages it for you | ✓ Yes. BYOC, on Enterprise, runs SigNoz in your account, managed by SigNoz. A self-hosted install runs anywhere, without Noz | | How is it priced? | ✓ One licence. The infrastructure runs on your own cloud bill, at your negotiated rates | SigNoz Cloud meters logs and traces per GB and metrics per million samples, and users and hosts are unlimited. The community edition has no licence fee, and your team runs it | | How much metric cardinality can I keep? | ✓ No hard limit. 20M series per metric per day by default, raised on request, with no sampling and no charge per label or metric name | No published series limit, but SigNoz Cloud bills each metric sample, so every new label value adds to the bill. Volume Control, which aggregates labels at storage, is a private preview | | Can I filter telemetry before I pay to store it? | ✓ Yes, for all three signals, from the UI or Terraform. Drop, remap, redact, forward, and aggregate metrics, logs, and traces at ingest | In the collector config your team runs. Logs Pipelines in the UI run after ingest, so they do not reduce billed volume. SigNoz Cloud adds ingestion limits | | Can we self-host it with no licence fee? | No. Last9 runs it for you, in your own cloud account | ✓ Yes. The core is open source, and the community edition is free to run on your own servers | ## AI on your model, in your cloud - **Last9:** One assistant in the app, in Slack, and in your IDE through MCP. It investigates, builds a diagnosis dashboard, and hands you the link. - **Last9:** The production agent, Last9, responds to pages with context from Slack, Linear, and PagerDuty. It runs on your model provider or inference endpoint and picks the model for each step. Customer data is never used for training. - **Last9:** Through MCP, an agent adds a drop rule and stops ingesting the noisy source it found. - **Last9:** Click a point on a chart, a table row, an alert, or an exception, and choose Ask Last9 AI. The investigation starts from that value, in its service context. - **SigNoz:** Noz, SigNoz's AI teammate, is in beta on SigNoz Cloud and free while in beta. It answers questions across logs, traces, and metrics, and creates dashboards, alerts, and views. The SigNoz MCP server is open source for self-hosted installs, hosted on SigNoz Cloud since May 2026, and can edit alerts, dashboards, saved views, and notification channels. ## Managed in your cloud, with no ClickHouse to run - **Last9:** Last9 runs single-tenant in your own cloud account, on AWS or GCP in any region, and manages it for you. Last9 sizes the cluster, tunes it, and runs the upgrades. - **Last9:** One licence covers distributed tracing, profiling, custom metrics, custom dashboards, alerting, RBAC, and forward deployed engineers. The infrastructure runs on your own cloud bill, at your negotiated rates. - **Last9:** Support is a shared channel in Slack, Microsoft Teams, or Google Chat, with forward deployed engineers who know your setup. - **SigNoz:** Self-hosted SigNoz runs on ClickHouse, and your team operates the database, the collectors, and the schema migrations each upgrade runs. SigNoz Cloud runs it in SigNoz's own cloud, and BYOC, on Enterprise, runs it in your account, managed by SigNoz. - **Matters most for:** Teams whose engineers spend on-call hours on ClickHouse, collectors, and upgrades. ## Every label, and control at ingest - **Last9:** Labels like customer_id or tenant stay on the metric. No hard limit. 20M series per metric per day by default, raised on request, with no sampling and no charge per label or metric name. - **Last9:** Drop, remap, redact, forward, and aggregate metrics, logs, and traces at ingest, from the UI or as code with the Terraform provider. Every rule is previewed against live data before you save it. - **Last9:** PromQL and LogQL natively, with a builder and plain-English Ask Mode for anyone who does not write queries. Your own Grafana can also query Last9 metrics as a Prometheus data source. - **SigNoz:** SigNoz Cloud bills metrics per million samples and publishes no series limit. Volume Control aggregates metric labels at storage, in private preview. Logs Pipelines run after ingest, so they do not reduce billed volume, and the filters that do live in the collector config your team runs. - **Matters most for:** Teams whose per-customer or per-tenant labels grow faster than their budget. ## Which one fits your team? **Choose Last9 if:** - You want a generally available AI agent on your own model provider, with no charge per investigation - Your team spends on-call hours on ClickHouse, collectors, and upgrades, and wants the backend managed in your own cloud account - Your metrics carry per-customer or per-tenant labels, and per-sample billing is the complaint - You want to drop, remap, and aggregate all three signals at ingest, from one place - You want an MCP server an agent can use to change what is ingested **Choose SigNoz if:** - You want open source, and to run everything yourself with no licence fee - Your team has the time to run ClickHouse and the collectors - Your team writes ClickHouse SQL against its telemetry - You want an MCP server and LLM monitoring on a self-hosted install ## Moving off SigNoz What the switch involves, and what Last9 does for you. - **Forward deployed engineers:** A Last9 engineer runs the move with your team. - **Keep your instrumentation:** SigNoz is OpenTelemetry-native, so services already sending OTLP need only a new endpoint. Nothing is re-instrumented. - **Queries without ClickHouse SQL:** PromQL metric queries carry over. The Last9 agent moves your dashboards and alerts with your team, and rewrites ClickHouse SQL and SigNoz search queries in PromQL or LogQL. Anyone who does not write queries uses the builder or plain-English Ask Mode. - **Run both:** Keep self-hosted SigNoz where a free install fits, such as development and staging, and move production services to Last9. The OpenTelemetry Collector can send the same data to both while you compare them on your own incidents. ## The objections we hear most Each one is a fair reason to hesitate. ### SigNoz already has Noz and an MCP server. Why switch for AI? The difference is the price, the model, and where it runs. Noz is in beta on SigNoz Cloud, and SigNoz has not published its price after beta. The Last9 agent is generally available, runs on your model provider in your own cloud account, and has no per-investigation charge. Through MCP, an agent can also add drop rules and change what is ingested. ### SigNoz is open source and free to self-host. The community edition has no licence fee. The cost moves to the infrastructure and to the engineers who run ClickHouse, the collectors, and each upgrade. Last9 runs in your own cloud account, manages it for you, and bills one licence. ### SigNoz has a bring-your-own-cloud plan too. SigNoz BYOC is on Enterprise, managed by SigNoz, and Noz is documented on SigNoz Cloud. Last9 runs the whole platform in your own cloud account, on AWS or GCP in any region, including the AI agent on your model provider. ### SigNoz Cloud publishes its prices, with users and hosts unlimited. Its meters stay: logs and traces bill per GB, and metrics per million samples, so each new label value adds to the bill. Last9 is one licence, with no charge per label or metric name, and the infrastructure runs on your own cloud bill. ### Is Last9 proven at our scale? Last9 regularly handles 500M+ events a minute and 60M+ concurrent users, and has monitored 12 of the world's 20 largest streaming events. It is SOC 2 Type II certified and PCI ready, with SSO and access controls. Teams across fintech, healthcare, gaming, media, and commerce run it in production, including Replit, Pine Labs, Tata 1mg, and Housing.com. ## FAQ ### Is Last9 a good SigNoz alternative? SigNoz fits teams that want open source and have the time to run ClickHouse themselves, or want a published rate card on SigNoz Cloud. Last9 fits teams that want an AI agent on their own model provider with no per-investigation charge, a backend that Last9 manages in their own cloud account, high-cardinality metrics with no charge per label, and control of all three signals at ingest. ### How does Last9's MCP server compare with the SigNoz MCP server? The SigNoz MCP server is open source for self-hosted installs and hosted on SigNoz Cloud since May 2026, and an agent can edit alerts, dashboards, saved views, and notification channels through it. Last9's hosted MCP server, available since March 2025, works with any MCP client, such as Claude Code or Cursor, and lets an agent act on what it finds: add drop rules to change what is ingested, and edit dashboards. ### How does Last9's AI compare with SigNoz AI? SigNoz's AI teammate, Noz, is in beta on SigNoz Cloud and free while in beta, and SigNoz has not published its price after beta or an option to use your own model provider. The Last9 agent is generally available, has no per-query or per-investigation charge, and runs on your model provider inside your own cloud account. ### How does Last9 billing compare with SigNoz pricing? SigNoz pricing meters SigNoz Cloud usage: logs and traces per GB, and metrics per million samples, with users and hosts unlimited. The self-hosted community edition has no licence fee, and your team runs it. Last9 is one licence, and the infrastructure runs on your own cloud bill at your negotiated rates. ### How does Last9 compare with SigNoz ClickHouse? SigNoz stores logs, metrics, and traces in ClickHouse, which your team runs on a self-hosted install, and SigNoz Cloud bills each metric sample. Last9 runs the storage for you in your own cloud account, answers PromQL natively, and has no hard cardinality limit: 20M series per metric per day by default, raised on request, with no sampling and no charge per label or metric name. ### Is there a SigNoz self hosted alternative that runs in our cloud account? Yes. Self-hosted SigNoz runs in your cloud, and your team operates ClickHouse, the collectors, and upgrades, without Noz, while SigNoz BYOC, on Enterprise, runs it in your account, managed by SigNoz. Last9 runs single-tenant in your own cloud account, on AWS or GCP in any region, and Last9 manages it for you, including the AI. ### Can Last9 replace SigNoz APM? SigNoz APM builds service metrics, traces, and exceptions from OpenTelemetry, on SigNoz Cloud or a self-hosted install. Last9 covers service discovery, dependency maps, database and external calls, Apdex, exceptions, and trace correlation, from OpenTelemetry, on the one licence. ### Can Last9 run alongside SigNoz? Yes. SigNoz is OpenTelemetry-native, so the OpenTelemetry Collector can send the same data to both. Keep self-hosted SigNoz where a free install fits, such as development and staging, and a Last9 engineer plans the split with your team. ### How do I migrate from SigNoz to Last9? SigNoz is OpenTelemetry-native, so services already sending OTLP need only a new endpoint, and PromQL metric queries carry over. The Last9 agent moves your dashboards and alerts with your team, and rewrites ClickHouse SQL and SigNoz search queries in PromQL or LogQL.