We're excited to share that AppSignal has once again been recognized as one of the top performance and error monitoring tools in the 2024 Ruby on Rails Community Survey.

This year, we maintained our position as the fifth most popular performance monitoring tool and climbed from seventh to fourth place in the error tracking rankings. This result means that AppSignal now stands shoulder-to-shoulder alongside some much larger competitors that are backed by a combined $600 million in venture capital funding. That's no small feat for a bootstrapped business.

In this article, we'll dive into the 2024 survey results, compare them with 2022, and explore how we stack up against larger, well-funded competitors.

Key 2024 Results Compared

Before we go into AppSignal's rankings in the error tracking and performance monitoring tool categories, let's take a look at how some wider community trends have changed since the 2022 survey:

*Combined totals for 'Totally Agree' and 'Mostly Agree'.

Trends in learning have remained relatively unchanged since the 2022 survey, with a majority (44%) of Rails developers being self-taught. Two years after the end of most lockdown restrictions in countries around the world, there has been a massive increase in remote work from 50% to 72%, meaning the vast majority of developers now work mostly remotely.

Regarding the Rails community, the monolith reigns supreme, with 77% of developers actively working on one. Rails is still seen as very relevant by 94% of developers, and 83% agree that the Rails core team is steering Rails in the right direction (an increase of just over 6% compared to 2022).

AppSignal Ranks Fourth for Error Tracking

We're thrilled that we've moved three places up the error tracking tool leaderboard (from seventh in 2022 to fourth in 2024), overtaking Honeybadger, Bugsnag, and Rollbar:

This ranking places us alongside much larger competitors Datadog, Sentry, and New Relic, which have hundreds of millions in funding and thousands of employees.

The fact that AppSignal, a small bootstrapped company with less than 20 people, ranks so highly is a testament to our exceptional error tracking functionality and deep understanding of the development communities we support.

Comparing the Top 4 Rails Error Tracking Tools

So, how does AppSignal's error tracking compare to Sentry, Datadog, and New Relic? Let's take a look:

AppSignal offers the same core error tracking functionality that Sentry, Datadog, and New Relic have.

When it comes to usability, Datadog falls behind the competition, despite ranking in first place. It's difficult to query and filter data in Datadog and it lacks a simple developer tooling integration setup.

With AppSignal, it's easy to query and filter your error tracking data from one simple overview.

AppSignal's interface is designed for ease of use, with minimal configuration, making it faster to resolve errors and optimize performance. We also offer several unique features that we believe set us apart from the competition, such as:

• Deploy markers that require little setup to filter issues between deploys.
• Time Detective: This allows you to dive deeper into a snapshot of your app's performance history to help with debugging. You can activate it virtually anywhere in AppSignal using command or ctrl + /.

Helper Methods Designed to Be Helpful

At AppSignal, our integration seamlessly fits into your Ruby app with easy-to-remember and readable helper methods, unlike Datadog, who have a more verbose approach:

# Adding custom tags with AppSignal
Appsignal.add_tags("user_id" => current_user.id)
 
# Adding custom tags with Datadog
Datadog::Tracing.active_span&.set_tag('user_id', current_user.id)
 
 begin
    raise "whoops"
 rescue => error
    # Reporting an error with AppSignal
    Appsignal.report_error(error)
 
    # Reporting an error with Datadog
    Datadog::Tracing.active_span&.set_error(error)
 end

AppSignal Ranks Fifth in Performance Monitoring

We've held our position as the fifth most popular performance tool. We're proud to outrank some much larger competitors, like CloudWatch, Google Cloud Monitoring, and Elastic APM.

This places us alongside industry giants Datadog, New Relic, Sentry, and Grafana as one of the top five performance monitoring tools for Rails developers.

Comparing the Top 5 Rails Performance Monitoring Tools

Let's take a look at the core functionality of the top five performance tools to see how they compare:

While it's unsurprising to see that all five tools share most of the same performance monitoring functionality, Datadog, New Relic and Grafana fall behind the competition when it comes to design, with more cluttered, data-heavy overviews that prioritize reporting over issue resolution.

Datadog

AppSignal

With AppSignal, it's easy to find what you're looking for: no filtering or custom query syntax is required. AppSignal makes searching, filtering, and sorting your overviews simple. It helps you get to the root cause of a performance issue quickly, with instant insights into an issue's impact on your app's performance.

AppSignal: The APM That Just Works

We're constantly updating AppSignal with enhancements and features that make it a more powerful APM; we recently released version 4.0 of AppSignal for Ruby, full of improvements to our Ruby integration.

AppSignal is built by developers, for developers. While it may sound like a cliché, it's true. We're a contributing member of the Rails Foundation. We focus on offering simple and predictable pricing, a relaxed upgrade policy, and ship stroopwafels to developers, conferences, and meetups worldwide.

Every feature we ship is designed from the ground up to provide developers with the insights they need to monitor their applications confidently; we love surprising customers, new and old, with our "it just works" out-of-the-box approach to monitoring.

Why Rails Developers Love AppSignal

There are lots of reasons why Ruby on Rails developers love AppSignal, but when we ask them, they often tell us it's because of our:

• Intuitive interface that is easy to navigate.
• Simple and predictable pricing.
• Friendly developer-to-developer support.

New to AppSignal? Thanks to our installation wizard, you can install AppSignal in minutes. Simply start a free trial and join thousands of Ruby on Rails developers who use AppSignal daily for all of their application performance monitoring needs.

P.S. Let us know when you start sending us metrics, and we'll send you some free stroopwafels!