AWS X-Ray vs AlertSite comparison

SmartBear and Amazon Web Services (AWS) are both solutions in the Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability category. SmartBear is ranked #37 with an average rating of 8.0, while Amazon Web Services (AWS) is ranked #15 with an average rating of 7.4. SmartBear holds a 0.2% mindshare in APM, compared to Amazon Web Services (AWS)’s 2.7% mindshare. Additionally, 100% of SmartBear users are willing to recommend the solution, compared to 90% of Amazon Web Services (AWS) users who would recommend it.

AlertSite

Read 7 AlertSite reviews

479 Views
402 Comparison Views

100% willing to recommend

AWS X-Ray

Read 11 AWS X-Ray reviews

4,843 Views
4,552 Comparison Views

90% willing to recommend

AlertSite

AWS X-Ray

Comparison Buyer's Guide

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Executive SummaryUpdated on Jul 24, 2024

AlertSite and AWS X-Ray are both robust monitoring solutions. Users tend to prefer AlertSite for its better support, while AWS X-Ray is favored for its comprehensive features.

Features: AlertSite excels in end-user experience monitoring and synthetic monitoring. AWS X-Ray offers detailed tracing capabilities, integration with AWS services, and comprehensive application performance insights.

Room for Improvement: AlertSite can improve customization and reporting features. AWS X-Ray needs to address its steep learning curve and the complexity of advanced configurations.

Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: AlertSite generally has a smoother deployment process, with excellent customer support easing setup and troubleshooting. AWS X-Ray can be more complex to deploy, and the support experience can vary.

Pricing and ROI: AlertSite users find the pricing structure to deliver good value. AWS X-Ray is potentially more expensive but is viewed as a worthwhile investment for extensive and detailed application performance data.

To learn more, read our detailed AWS X-Ray vs. AlertSite Report (Updated: September 2025).

Buyer's Guide

AWS X-Ray vs. AlertSite

September 2025

Download the complete report

Helped 872,019 peers since 2012

Review summaries and opinions

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:

Categories and Ranking

AlertSite

Ranking in Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability

37th

Average Rating

8.0

Reviews Sentiment

7.6

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

API Monitoring Software (3rd)

AWS X-Ray

Ranking in Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability

15th

Average Rating

7.8

Reviews Sentiment

6.6

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

No ranking in other categories

Mindshare comparison

As of October 2025, in the Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability category, the mindshare of AlertSite is 0.2%, up from 0.2% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of AWS X-Ray is 2.7%, down from 3.4% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.

Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability Market Share Distribution
Product	Market Share (%)
AWS X-Ray	2.7%
AlertSite	0.2%
Other	97.1%

Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability

Featured Reviews

SandeepTarwe

Team lead at Tata Consultancy

Alerting capabilities have enabled timely escalation and resolution of issues

In AlertSite, I was monitoring the kiosks and servers for JetBlue Airlines. The servers would trigger alerts if there were any outages or issues with any of the kiosks, servers, or the ticketing tool. I monitored these alerts and escalated them to the concerned team to rectify them at the earliest…

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Muhmad Tabrez A Deewanji

Lead Software Engineer at a tech services company with 1,001-5,000 employees

Improving performance through efficient trace metrics and data insights

As an application developer and architect, I appreciate AWS X-Ray for checking latency and identifying bottlenecks. I use it for performance tuning, conducting performance testing on applications, getting real-time traces, and gaining data insights. It helps in improving throughput and tuning infrastructure. The trace metrics and data collected provide valuable insights.

Read full review

Quotes from Members

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:

Pros

"I highly recommend AlertSite to other users."

"If there are any issues, it triggers an alert within 30 seconds. When it triggers the alert, we go ahead and check it immediately. The alert is triggered on a real-time basis."

"The alerting capabilities were really helpful."

"The best feature of AlertSite is that it shows you a visual graph and also sends you notifications about errors, so you get immediate notifications about errors which means that your support team can start taking steps and more quickly make sure the site is up and that customer experience isn't interrupted in terms of using your system and your products. AlertSite is a very good tool. It's user-friendly, and you can see everything on the dashboard. Configuring it is also easy."

"I found multiple features in AlertSite that I like. One is data monitoring history, for example, a history of the blackouts and the data. Sometimes, there's a glitch in the application that AlertSite can capture, and the tool notifies you about that glitch. It also identifies issues that could happen in the future. AlertSite is also a fast tool that you can use to monitor on-premise servers, internal applications, and even global applications. The data is available on a single UI in AlertSite, so there's no need to monitor and click on different applications or URLs. I also love that the tool is quite user-friendly, apart from being fast."

"The alerting capabilities of AlertSite were really helpful."

"There are custom reports available along with the inbuilt reports."

"This solution has numerous advantages. It's extremely simple to configure. Either digital monitors or single-URL monitors are simple to configure and build."

"It is a very scalable solution."

"The most promising feature of AWS X-Ray is that you can debug the issues through the proper logs. You can also get an analysis out of the logs for some use cases, though I have yet to try all the features of AWS X-Ray."

"The error analysis capabilities of X-Ray are really good."

"The most beneficial feature is that it shows a dashboard for performance intervals, which reveals latencies."

"I would give AWS X-Ray a nine out of ten overall."

"AWS X-Ray is a strong solution and has a smooth integration process."

"AWS X-Ray shows us exactly when there are delays, helping us understand the depth of issues and what is happening point-to-point."

"The most important one is compliance. We're able to achieve our regulatory levels. We're able to achieve the security level that we need for the federal government."

More AWS X-Ray pros

Cons

"It is not compatible with all of the product platforms that we use."

"Additionally, support from AlertSite is not at an enterprise level since it is not offered 24/7."

"I would like the ability to get more data points with regard to some of the unique requirements that we have."

"AlertSite sometimes triggers false alerts or fake alerts, which needs to be rectified. When we see an alert and go ahead and run certain tests on it, the test always passes. However, on the main screen, it shows up as critical. Therefore, the false alert needs to be fixed."

"One area that needs improvement in AlertSite is the slow UI. I'm using the classic UI because it's quite user-friendly, or in human-readable format, but it's a little slow. It takes time to load all the monitors, so if that could be sped up, that would be helpful. The AlertSite support team also needs improvement in terms of availability. Most of the agents in the team aren't available 24 x 7, so if there's something you need to discuss, you need to tell the support team ahead of time to schedule it. Multiple times, when a case comes up during weekends or whenever my team is doing an update, support needs improvement, availability-wise. I use AlertSite for synthetic monitoring, so whatever is available right now is okay, but if I want to request a new feature on a website, currently, the UI refreshes automatically. I would like to have the option on AlertSite to configure that manually. The UI auto-updates every few minutes, so if I can control that manually, that would be helpful."

"I could use a few changes to the user interface."

"What needs improvement in AlertSite is the documentation, particularly the lack of documentation. If there's a specific activity you want to do, you can't even find information on how to do it, so you have to contact the AlertSite support team to assist you, and only then would the issue be resolved. At the moment, it's not easy to find or get full documentation on how to deal with different issues. You always have to go back to AlertSite support and get help. The documentation for AlertSite could be improved and it's what I'd like to see in the next release of the tool because at the moment, the documentation isn't complete, so you'll have to contact support, but contacting support isn't an issue because the team responds to you quickly."

"It should have X-Ray SDKs for different languages like Node.js, Python, or Java."

"The user interface is sometimes kind of confusing to understand. It's not very user-friendly."

"If you have a small team, it's probably overkill."

"Sometimes, the collector agents are confusing to configure initially."

"What needs to be better in AWS X-Ray is the log filtering. Predefined filters could be helpful because the power of analytics comes from how you can filter the data. I also want to see more KPIs from AWS X-Ray."

"A significant downside is that it is very expensive."

"They can improve how traces are sent to other providers."

"Compared to other open-source tools, AWS X-Ray needs improvement in providing discounts."

More AWS X-Ray cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

"We purchased the license once and had the option of selecting the number of user licenses."

"The cost is high."

"My company pays to use AlertSite, but I'm unsure of the exact costs because it depends on how many monitors you have."

"As you develop a relationship with Amazon, your pricing gets lower. You get credits for the amount of the system you use, and then if you're the government, you can get government pricing. For commercial users, there's a hump when you go from small to medium to big enterprise. Small businesses can live pretty easily off the free tier in a lot of cases, but when you go from a medium to a big enterprise, it becomes more expensive on a per-user basis. I'd like to see that curve going in a different way where pricing can be driven down while people are trying to adopt the technology."

"The pricing for AWS X-Ray is a six out of ten."

"The solution is a bit expensive."

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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

No data available

Financial Services Firm

16%

Computer Software Company

16%

Manufacturing Company

Comms Service Provider

Company Size

By reviewers

Large Enterprise

Midsize Enterprise

Small Business

By reviewers
Company Size	Count
Large Enterprise	8

By reviewers
Company Size	Count
Small Business	8
Large Enterprise	3

Questions from the Community

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for AlertSite?

I would rate the pricing aspects of AlertSite as nine out of ten, indicating it is good or low-priced.

See all answers

What needs improvement with AlertSite?

SmartBear, as a vendor, is focusing more on API management and testing rather than monitoring. AlertSite could benefit from more future-focused innovation, especially with competencies in generativ...

See all answers

What is your primary use case for AlertSite?

I have been working with the AlertSite ( /products/alertsite-reviews ) product since 2019. Within our organization, specifically one service unit at one of the Big Four firms, this product has been...

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What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for AWS X-Ray?

While I have not compared it with GCP or Azure ( /products/microsoft-azure-reviews ), AWS generally offers cost-effective services. Some services, like Athena ( /products/odyssey-software-athena-eo...

See all answers

What needs improvement with AWS X-Ray?

The challenges we faced with AWS X-Ray were that some of the AWS services we were using did not support it, which we discovered at a later stage. This was potentially a design consideration we shou...

See all answers

What is your primary use case for AWS X-Ray?

I have been using AWS X-Ray for creating insights to our applications we have developed. It is used to correlate different services in AWS when a transaction happens, allowing us to see the flow of...

See all answers

Comparisons

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Compared 50% of the time

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Compared 50% of the time

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Compared 19% of the time

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Compared 18% of the time

Google Cloud's operations suite (formerly Stackdriver) vs AWS X-Ray

Compared 9% of the time

New Relic vs AWS X-Ray

Compared 8% of the time

Azure Monitor vs AWS X-Ray

Compared 7% of the time

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Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

AlertSite

October 2025

Download AlertSite product report

Buyer's Guide

AWS X-Ray

October 2025

Download AWS X-Ray product report

Overview

SmartBear's AlertSite is an application performance management and system monitoring software. AlertSite is an early warning system that users can rely on to monitor their websites, web apps, and APIs from any physical location as well as from within their private networks. It offers real-time alerting with root-cause analytics and robust reporting. AlertSite allows you to proactively monitor from an independent network of over 350 monitoring nodes worldwide.

Here are AlertSite’s 6 use cases:

Monitor web: AlertSite monitors beyond availability to detect performance anomalies and notify the appropriate people when deviations occur, whether it's online apps or websites.
Monitor APIs: Check to see that your internal, external, and third-party APIs are working properly, returning the correct content, and performing as expected.
Monitor apps: With nearly any action, monitor your online sites and applications using actual browsers, just like a consumer. There is no need for scripting.
Monitor mobile: Monitor your mobile-friendly websites, native mobile apps, carrier-based nodes, and network speeds with real devices (3G, 4G LTE).
Monitor SLAs: Make sure you're meeting service-level agreements' requirements. SLA requirements are monitored and reported on by AlertSite.
Monitor cloud: Monitor your cloud-based applications to improve mobility. AlertSite monitors your apps across public and private clouds, giving you complete visibility into their status.

AlertSite Features

AlertSite has many valuable key features. Some of the most useful ones include:

Enables a comprehensive view of UI and API performance.
Monitoring coverage from 350+ worldwide nodes and private networks.
Integrates with DevOps and Ops tool stacks.
Displays availability and performance data that assist in determining the root cause of performance problems.
With AlertSite's Single Sign-On (SSO) support, you can assist your authentication procedures.
Free training and assistance. AlertSite’s responsive team is always there to assist you, from the initial rollout through day-to-day support.
Eliminates the stress of false alerts using these key features:
- Tracks the performance of your apps, APIs, and websites.
- Sets up monitor and alarm schedules, as well as blackout periods and retry choices.
- Sets alert thresholds that are both static and dynamic.
- Calculates the number of failures needed to set off an alarm.
- After the first failure, retries logic.
- Based on error code, sends an alert to recipients and group routing.
- Tests from over 85 different locations across the world, with internal and external monitoring.
- Defines assertions and validations.
- Integrates with PagerDuty, Slack, Splunk, VictorOps, and more.

Easy configuration with help from these key features:
- DejaClick is an intuitive, seamless plug-in for documenting web transactions and user journeys.
- Use the point-and-click script creation for website, web, and mobile monitor scripts.
- Benefit from using native API monitor creation.
- Scripts for functional tests can be reused.
- Automate monitor creation by using Swagger Specs or OpenAPI Specification files.

SmartBear

AWS X-Ray is a powerful debugging and performance analysis tool offered by Amazon Web Services. It allows developers to trace requests made to their applications and identify bottlenecks and issues.

With X-Ray, developers can visualize the entire request flow and pinpoint the exact location where errors occur. It provides detailed insights into the performance of individual components and helps optimize the overall application performance.

X-Ray integrates seamlessly with other AWS services, making it easy to trace requests across different services and identify dependencies. It also offers a comprehensive set of APIs and SDKs, enabling developers to instrument their applications and capture valuable data for analysis. With its user-friendly interface and powerful features, AWS X-Ray is a valuable tool for developers looking to improve the performance and reliability of their applications.

Amazon Web Services (AWS)

Sample Customers

JetBlue, Payless ShoeSource, Hilton Inc., StubHub, Symantec, Newegg, Sapient, AstraZeneca, Dell, Quest Diagnostics

COMCAST, ConnectWise, skyscanner, AirAsia, cookpad, cimpress, VTEX, zowdow

Buyer's Guide

AWS X-Ray vs. AlertSite

September 2025

Free Report: AWS X-Ray vs. AlertSite

Find out what your peers are saying about AWS X-Ray vs. AlertSite and other solutions. Updated: September 2025.

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