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Apache SkyWalking vs VictoriaMetrics comparison

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Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Jul 16, 2026

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

Apache SkyWalking
Ranking in Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability
20th
Average Rating
8.2
Reviews Sentiment
4.6
Number of Reviews
8
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
VictoriaMetrics
Ranking in Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability
16th
Average Rating
8.6
Reviews Sentiment
6.7
Number of Reviews
12
Ranking in other categories
Open Source Databases (10th), Server Monitoring (4th), IT Infrastructure Monitoring (12th), Log Management (12th), Container Monitoring (7th), Cloud Monitoring Software (14th), AIOps (13th), AI Observability Services (1st)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of November 2026, in the Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability category, the mindshare of Apache SkyWalking is 0.7%, down from 0.7% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of VictoriaMetrics is 0.3%, up from 0.2% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
VictoriaMetrics0.3%
Apache SkyWalking0.7%
Other99.0%
Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability
 

Featured Reviews

reviewer2784462 - PeerSpot reviewer
Software Engineer at a tech vendor with 10,001+ employees
Tracing has revealed hybrid bottlenecks and delivers full visibility into critical payment flows
Apache SkyWalking provided full visibility into the black hole because before using it, we could not see what was happening when a request left Amazon EKS and went to our on-premises legacy databases. Apache SkyWalking's distributed tracing correlates these two worlds in a single view, showing us that 40% of the latency was actually happening in the network hop between the cloud and the physical data center, not in the code itself. Second, it exposes hidden architectural flaws. By using the automatic dependency mapping, we discovered that some microservices were stuck in a cyclic dependency which was documented nowhere. This visual evidence allowed us to refactor the logic and immediately increased our throughput by 30%. Apache SkyWalking gave us database-level insight without database access. Through its slow query monitoring, the Java agents captured the exact SQL statements that were hanging during peak sales hours. This meant our developers could fix the exact line of code or index without needing to wait for a DBA to pull logs, reducing our mean time to resolution. There are many features that are useful to mention in this case because we obtained different benefits. Apache SkyWalking automatically drew the topology of the 600 pods where we discovered cyclic dependencies between services that no one had documented before and that were slowing down the system. Another valuable feature is resolving hybrid bottlenecks because we isolated a specific network issue between AWS and the physical data center. Without distributed tracing, infrastructure teams blame Java code and vice versa. Database tuning is also important because thanks to slow query metrics captured by the agent, we identified and rewrote the SQL queries that most impacted performance during sales peaks.
reviewer2911872 - PeerSpot reviewer
DevOps Engineer
Long term metrics monitoring has improved AI workflows and now powers faster incident analysis
The best features VictoriaMetrics offers in my experience include fast query performance and efficient resource usage, seamless compatibility with the Prometheus ecosystem, a simple cluster architecture with minimal components, MetricsQL with useful functions beyond PromQL, and comprehensive tooling like VMAgent and VMAlert. VictoriaMetrics stands out to me because it is highly efficient, stable, and easy to run in air-gapped environments. It integrates well with Prometheus ecosystem tools like Kube-Prometheus-Stack and Grafana. Its compact storage and fast query performance make it ideal for long-term metric storage. The cluster setup is simple and scalable, which is a big advantage for production use.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"Using Apache SkyWalking has had a positive impact on my organization because it has enabled us to identify the causes of various problems more quickly."
"Apache SkyWalking has impacted my organization positively."
"Apache SkyWalking has improved our ability to troubleshoot distributed applications and resolve integration issues more quickly, giving QA, developers, and operations better visibility into service interactions, reducing the time spent identifying root causes, and improving collaboration by allowing us to share traces and monitoring data as concrete evidence when investigating defects."
"Apache SkyWalking has enabled me to save considerable money because I can monitor multiple applications simultaneously in the same environment without deploying multiple solutions, while optimizing application performance and boosting system health through increased visibility."
"Apache SkyWalking has significantly improved application visibility and reduced troubleshooting times while enhancing security reliability."
"Apache SkyWalking is a very nice tool and an exceptional tool for managing volume and complex architecture on AWS without the prohibitive cost of commercial suites."
"Apache SkyWalking has positively impacted my organization by reducing the time of the team so that they can put in more efforts into their other tasks, saving a lot of time, improving our SLA in resolving any issue, providing good RCA analysis to the leadership team, and helping us in monitoring the entire health in a shorter time span."
"Overall, Apache SkyWalking gives us greater visibility into our distributed applications and makes it easier for the development and DevOps team to identify and resolve production issues."
"VictoriaMetrics works very fast and efficiently, and it is easy to set up and run."
"VictoriaMetrics has positively impacted my organization because we were able to save on metric storage by not using expensive solutions from other vendors."
"Prometheus compatibility is the biggest plus for me, and it allows me to use familiar PromQL queries across Grafana dashboards, alert rules, and the anomaly detection workflow, which saves integration effort and makes it easier to investigate an incident using the same metrics across those tools."
"VictoriaMetrics has positively impacted my organization as it is a stable, performant, safe, and well-engineered piece of software which works exactly as expected and delivers stable results."
"VictoriaMetrics has positively impacted our organization because we chose it for efficiency, simplicity, one binary and cost, and it's straightforward embedded in our Helm chart, so it works out of the box."
"The resource efficiency of VictoriaMetrics allows you to reduce infrastructure costs."
"VictoriaMetrics customer support is exceptional, responses are very quick, and the solutions are usually worked through."
"We observed that RAM was reduced by around 70% and disk usage by 75%, while write speed increased 3x and query per second P95 latency became 7x faster."
 

Cons

"Apache SkyWalking can be improved by making the dashboards easier to customize, improving alerting options, and adding more detailed troubleshooting information."
"Right now, I don't think it is stable."
"Apache SkyWalking can be improved by enhancing a few things. The learning curve is definitely there, so it needs a good learning curve."
"For AI and compliance, I would rate it a two, but for operation monitoring and security, I would rate it a five."
"Areas for improvement include simplified initial deployment and configurations, better documentation for advanced use cases, and more built-in dashboards and reports."
"Apache SkyWalking can be improved by responding more quickly to new versions of monitored products."
"Apache SkyWalking can be improved with storage management complexity because with this volume of 50 million traces a day, managing data retention on OpenSearch is critical."
"Apache SkyWalking could be improved by making the initial setup and configuration more straightforward, especially for teams that are new to observability."
"I chose an eight out of ten because for a perfect score of ten, VictoriaMetrics would need to be effortless to install, set up, run, and use—essentially, it should just work without me having to do anything."
"I am sad that VictoriaMetrics moves towards enterprise only for features that it is really good at, such as downsampling."
"From my project experience, I would appreciate more practical guidance on tuning queries and diagnosing missing or delayed metrics across the ingestion pipeline."
"I chose exactly 8 out of 10 because I do not have full knowledge of the product in production, and my experience stopped at the testing phase pending the company's evaluation."
"The reason I rate it eight is that the solution lacks aggregation and I have to either use a custom solution or solutions from other vendors."
"Regarding performance gains or cost savings, I can add that native multitenancy is only in the cluster version, and on single-node, we had to build tenant isolation ourselves with labels and query filters, so this could be improved."
"However, for people who want to go into the enterprise version, I think VictoriaMetrics needs to work on the pricing because it is quite high even if someone uses a single cluster."
"The main areas of improvement for VictoriaMetrics include automatic rebalancing, a large ecosystem, and Enterprise features."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
14%
Manufacturing Company
12%
Computer Software Company
11%
Outsourcing Company
10%
Outsourcing Company
21%
Comms Service Provider
13%
Financial Services Firm
11%
Manufacturing Company
8%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business4
Midsize Enterprise1
Large Enterprise5
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business3
Midsize Enterprise2
Large Enterprise2
 

Questions from the Community

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Apache SkyWalking?
It is fine regarding my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing.
What needs improvement with Apache SkyWalking?
Apache SkyWalking can be improved by making the dashboards easier to customize, improving alerting options, and adding more detailed troubleshooting information. Better integration with other monit...
What is your primary use case for Apache SkyWalking?
My main use case of Apache SkyWalking is for application performance monitoring. I have been using Apache SkyWalking for application performance monitoring, service monitoring, and distributing tra...
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for VictoriaMetrics?
Regarding pricing, setup cost, and licensing, we are using open source today.
What needs improvement with VictoriaMetrics?
Regarding performance gains or cost savings, I can add that native multitenancy is only in the cluster version, and on single-node, we had to build tenant isolation ourselves with labels and query ...
What is your primary use case for VictoriaMetrics?
VictoriaMetrics is our time-series store, and we have Helm charts that ship an embedded single-node VictoriaMetrics with 30-day rotation by default. Teams that already run VictoriaMetrics can point...
 

Also Known As

No data available
VictoriaMetrics Observability Enterprise Support
 

Interactive Demo

Demo not available
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

1. Alibaba 2. Amazon 3. Apple 4. Baidu 5. ByteDance 6. Cisco 7. Dell 8. Google 9. Huawei 10. IBM 11. Intel 12. JPMorgan Chase 13. Klarna 14. LinkedIn 15. Microsoft 16. Netflix 17. Oracle 18. PayPal 19. Pinterest 20. Qualcomm 21. SAP 22. Samsung 23. Spotify 24. Tencent 25. Twitter 26. Uber 27. VMware 28. WeChat 29. Xiaomi 30. Zoom
CERN, Grammarly, Adidas, Spotify R&D, DreamHost, Traefik Labs, DSV, MHI Vestas
Find out what your peers are saying about Apache SkyWalking vs. VictoriaMetrics and other solutions. Updated: November 2026.
920,769 professionals have used our research since 2012.