No more typing reviews! Try our Samantha, our new voice AI agent.

Comet vs IBM Instana Observability comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive Summary

Review summaries and opinions

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

ROI

Sentiment score
6.2
Comet users save time and boost productivity through automation, improved tracking, and enhanced collaboration, reducing manual efforts.
Sentiment score
6.0
IBM Instana Observability boosts efficiency with quick issue identification, reduces costs, and improves response times and application performance.
I estimate I spend around thirty to forty percent less time organizing and comparing experiment results compared to manual tracking.
student at a university with 5,001-10,000 employees
Comet's return on investment is evident through significant time reduction, which is the most crucial factor I have observed.
Senior Data Scientist at a consultancy with 1-10 employees
While that is not a significant improvement, it has helped me with summarizing and drafting emails.
AI/ML Engineer
It provides a single pane of glass from which I can see what is happening with all the servers in my infrastructure, which saves time.
UNIX/LINUX, ENTERPRISE SERVER AND STORAGE ADMINISTRATOR at Fidelity Bank Plc
It made a notable difference from when we were almost blind to being able to respond to calls immediately.
Software engineer at EJADA
If we have a monitoring tool, we can save our transactions and see the performance of the application using MTTR and MTTD.
Technical Manager, Consulting at a outsourcing company with 1,001-5,000 employees
 

Customer Service

Sentiment score
5.9
Comet's support is praised for responsiveness, clear guidance, and effective integration with PyTorch and TensorFlow, ensuring smooth operations.
Sentiment score
6.4
IBM Instana support is mixed, with varied responsiveness, reliance on local teams, and average ratings between five and six.
Comet's help center contributes significantly to building the AI-powered solution smoothly and rapidly.
Senior Data Scientist at a consultancy with 1-10 employees
I was able to troubleshoot all the issues with the online discussion forums.
student at a university with 5,001-10,000 employees
They are very slow to respond and integrate new features.
DevOps engineer at Yara International
IBM support for Instana is responsive and helpful.
UNIX/LINUX, ENTERPRISE SERVER AND STORAGE ADMINISTRATOR at Fidelity Bank Plc
We did have experiences where a significant issue arose during implementation, often involving compatibility problems with JavaScript libraries used by IBM Instana Observability.
Technical Manager at a consultancy with 1-10 employees
 

Scalability Issues

Sentiment score
6.1
Comet scales well for most projects, efficiently handling workloads with reliable performance, though dashboards may slow with high usage.
Sentiment score
7.5
IBM Instana Observability excels in scalability for enterprises, supporting microservices, with positive user reviews and efficient growth handling.
Comet's scalability is excellent, as it can generate customized user-to-user browsers.
Senior Data Scientist at a consultancy with 1-10 employees
Overall, I would say Comet scales very well for academic to mid-sized machine learning projects, and it remains usable.
student at a university with 5,001-10,000 employees
Comet's scalability is limited for me since I usually do only one task, and when I overload Perplexity, I hit the limit very quickly.
Automation Engineer at a tech services company with 501-1,000 employees
More innovations are coming in every day, so it is scalable and more applications are becoming container-based.
UNIX/LINUX, ENTERPRISE SERVER AND STORAGE ADMINISTRATOR at Fidelity Bank Plc
IBM Instana Observability demonstrates scalability, especially in dynamic, distributed environments such as microservices and Kubernetes.
Technical Manager, Consulting at a outsourcing company with 1,001-5,000 employees
 

Stability Issues

Sentiment score
8.3
Comet is stable and reliable for experiment tracking, supporting multiple users and scaling without significant performance issues.
Sentiment score
8.4
IBM Instana Observability is rated high in stability, with users consistently praising its reliable and steady performance.
 

Room For Improvement

Comet requires faster performance, better security, seamless AI integration, and improved usability while addressing pricing and reliability issues.
IBM Instana Observability needs enhancements in log management, AI models, user interface speed, support, and cost monitoring.
There are vulnerabilities to prompt injection attacks, and the AI can be tricked into leaking data or acting harmfully.
AI/ML Engineer
It needs to be smarter, utilizing better AI engines to combine data from various sources, and improve the intelligence of its answers, creativity, and document creation capabilities.
Manager & Co-Founder at Arido
Comet can be improved by being more stable and providing security features similar to Brave.
Cloud Operations Engineer at a tech vendor with 51-200 employees
I had many false positives with IBM Instana Observability. Then I fixed the filters and it became more accurate on the errors reported.
Software engineer at EJADA
One main issue I found with IBM Instana Observability was the customer support, which was very poor when we needed some features to be enabled or integrated into IBM Instana Observability sensors.
DevOps engineer at Yara International
It is not open-source, and I have to be a partner to get more access to the products.
UNIX/LINUX, ENTERPRISE SERVER AND STORAGE ADMINISTRATOR at Fidelity Bank Plc
 

Setup Cost

Comet offers flexible, affordable pricing and easy management, with clear billing and minimal setup costs for enterprise users.
IBM Instana offers competitive pricing in India, with a straightforward model and simple implementation despite varying cost perceptions.
I found it easy to understand the pricing and subscription models for faster integration.
Senior Data Scientist at a consultancy with 1-10 employees
My experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing is that I am using Perplexity, the pro version, which is connected to Comet, and together they provide me with very good results at a cost of only twenty dollars, which is acceptable to me.
Automation Engineer at a tech services company with 501-1,000 employees
My experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing is that it was all free.
AI/ML Engineer
I find the cost of IBM Instana Observability to be very affordable compared to competitors because the pricing mechanism is based on the host that we monitor, unlike other competitors such as DataDog and Dynatrace, whose pricing is based on other factors.
Technical Manager, Consulting at a outsourcing company with 1,001-5,000 employees
It is not that costly, especially since we only use two instances.
Software engineer at EJADA
I think the pricing is good and I do not think it is high.
DevOps at a outsourcing company with 1,001-5,000 employees
 

Valuable Features

Comet excels in experiment tracking, task automation, collaboration tools, and integration with ML frameworks, enhancing teamwork and analysis.
IBM Instana Observability enhances performance with real-time insights, APM trace capabilities, and integration features to improve operational efficiency.
The feature that keeps tabs open is great because they are updated and still on the same page where I left off, which is super helpful, allowing me to quickly return to what I was working on.
Manager & Co-Founder at Arido
It has transformed the workflow because fewer people are needed for some tasks, and the automation of tasks means that not much human effort is required.
Cloud Operations Engineer at a tech vendor with 51-200 employees
This setup significantly reduces task efficiency in high latency scenarios, providing dynamic websites, faster responses, quicker solutions, and smoother searches compared to typical browsing methods.
Senior Data Scientist at a consultancy with 1-10 employees
IBM Instana Observability has positively impacted my organization by making it easy to observe the entire infrastructure under one platform, which was the biggest advantage of onboarding onto IBM Instana Observability.
DevOps engineer at Yara International
IBM Instana Observability has impacted my organization positively in that it has helped me find out what the issue is in real-time because of its one-second granularity and its ability to identify issues as quickly as possible.
UNIX/LINUX, ENTERPRISE SERVER AND STORAGE ADMINISTRATOR at Fidelity Bank Plc
With multiple servers and multiple applications, IBM Instana Observability allows us to resolve issues very quickly because we immediately know that a disk is full, the storage is full, or the database is down.
Technical Lead at a tech services company with 11-50 employees
 

Categories and Ranking

Comet
Ranking in AI Observability
12th
Average Rating
8.4
Reviews Sentiment
5.9
Number of Reviews
9
Ranking in other categories
AIOps (12th)
IBM Instana Observability
Ranking in AI Observability
10th
Average Rating
8.0
Reviews Sentiment
6.9
Number of Reviews
10
Ranking in other categories
Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability (23rd)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of July 2026, in the AI Observability category, the mindshare of Comet is 0.8%, up from 0.1% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of IBM Instana Observability is 1.1%, up from 0.5% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
AI Observability Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
IBM Instana Observability1.1%
Comet0.8%
Other98.1%
AI Observability
 

Featured Reviews

reviewer2827170 - PeerSpot reviewer
student at a university with 5,001-10,000 employees
Organizing research experiments has improved and supports faster model comparison and learning
My experience with Comet has been very positive, but there are a few areas where it could be improved. One area is the learning curve for new users. Some of the more advanced features can feel overwhelming at first, especially for students who are new to machine learning experiment tracking. More beginner-friendly tutorials and guided onboarding would help. I would also like to see more customization options for dashboards and visualizations, making it easier to create views tailored to specific projects. Another improvement would be deeper integration with commonly used collaboration tools, which would streamline project documentation and team workflows. There are a few additional areas where Comet could improve. From a performance perspective, I occasionally notice that dashboards with a large number of experiments can take longer to load or navigate. Regarding documentation, while the available resources are helpful, I would appreciate more beginner-focused examples, step-by-step tutorials, and real-world use cases. For support, my experience has generally been good, but having more community resources, discussion forums, webinars, or educational content specifically aimed at students and researchers would be valuable.
FranciscoGálvez - PeerSpot reviewer
Technical Manager at a consultancy with 1-10 employees
Observability has improved collaboration and predicts failures across distributed services
From my perspective, IBM Instana Observability is quite technical. Compared to some competitors, it offers an abundance of information about system performance but lacks planning or capacity planning information. You do not receive reports with recommendations; instead, it provides only the technical layer. Other companies, like Compuware, give more functional information about your environment, while IBM Instana Observability provides only limited functional insights. This means you often must interpret the data independently. Unlike other tools that can offer recommendations to save resources or costs, IBM Instana Observability does not provide that functionality. On the bright side, it is much more affordable than some other options, but it isn't complete. If you want full functionality with IBM Instana Observability, you also need to acquire other products for additional insights in monitoring areas, such as networking monitoring tools or similar products. For instance, we often recommend Turbonomic, which provides complementary insights. One potential feature that could improve IBM Instana Observability is the ability to translate KPIs into monetary terms. It would be interesting to have a product that integrates IBM Instana Observability with Turbonomic, as Turbonomic can utilize data from IBM Instana Observability to inform you about unnecessary spending and suggest whether you can consolidate servers or optimize containers for quicker response times. Implementing some level of simulation or capacity planning would greatly enhance the current capabilities of IBM Instana Observability.
report
Use our free recommendation engine to learn which AI Observability solutions are best for your needs.
902,894 professionals have used our research since 2012.
 

Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Energy/Utilities Company
15%
Manufacturing Company
14%
Construction Company
11%
Financial Services Firm
10%
Financial Services Firm
12%
Outsourcing Company
10%
Manufacturing Company
9%
Construction Company
9%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business10
Midsize Enterprise3
Large Enterprise4
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business6
Large Enterprise5
 

Questions from the Community

What needs improvement with Comet for SageMaker Partner AI Apps?
I'm not sure how Comet can be improved, as I've only been working on it for three months, so I feel like I need a bit more time to be able to answer this question.
What is your primary use case for Comet for SageMaker Partner AI Apps?
My main use case for Comet is looking at investigations related to health and safety issues and incidents. For a health and safety investigation, I create a timeline of the events that led up to th...
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Comet?
My experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing is that I am using Perplexity, the pro version, which is connected to Comet, and together they provide me with very good results at a cost of o...
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for IBM Instana Observability?
I would evaluate the implementation process of IBM Instana Observability as not complex at all because you pay the license, and IBM takes care of everything. The only problem we occasionally face, ...
What needs improvement with IBM Instana Observability?
From my perspective, IBM Instana Observability is quite technical. Compared to some competitors, it offers an abundance of information about system performance but lacks planning or capacity planni...
What is your primary use case for IBM Instana Observability?
I usually recommend IBM Instana Observability for companies in the academic environment, as I have been working in a consultancy company for the last three years, where one of our customers built t...
 

Also Known As

Comet for SageMaker Partner AI Apps
No data available
 

Overview

Find out what your peers are saying about Comet vs. IBM Instana Observability and other solutions. Updated: June 2026.
902,894 professionals have used our research since 2012.