Best Application Performance Monitoring (APM) Tools For Small Business

What small businesses need from application performance monitoring

Before comparing application performance monitoring tools, it helps to name what actually matters at small-business scale. These are the criteria that separate a good fit from an expensive mistake.

• A price that fits a small budgetFor application performance monitoring, per-user costs should stay reasonable as you add a few seats — not enterprise contracts built for hundreds of users and a procurement cycle. For most small teams the entry tier lands in the low double digits per user.
• A free plan or real trialA way to start at zero cost and prove the application performance monitoring earns its keep before any money changes hands. 3 of the picks below ship a genuinely free tier, not just a time-boxed trial.
• Setup without an IT teamOnboarding your application performance monitoring should be something a non-technical founder or office manager finishes in a day, not a quarter. If it needs a consultant to stand up, it's the wrong fit at this size.
• Day-one ease of useA application performance monitoring interface clean enough that the whole team adopts it without training — at a small company, software nobody uses is just a line item.
• Core features, not bloatThe handful of application performance monitoring capabilities a small team actually uses daily, without paying for enterprise modules that sit idle and complicate the screen.
• Room to growPricing and features that scale with you, so hitting 20 or 50 people doesn't force a painful, mid-stride migration to a different application performance monitoring tool.

Best application performance monitoring for small businesses

Ranked by Spotscore and filtered for small-business fit, here are the application performance monitoring worth shortlisting. Prices are the published entry plan; free plans are flagged.

#	Product	SpotScore	Rating	Reviews	Starting price
1	New Relic APM	9.8	★★★★★4.50	155	—Free trial
2	Datadog APM	9.8	★★★★★4.00	153	—Free trial
3	Dynatrace	9.7	★★★★★4.40	283	—Free trial
4	ManageEngine Applications ManagerFree plan	9.1	★★★★★4.40	8	—
5	eG EnterpriseFree plan	9.1	★★★★★4.80	4	—
6	Sumo LogicFree plan	9	★★★★★4.40	237	—
7	Scout APM	9	★★★★★4.70	20	—
8	Zenoss	8.9	★★★★★3.90	22	—

Free and freemium application performance monitoring

If budget is the hard constraint, start here. These application performance monitoring picks offer a genuinely free plan you can run indefinitely, not just a trial.

• ManageEngine Applications ManagerFree plan available.
• eG EnterpriseFree plan available.
• Sumo LogicFree plan available.

What to watch out for

A few traps catch small businesses buying application performance monitoring. Knowing them upfront saves money and a painful switch later.

• Enterprise pricing in disguiseSome application performance monitoring tools advertise a low entry tier but gate the features you need behind plans priced for big companies.
• Tools that need an adminIf a application performance monitoring platform assumes a dedicated operator, a small team will under-use it and still pay full price.
• Per-seat costs that scale badlyA reasonable per-user price can turn painful as a application performance monitoring rollout grows — model it before you commit.
• Lock-in and hard exportsCheck you can get your data out cleanly; switching application performance monitoring later shouldn't be a hostage situation.

Setup and ease of use

For a small team, time-to-value matters more than feature count. The best application performance monitoring here get a team productive the same week, with templates and guided setup instead of a services engagement.

When you trial a application performance monitoring shortlist, time the setup. A application performance monitoring tool you can configure and get the team into within a day or two is worth more to a small business than one with a longer feature list that takes weeks to roll out. Import your real data during the application performance monitoring trial — that's where clunky tools reveal themselves.

Best application performance monitoring for small business, by need

Bottom line

For most small businesses, the smart move with application performance monitoring is to start free or cheap, prove it earns its place, and only pay up as the team grows. New Relic APM is the strongest all-round pick here, and ManageEngine Applications Manager is the place to start if you need a free plan. Shortlist two or three, run the free application performance monitoring trials with your real data, and let ease of setup break the tie.

Small business FAQs