elmah.io vs. Airbrake

See how elmah.io compares to Airbrake

Welcome to elmah.io

You probably ended up on this page while searching for differences between elmah.io and Airbrake. Or maybe you are in the process of finding the best error monitoring solution for your websites and services. Airbrake is a well-established error monitoring platform supporting a wide range of languages including Ruby, JavaScript, PHP, Python, and .NET, while elmah.io focuses solely on being the deepest possible integration into the .NET and JavaScript ecosystem.

A quick disclaimer before we start digging into the details. We have all seen these types of pages which exist only to highlight all of the downsides of alternative products. While we would like you to pick elmah.io for your error monitoring needs, we don't want users signing up with the wrong expectations. These pages are our attempt to paint an honest picture of both elmah.io's upsides and downsides compared to Airbrake. With that out of the way, let's get started!

elmah.io vs. Airbrake

Feature elmah.io Airbrake
Error Logging
New error detection
Clientside error logging
Deployment tracking
Uptime monitoring
Heartbeats
MCP Server
Anomaly Detection (ML)
Performance Monitoring
Cloud-hosted
Self-hosted
Price/mo $17 - $269 $17 - $299

elmah.io prices are monthly rates when billed annually. Airbrake's low end ($17) is its annual rate; its high end ($299) is the monthly billing rate for the Growth plan (1,000,000 errors/mo).

FAQ

Why isn't elmah.io free?

Like Airbrake, we offer a free trial. You can sign up and try out elmah.io without ever needing to input a credit card. We believe that software should be something you pay for. elmah.io is a bootstrapped company, meaning the funding we get is when people sign up and pay for elmah.io. This gives us the best control over the direction we want to go, without investors to constantly keep happy by increasing prices.

We have decided to become the best error logging and uptime monitoring service for Microsoft .NET developers, rather than support every language and platform like Airbrake does. By focusing on .NET on the server and JavaScript on the client only, we can keep our focus on making the deepest integration into this ecosystem out there, with native integrations for all major .NET web and logging frameworks. In other words, if you need to monitor a backend written in Ruby, PHP, or Python, elmah.io is not the best choice for you.

Unlike Airbrake, elmah.io doesn't offer application performance monitoring (APM). This may change at some point, but for now, we have focused our time on error logging, uptime monitoring, deployment tracking, and heartbeats monitoring. We believe in picking the best tool for the job. elmah.io works together with all major APM tools out there, making it possible to use elmah.io's powerful platform for error monitoring and something else for APM.

Yes. elmah.io has native integrations for all major .NET web and logging frameworks (ASP.NET Core, log4net, NLog, Serilog, and more), so switching from Airbrake's .NET client is usually a matter of swapping a few lines of configuration. Reach out to our support if you need help planning a migration.

Not officially. elmah.io provides a first-party MCP server that lets you query your logs directly from AI tools like Claude and ChatGPT. Airbrake only has unofficial, community-built MCP servers, not something built and maintained by Airbrake itself.

Yes and no. The persistence part and the elmah.io website are not open source. We open sourced a couple of the components we have written in order to make elmah.io work, as well as our NuGet packages for logging errors to elmah.io.

A lot of the internals of elmah.io are based on open source and we love making contributions to other projects.

Here's what our customers say

Don't just take our word for it. Here's what some of our users have to say about elmah.io:

"elmah.io's visuals and robust metrics give us invaluable insight into the general health of our systems"

Armando Monzon

Director of Software Development at ONEIL
Armando Monzon

"The ease of use is nuts. In under 10 minutes, I switched my logging from file to elmah.io. This is going to be a game-changer."

Mitchel Sellers

Microsoft MVP
Mitchel Sellers

"elmah.io has enabled quicker and more accurate fixes and ultimately better customer service."

Paul Johnson

Managing Director at Insurance Data Solutions
Paul Johnson

"If you would take elmah.io away from our business now, it would be like chopping off an arm. Great product guys!"

Matt Ross

CEO at Tronik
Matt Ross
Get started with elmah.io
elmah.io is the easy error logging and uptime monitoring service for .NET. Take back control of your errors with support for all .NET web and logging frameworks.
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