elmah.io vs. Application Insights

An Application Insights alternative for .NET error logging

Welcome to elmah.io

You probably ended up on this page while searching for an Application Insights alternative, or for the differences between Application Insights and elmah.io. Application Insights is Microsoft's application performance monitoring feature in Azure Monitor. It collects requests, dependencies, exceptions, traces and usage data, and it is the natural choice for monitoring performance on Azure. elmah.io focuses on the errors you need to act on. It groups them, notifies your team when a new one appears, shows which deployment introduced it, and puts them in front of your AI agent. Many teams run both, with Application Insights for performance and traces and elmah.io for errors, uptime and heartbeats.

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 Application Insights. With that out of the way, let's get started!

Choose elmah.io if

  • Errors are what you need to act on: grouping, new error alerts and the deployment that caused them.
  • Uptime checks, heartbeats and errors should come in one plan, with a flat monthly price.
  • You want to find an error without writing Kusto queries or learning Azure Monitor.

Choose Application Insights if

  • Performance monitoring and an application map are a must.
  • You want everything in Azure Monitor, next to the metrics and alerts of your infrastructure.
  • You need user analytics like funnels and flows, or the .NET Profiler and Snapshot Debugger.

elmah.io vs. Application Insights

Feature elmah.io Application Insights
Error Logging
Clientside error logging
Deployment tracking
Uptime monitoring 5 to 50 checks included
(Business and up)		 Standard tests,
up to 100 per resource
Heartbeats 5 to 20 included
(Business+ and up)
SSL, domain and security checks SSL certificates only
MCP Server *
Anomaly Detection (ML)
Performance Monitoring
Distributed tracing with correlation IDs
Application map, .NET Profiler and Snapshot Debugger
Cloud-hosted
Self-hosted
Browse errors in Visual Studio
Price/mo (annual billing) $17 - $269 Per GB ingested
and retained**

elmah.io prices are monthly rates when billed annually, from the Startup plan to the Enterprise plan at 1,000,000 messages/mo ($269).

* Application Insights is reachable from AI agents through the Azure MCP Server and its Azure Monitor tools, which query logs and metrics. It has no dedicated Application Insights MCP server.

** Application Insights has no fixed plans. Data ingestion and retention are billed per GB through a Log Analytics workspace, and availability test results are charged the same way.

FAQ

Is elmah.io an alternative to Application Insights, or a complement?

Both. If you mainly use Application Insights for exceptions and availability tests, elmah.io can replace that part and give you grouped errors, new error notifications, deployment tracking, heartbeats and AI agent access in return. If you also rely on performance monitoring and the application map, keep Application Insights for those and add elmah.io for the errors. Many teams do exactly that.

Yes. Nothing stops you from sending errors to both. Application Insights now recommends the Azure Monitor OpenTelemetry Distro for instrumentation, and elmah.io has an exporter for OpenTelemetry logs (currently in pre-release), so the same logging setup can feed both.

elmah.io has flat monthly plans, and the plan decides how many messages you can log. Application Insights has no plans. Data ingestion and retention are billed per GB through a Log Analytics workspace, with commitment tiers starting at 100 GB per day, so the cost follows how much telemetry you send.

Yes. elmah.io has native integrations for all major .NET web and logging frameworks (ASP.NET Core, Serilog, NLog, log4net, and more), so adding it is usually a matter of installing a package and a few lines of configuration. Start with both side by side, and remove the parts of Application Insights that you no longer use.

Yes. There are guides for App Service and Azure Functions, and integrations for Azure Pipelines and Azure Boards. Read more on elmah.io on Azure.

We offer a free trial, so 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 revenue.

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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