Tideways

Tideways is a Bonn-based PHP profiling and application-performance platform, operated by Tideways GmbH, built specifically for PHP shops rather than as a general-purpose observability suite. It offers automatic instrumentation with no code changes for Laravel, Symfony, Magento, Shopware, WordPress and Drupal, plus common PHP data stores like MySQL and PostgreSQL, and the vendor states an overhead of just 1-5% on most applications — low enough to run continuous profiling in production rather than only during an incident.

The product covers three layers: monitoring and alerting across the stack, request-level profiling and distributed tracing with developer-controlled trace collection, and error and exception tracking.

Team and Business plans are both priced in tiers by monthly request volume, from 5 million requests up to 1 billion or more, with Business adding distributed profiling across services, a longer data lookback (30 days versus 5), 15 months of historical data against Team's six weeks, and integrations with PagerDuty, OpsGenie and Splunk On-Call.

Both plans get a 10% discount for annual billing, and the vendor's stated policy is no surprise invoices: there is a two-month grace period before a busier month triggers an automatic tier upgrade, rather than an immediate overage charge.

The limitation is scope by design: Tideways monitors PHP only, with no coverage for a Node, Go or Python service sitting in the same estate, and no infrastructure-wide log or metrics store. For an agency or in-house team running Symfony, Laravel or Shopware in production, that focus is the point — a profiler that happens to run continuously, rather than a general dashboard that happens to support PHP.

What Tideways does well

• Continuous production profiling with automatic instrumentation and a stated 1-5% overhead
• Published, tiered pricing by request volume, with a stated no-surprise-invoice policy and a grace period before upgrades
• Deep framework coverage for Laravel, Symfony, Magento, Shopware, WordPress and Drupal
• German company and EU jurisdiction, with a 14-day no-card trial

Where Tideways falls short

• PHP only — no coverage for other languages in a mixed estate
• No infrastructure-wide log aggregation or metrics store; it is an application-layer specialist
• No permanent free tier, only a 14-day trial

Standout feature. Continuous production profiling at a stated 1-5% overhead, with no code changes, purpose-built for Symfony, Laravel and Shopware rather than retrofitted onto a general-purpose agent.