Tideways
German PHP profiling and APM, tiered by request volume, no surprise invoices, 14-day trial
Quick Overview
| Company | Tideways GmbH |
|---|---|
| Category | Observability & Log Management |
| Headquarters | Bonn, Germany |
| Founded | Not stated by the vendor |
| EU Presence | EU (Germany) |
| Open Source | Not stated; closed-source SaaS |
| Compliance | GDPR-compliant; German-hosted |
| Pricing | Team and Business tiered by monthly requests, published; Enterprise custom |
| Free Option | 14-day free trial, no credit card required, no permanent free tier |
| Replaces | New Relic, Datadog, Blackfire |
Detailed Review
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.
Pros and Cons
Pros
- Error tracking and a real PHP profiler in the same tool
- All data stored at SysEleven in Berlin, the most specific residency claim here
- Unlimited projects, services and users on every plan
- Deep framework instrumentation for Laravel, Symfony, Magento and Drupal
- 14-day trial with no credit card or phone number
Cons
- PHP only — useless for any other runtime in your stack
- No free plan, and €69 a month is a high floor for a small site
- Team plan keeps only five days of lookback
- No published security certification
- Alerting on the Team plan is limited to ten transactions and a ten-minute resolution
Alternatives to Tideways
Frequently Asked Questions
What is Tideways?
Tideways is German PHP profiling and APM, tiered by request volume, no surprise invoices, with a 14-day trial.
Where is Tideways based?
Tideways is operated by Tideways GmbH, based in Bonn, Germany, which places it under EU (Germany) law.
What does Tideways cost?
Team and Business plans are priced in tiers by monthly requests, from 5 million up to 1 billion or more, published on the pricing page; Enterprise is custom above 1 billion requests. A 14-day free trial requires no credit card, and annual billing gets a 10% discount.
Who is Tideways best for?
A PHP shop running Symfony, Laravel, Magento, Shopware, WordPress or Drupal that wants continuous production profiling, not just a performance graph, with automatic instrumentation and 1-5% overhead.
Is Tideways a good alternative to Datadog or New Relic?
Tideways is built as a European alternative to US-based observability platforms like Datadog and New Relic, specifically for PHP. It covers no other language and has no infrastructure-wide metrics store, so check the review above for where it genuinely differs before switching.
How does Tideways compare to other Observability & Log Management tools?
Tideways is one of several European Observability & Log Management tools covered on this site. See the full Observability & Log Management category page for how it ranks against its closest European competitors.