FOR PHP DEVELOPERS COMPARING PROFILERS

A Tideways alternative
for the servers Tideways cannot reach.

Tideways is the most established PHP-specific profiler there is, and this page is not going to pretend otherwise. It has been doing this for a decade, it is built by people who know the PHP internals, and on a server you control it is an excellent answer. If that describes your setup, take it.

This page is for the other case: the part of your PHP estate where you cannot install a daemon or get root — a client's shared hosting account, a managed platform, a small VPS where the per-host price is out of proportion to the app.

Everything below about Tideways was read from Tideways' own pages on 22 September 2026: the plans page and compatibility and requirements. If something has changed, tell us and we will correct it.

Where Tideways is better than us, plainly

PHP 5.3 through 8.5. Tideways supports fifteen PHP versions going back to 5.3. We start at 8.0. If you are keeping a legacy application alive, that alone decides it.
macOS as well as Linux. We are Linux only.
A decade of framework instrumentation. Symfony, Laravel, Shopware and the rest, with call-graph profiling that has been refined for years. We attribute time to components; that is not the same depth.
Unlimited users on every plan. Their pricing scales on requests, not on how many colleagues are allowed to look — which is the opposite of how New Relic prices, and better.
700+ customers and a support team. We are new.

Where we fit and they do not

	Tideways	PHPRay
Root to install	“During installation ‘root’ access to the server is often required”, with exceptions through partner hosters that ship a managed build.	No. The extension loads from your own `php.ini`; the WordPress plugin needs neither an extension nor a daemon.
Shared hosting	Through a partnering hoster that offers it. Not something you install yourself.	Yes, directly — CageFS, LiteSpeed lsphp, mod_php. This is the case it was built for.
Separate process	A daemon. The extension talks to it over a socket or TCP.	A collector, and you can run it as your own user.
Free tier	None. A 14-day trial, no credit card.	Local core free and unlimited. Cloud Free covers one site with no card.
Licence	Proprietary.	Apache-2.0 core, self-hostable.
Where data lives	SysEleven's data centres in Berlin, Germany.	Your own server. The Cloud console is optional and stored in the EU.
Sampling	Profiling on a sample of requests, which is what keeps a profiler cheap.	Every request recorded; per-function attribution on a sample.

What their plans actually gate

Tideways prices on request volume rather than per seat, and the plans differ mostly in how far back you can look:

Plan	Lookback	Historical data
Team	5 days	6 weeks
Business	30 days	15 months
Enterprise	Custom	Unlimited

All plans include unlimited projects, services, transactions and users; Business includes up to five teams, then €25 per extra team. Monthly or yearly, with 10% off for yearly. Exact prices depend on your request tier and are shown on their page — we are not going to quote a number that moves.

The honest summary

If you run your own servers, have root, and want the deepest PHP profiling available, Tideways is the better product and we will not argue. If a meaningful part of what you look after runs where you cannot install a daemon — or you want the data on your own machine under a licence you can read — that is the gap we were built for. They are not really competing for the same server.

Questions people actually ask

Can I run both?

Yes, and on a mixed estate that is the sensible answer: Tideways on the servers you control, PHPRay on the shared and managed accounts it cannot reach. They are separate extensions and do not conflict — but load one at a time per pool when you are measuring overhead, or you are measuring both.

Does PHPRay support PHP 7?

No. We support 8.0 to 8.5, on glibc and musl, amd64 and arm64. Tideways goes back to 5.3, so for a legacy codebase it is the answer and we will say so.

What does always-on recording cost in performance?

Measured on a WordPress page rendering in about 48 ms: 40.7 ms with recording on against a 40.2 ms baseline — inside the noise. Per-function attribution adds about 4% on that page. Method and raw numbers are published in the repository.

Can I look at real data before installing anything?

Yes, three ways and none of them need an account: a published report from a production WooCommerce shop, a read-only console on live traffic, and a public MCP endpoint your agent can query with no API key.

Look at recorded data before installing anything

The MCP endpoint answers questions about a real WooCommerce fleet with no account and nothing installed. Or install locally in one line — Apache-2.0, no card.

Ask an agent about live data Install locally

A Tideways alternativefor the servers Tideways cannot reach.