Arize+26 Positive

GILD Review

GILD's call and the buying facts behind it.

From GILD research

Should we adopt Arize?

Can your team start Arize on free Phoenix and move to Arize AX without instrumenting its agents again?

30-Second TakeStart on Arize Phoenix self-hosted, and move to managed Arize AX when production monitoring matters.
Best fitTeams that want portable, OpenTelemetry-based tracing and evals, starting self-hosted on Phoenix and moving to Arize AX for production monitoring and compliance.GILD Review
Consider another workflowIf your agents run on LangGraph and you want hosting from the same vendor, evaluate LangSmith. If your license policy needs an MIT core, evaluate Langfuse. If your SREs live in Datadog, evaluate Datadog.GILD Review

Drawn from 78 sources and 11 operator insights

GILD analysis

Arize Review

PagerDuty, Wayfair and Uber run Arize AX in production; teams that left Phoenix in 2026 went to Langfuse or their own datastore. Start on Phoenix, free to self-host under the Elastic License 2.0, and move to Arize AX for managed online evals and monitors. Both use OpenTelemetry, so the same instrumentation moves between them, at the price of small AX allowances and a Phoenix your team runs.

AI Observability
AI Costs

The decision

Best fit: Teams that want portable, OpenTelemetry-based tracing and evals, starting self-hosted on Phoenix and moving to Arize AX for production monitoring and compliance.
Consider another workflow: If your agents run on LangGraph and you want hosting from the same vendor, evaluate LangSmith. If your license policy needs an MIT core, evaluate Langfuse. If your SREs live in Datadog, evaluate Datadog.
Adoption condition: Get a written AX quote for production span volume. If self-hosting Phoenix, name an owner and configure PostgreSQL, sign-in, and retention before tracing production.

Basis: Arize documentation, plans, and pricing, plus 53 counted public accounts. Before Oct 28, 2026 they were 30 GitHub issues, pull requests, and discussions, 6 Hacker News comments, and 9 company and personal blog posts. The rest are 2 Reddit posts, 3 recorded conference talks, 1 independent tool evaluation, and 1 newsletter guest post. On Oct 28, 2026 GILD added 3 GitHub issues, 4 X posts, 3 Reddit posts and comments, 1 Hacker News comment and Parlance Labs' 100-trace evaluation; one X post and one Reddit comment of these count toward the score. In a pilot, time Phoenix's attribute search and count dropped spans at your peak daily volume.

Buying & deployment factsWhat a team building on it should verify before production traffic grows.

How you buy it

US$50

A month for AX Pro with 50,000 spans. Free covers 25,000, and Phoenix self-hosts free.

Source 3, Arize AI, Phoenix license: Phoenix license Source 1, arize.com, Arize AX pricing: Arize AX pricing Source 2, Arize AI, Pricing and usage: Pricing and usage

Details

Phoenix self-hosts free under Elastic License 2.0, with no feature gates. AX Free costs US$0 for 25,000 spans and 1 GB monthly. Pro costs US$50 for 50,000 spans and 10 GB. Enterprise pricing is custom. Every AX plan includes unlimited users and evaluations, plus experiments.

Cost drivers

50,000 spans

And 10 GB a month on Pro. Arize lists no overage rate today, so get it in writing.

Source 1, arize.com, Arize AX pricing: Arize AX pricing Source 2, Arize AI, Pricing and usage: Pricing and usage Source 5, arize.com, Arize AX release notes: Arize AX release notes Source 9, arize.com, View eval results and costs: View eval results and costs Source 3, Arize AI, Phoenix license: Phoenix license

Details

Span and storage volume. Pro includes 50,000 spans and 10 GB a month, and Arize's pricing page and plan docs no longer list a per-span or per-GB overage rate, so get the overage terms and any Enterprise price in writing. Retention is 15 days on Free and 30 on Pro, with a self-serve extension to 13 months on Pro. LLM-judge evals consume tokens and model spend, and Phoenix costs only the infrastructure you run.

Where it runs

US, EU, or Canada

AX SaaS regions with private links. Phoenix runs on Docker or Kubernetes, air-gapped too.

Source 2, Arize AI, Pricing and usage: Pricing and usage Source 6, arize.com, Arize Private Connect: Arize Private Connect Source 4, Arize AI, Self-hosted Arize AX: Self-hosted Arize AX Source 3, Arize AI, Phoenix license: Phoenix license Source 8, Arize AI, Phoenix architecture: Phoenix architecture Source 7, Arize AI, Phoenix self-hosted privacy: Phoenix self-hosted privacy

Details

AX SaaS offers US, EU, or Canada regions with AWS PrivateLink, Azure Private Link, or Google Private Service Connect. Enterprise also supports self-hosted Kubernetes. Phoenix runs on Docker, Kubernetes, or Helm with SQLite or PostgreSQL, including air-gapped operation.

What to verify

October 1, 2026

Dynatrace closed its purchase of Arize and says AX and Phoenix stay available.

Source 7, Arize AI, Phoenix self-hosted privacy: Phoenix self-hosted privacy Source 2, Arize AI, Pricing and usage: Pricing and usage Source 10, dynatrace.com, Dynatrace completes acquisition of Arize: Dynatrace completes acquisition of Arize

Details

Self-hosted Phoenix sends no traces to Arize. AX includes SOC 2 Type II and GDPR from Pro. HIPAA and SSO, plus audit logs, require Enterprise. Dynatrace completed the acquisition on October 1, 2026 and says AX and Phoenix remain available.