Honestly, right in the first sentence: we build one of the tools on this list. You are reading a comparison on a vendor’s blog, and that belongs at the top, not in the small print.
So we do this differently from most lists of this kind. The criteria come before the first tool. Every price is a list price with a date on it. Where we could not source a fact, it says “not verified” instead of a guess. And every tool gets a line saying when it beats fastmon. Those are not courtesies: for several vendors on this list there are situations where we would reach for them ourselves.
What real user monitoring measures, and what it does not
Real user monitoring measures the experience of actual visitors while they use your site. A small script in the browser records how long it took until the largest visible element appeared, how quickly the page responded to the first click, and how much the content jumped while loading. Those values go to the vendor, who aggregates them across all visitors.
The difference from a lab test is the whole reason RUM exists. A Lighthouse run measures one page under fixed conditions: one device, one network, one location. Your visitors are not a fixed condition. They sit on four year old Android phones in a congested mobile network, on an office machine with fibre, or on a train with a connection that comes and goes. RUM shows that distribution, which is why it is the data Google looks at too.
What matters just as much is what RUM cannot do. It does not tell you reproducibly why something was slow, because every measurement happened under different conditions. It measures nothing before the first real visitor arrives, so it is no use as a pre-deploy test. And at low traffic the statistics get thin: below roughly a thousand pageviews a month the percentiles are no longer stable enough to decide anything.
RUM or synthetic monitoring?
This question comes up in every tool selection, and the honest answer is: both, where you can.
| Real user monitoring | Synthetic monitoring | |
|---|---|---|
| Data source | actual visitors | scheduled test runs |
| Conditions | variable, like reality | fixed and repeatable |
| Finds a problem | when visitors experience it | before visitors experience it |
| Answers | who it hits, how often, where | why exactly, reproducibly |
| Blind spot | rare pages with no traffic | anything that only happens live |
| Fit for alerting | medium, needs volume | high, stable baseline |
| Core Web Vitals | LCP, INP, CLS as field data | LCP and CLS, INP only approximated |
That last row often decides the choice. Interaction to Next Paint cannot be measured cleanly in a lab, because nobody clicks there. Lighthouse offers Total Blocking Time as a proxy instead. If you genuinely want to know your INP, there is no way around field data.
What we compared on
All eight tools measure real visitors. They differ on six points that genuinely hurt in daily use:
Entry price and included volume. Not the list price on its own, but what it buys in pageviews or sessions. A cheap plan with 100,000 pageviews costs a mid-sized shop more than a dearer one with 1.5 million.
Where the data sits and who can reach it. For a European company that is not a matter of taste, it is a question asked in every procurement process. What matters is not only the server location but the vendor’s jurisdiction: an EU region does not change which law the company answers to.
What ends up on the device in the default mode. Cookie, localStorage or nothing. It decides what the consent question looks like, and it is where the tools differ most sharply.
Whether field and lab live in the same tool. Buy them separately and you pay twice, then compare numbers from two systems with different definitions.
How long the data stays. A year-over-year comparison needs thirteen months of history. With several vendors that costs a multiple of the entry price.
What the tool was originally built for. An uptime service with a RUM feature behaves differently from a web performance tool. Both are legitimate, but it decides whether you find your way around the interface.
The overview
Price and volume
| Tool | Entry | What that buys | Built for |
|---|---|---|---|
| fastmon | €29/mo | 200k pageviews | web performance, EU |
| Datadog RUM | $0.15/1,000 sessions | usage based | full-stack observability |
| New Relic | $0 up to 100 GB | 100 GB ingest | one platform for everything |
| Pingdom | €14.33/mo | 100k pageviews | uptime first |
| SpeedCurve | $90/mo | configurable | performance culture |
| DebugBear | $99/mo | 100k pageviews | Core Web Vitals, lab |
| RUMvision | €150/mo | 1.5M pageviews | RUM specialist, EU |
| Raygun | $80/mo | 100k sessions | errors and RUM |
Data path and device
| Tool | Base and processing | On the device |
|---|---|---|
| fastmon | Germany, data path fully in the EU | nothing in the default mode |
| Datadog RUM | US company, EU region optional | cookie (_dd_s) |
| New Relic | US company, EU region at a surcharge | not verified |
| Pingdom | SolarWinds, headquartered in Austin, Texas; processing location not verified | not verified |
| SpeedCurve | US company, AWS us-east-1 | session cookie (lux_uid) |
| DebugBear | UK, Google Cloud, EU proxy as opt-in | no cookie by default |
| RUMvision | Netherlands, edge on AWS CloudFront | localStorage by default |
| Raygun | AWS, region not documented | not verified |
List prices, checked on 2 September 2026. DebugBear and Raygun at their annual rates; paying monthly costs more there. Hosting and device behaviour come from vendor documentation, checked on 14 July 2026. Where it says “not verified” we found no solid public source and therefore claim nothing. Terms change, so verify them with the vendor before you decide.
The eight tools
fastmon
Real user monitoring, scheduled Lighthouse audits and web analytics in one interface, built and hosted in Germany. Light is €29 for 200,000 pageviews, Standard €99 for a million, usage based in steps above that. One production and one development application are included, and the number of domains does not matter.
In the default mode nothing is stored on the device. The visitor identifier is short-lived and derived at the edge, where the IP address is reduced to a country code and never reaches application code.
Debugging covers error grouping, network waterfalls and a breakdown of server time into nine phases via the Server-Timing header, including separate phases for search index and key-value store. Deploys can be tagged as a release, after which one query compares before and after at the 75th percentile. For shops, fastmon recognizes cart, checkout and completion from the URL patterns of the common systems, with no tracker change.
Pick something else if you need session replay, expect logs and APM in the same tool, or want to measure native mobile apps. fastmon does none of that. Synthetic monitoring and analytics are also labelled beta.
Datadog RUM
The benchmark for teams that want frontend, backend, infrastructure and logs correlated in one place. When something surfaces in the frontend and the cause sits three layers down, Datadog is there where other tools stop.
Pricing is split into separate SKUs, and working that out is the real task. RUM Measure is $0.15 per 1,000 sessions on an annual contract, remarkably cheap for aggregate metrics. The moment you want to inspect individual sessions, RUM Investigate joins at $3 per 1,000 filtered sessions, Session Replay at $2.50 and Product Analytics at $0.80. If aggregate metrics are all you need, the entry SKU is all you pay for; if you open individual sessions, you budget for several.
Datadog is a US company, the EU region is an option rather than a default, and the browser SDK sets a cookie named _dd_s by default to hold a session together across pages.
Pick Datadog if you are already there and want frontend data next to traces and logs. No specialized tool replaces that correlation, ours included. We have a dedicated fastmon versus Datadog comparison.
New Relic
The most generous free tier in the field: 100 GB of ingest per month costs nothing, then $0.40 per GB, or $0.60 with Data Plus. Browser monitoring is part of the platform rather than a separate SKU, so you pay for data volume, not for pageviews.
The user prices are the part that surprises teams. A core user is $49 a month, a full platform user $349 a year and up depending on tier. With a larger team that quickly becomes the dominant line item, not the data.
There is an EU region, at $0.05 per GB extra. Here too the vendor is a US company.
Pick New Relic if you want a broad observability platform, can live with a consumption model, and want to use the free tier to try things out.
Pingdom
The best known name in uptime monitoring, with RUM as a second leg. Entry is €14.33 a month on annual payment for 100,000 pageviews, the cheapest on this list. Synthetic monitoring is billed separately at the same rate, so both together come to roughly €344 a year. The 30 day trial covers both.
The product page describes a live map of visitors, breakdowns by browser, device and platform, load time with an Apdex score, session journeys and shareable reports. Core Web Vitals are part of the RUM product as well. The centre of gravity is clearly availability and classic load time, and that is exactly what Pingdom has been the known name for over twenty years.
For European buyers the ownership matters. Pingdom was founded in Sweden in 2005 and belongs to SolarWinds today, headquartered in Austin, Texas. The pages we checked do not state where the RUM data is processed and stored. If you need processing to stay inside the EU, get that in writing before you buy.
Pick Pingdom if uptime is your main topic and RUM the addition to it. If the processing location is decisive for you, settle it first.
SpeedCurve
The tool with the strongest culture around performance: dashboards you put on a wall, comparisons against competitors, lab and field side by side. If you want performance to become a topic other departments talk about, this is the best presentation of it.
Entry is $90 a month, with sliders for RUM and synthetic volume, so there is no fixed included amount. Thirteen months of history starts at the Growth plan at $576, so the year-over-year comparison is a cost item of its own there.
Hosting is in the AWS us-east-1 region. Ownership has moved: SpeedCurve belonged to Embrace and now trades as a Palo Alto Networks company, so it stays US-based. By default SpeedCurve sets a session cookie named lux_uid that expires thirty minutes after the last pageview.
Pick SpeedCurve if you want to establish performance as a team topic and value good visualization.
DebugBear
The Core Web Vitals specialist with the deepest lab side. Experiments that let you simulate a change before you build it are a first-class feature, and for the question “what do we gain by removing this script?” there is no better tool on this list.
Recently the Startup plan at $99 a month on annual billing already includes 100,000 RUM pageviews plus 4,000 synthetic tests. Team with 500,000 pageviews is $249, Corporate with two million $699. Fourteen day trial, no credit card.
DebugBear is a UK company on Google Cloud. A proxy in Germany is available so IP addresses do not leave the EU, but it is opt-in rather than the default. Its RUM sets no cookies by default.
Pick DebugBear if synthetic tests and lab debugging are your focus and the field is the supplement. With us it is the other way round.
RUMvision
The other European option on this list, from the Netherlands, and a pure RUM specialist.
Entry is €150 a month for 1.5 million pageviews across two domains, with extra domains at €20. Measured by volume that is fair: if you use the 1.5 million, you pay less per pageview than with most others here. If you do not, you pay the highest entry price in the field. Thirteen months of retention only arrives with the Scale plan from €700.
By default RUMvision uses localStorage and sessionStorage to tell new visitors from returning ones. That is not a cookie, but it is access to the device, and for the consent question that makes a difference. Both can be switched off, and the vendor says consent then falls away too.
One point that the word EU tends to hide: collection runs through AWS CloudFront and AWS WAF. RUMvision documents the mechanism openly and cleanly, the IP is seen at the edge only long enough to derive the country code and is then discarded, with only the ISO code reaching the database. Still, if you pick a vendor by its data path, you should know that a US hyperscaler sits in that path, even though the company itself is Dutch.
Pick RUMvision if you have high volume on few domains and want an EU vendor for whom RUM alone is enough.
Raygun
Error tracking, crash reporting and RUM from one vendor, with a strong eye on individual user sessions. If you care what a specific user experienced before the error hit, that is where Raygun is at its strongest.
Real user monitoring starts at $80 a month billed annually for 100,000 sessions, $120 monthly, with extra sessions at $0.002 each. Fourteen day trial, no commitment.
Raygun runs on AWS according to its own security page. Which region that is, and whether an EU option exists, is not stated there and we could not source it elsewhere.
Pick Raygun if you want errors and performance at session level in one view and the server location does not matter to you.
Core Web Vitals compared
If Google is the reason you are buying, this is the row to read. All values refer to field data, that is, to actual visitors.
| Tool | LCP, INP, CLS | Segmentation | Attribution |
|---|---|---|---|
| fastmon | yes, at the 75th percentile | page, page type, device, country, browser | yes, element and phase per pageview |
| Datadog RUM | yes | extensive | partial, via session details |
| New Relic | yes | extensive | partial |
| Pingdom | yes | browser, device, location | not verified |
| SpeedCurve | yes | extensive, incl. competitor benchmarks | yes |
| DebugBear | yes | extensive | yes, linked to lab data |
| RUMvision | yes | extensive | yes |
| Raygun | yes | session, device, location | partial |
We classified segmentation and attribution from the vendors’ public product and documentation pages, as of 2 September 2026. “Partial” means an attribution exists but not as a dedicated view per metric. Where it says “not verified” we found no solid source.
Attribution is the part that saves the most time. Knowing that LCP sits at 3.4 seconds helps little. Knowing that it is the hero image on the category page, and that the time sits in load delay rather than in rendering, is the difference between guessing and working.
And if it has to be free
There are two free routes that carry you surprisingly far. The Chrome UX Report gives you field data from real Chrome users for any sufficiently visited domain, with nothing to install. And PageSpeed Insights shows that field data next to a Lighthouse run, so field and lab on one screen.
You hit the limit quickly. CrUX only knows Chrome users, aggregates over 28 days, and will not show you one page of your shop at the moment it was slow. There is no error data, no network waterfall, and no way to compare yesterday’s deploy with the day before. For “where do we stand?” it is enough. For “what happened yesterday?” it is not. More in our comparison with Lighthouse.
Which tool for which situation
If you are in one of these situations, the answer is fairly clear:
- European shop or agency, privacy comes up in every meeting: fastmon or RUMvision. Both companies are based in the EU. They differ in price, in included volume, in what lands on the device (nothing, with us, in the default mode), and in the data path: RUMvision collects through AWS CloudFront, while with us every provider in the customer data path is an EU company.
- You already run Datadog or New Relic: stay there, unless the bill or the privacy question forces you out. A second tool next to an observability platform rarely pays off.
- Uptime is the main topic, performance the bonus: Pingdom, cheap and with a name your management already knows.
- Load time is your core job and you work a lot in the lab: DebugBear or SpeedCurve.
- Errors and individual user sessions come first: Raygun.
- You want field, lab and analytics in one tool without an enterprise contract: that is what we built fastmon for.
What to watch out for when choosing
Three mistakes come up again and again, and all three cost money or nerves later.
Buying on list price instead of price per pageview. Work out your actual monthly traffic against the included volume. A $10 plan with 100,000 pageviews is more expensive than a €150 plan with 1.5 million as soon as you have two million.
Forgetting retention. Almost every vendor sells the short history cheaply and the long one dearly. If you want to know in January how last December went, you need thirteen months, and with several vendors that is exactly the jump into the next tier.
Checking the data path only during procurement. The question of where data sits and who can legally reach it comes up in every larger organization. Asking it once the tool is already embedded leads to migrations nobody planned for.
What we do differently
Three things we are happy to be held to, all three checkable.
The cheapest EU-hosted entry in this comparison. €29 for 200,000 pageviews against €150 at RUMvision, the only other EU vendor on this list. Cheaper overall is Pingdom at €14.33, and New Relic has a free tier. Neither is an EU vendor, and that is the point of the claim: among the tools with a European data path, we are the cheapest way in.
Nothing on the device. In the default mode fastmon writes neither a cookie nor localStorage. In our assessment that needs no consent under § 25 TDDDG, and the full derivation including the residual risk is public on our cookies page. We know of no other tool on this list that derives its own legal position publicly in that detail.
The data path stays in the EU. Built and hosted in Germany, and every provider in the customer data path is a company from Germany or the EU, listed in our sub-processor list. No Cloudflare, no AWS, no GCP.
What we cannot do is in the fastmon section above, and none of it changes that for some teams one of the other seven is the right choice.
Try it instead of comparing it
In the end no table decides this, the question is whether you find what you are looking for in the interface. Every fastmon account starts with 30 days of full access, no credit card, and the script is one tag in the head. Five minutes later you are looking at your first real visitors.
Something wrong here? Everything stated about other vendors is a list price or a public product claim, checked on 2 September 2026. Prices and features change, sometimes within the same week. If you spot something that is no longer accurate, or never was, write to support@fastmon.eu. We will correct it and note the date of the change. That invitation goes to the vendors themselves as well.