Overview
Grafana Cloud is the hosted service of Grafana Labs, the company behind the Grafana dashboarding project that Torkel Ödegaard created in December 2013[15]. The cloud service packages the company’s open-source back ends, Mimir for metrics, Loki for logs, Tempo for traces and Pyroscope for profiles, behind Grafana dashboards, alerting and incident response (IRM). Grafana Labs says it has more than 10,000 customers[15].
The pricing model is the most accessible in this list for small teams. The Free plan includes 10,000 active metric series and 50 GB each of logs, traces and profiles per month with 14-day retention, plus three active users[3]. Pro carries a US$19 monthly platform fee with the same included usage, after which metrics cost from US$6.50 per 1,000 series and logs are billed in three parts: US$0.05 per GB processing, US$0.40 per GB written and US$0.10 per GB retained[3]. Enterprise starts at a US$25,000 annual commitment and adds Federal Cloud and bring-your-own-cloud deployment[3]. Because the components are open source, teams can also self-host them and later move to the managed service, which reduces lock-in. The trade-off is that the stack is assembled from separate query languages (PromQL, LogQL, TraceQL), which lengthens the learning curve compared with single-language platforms.
What Grafana does
- Hosted Prometheus-compatible metrics (Mimir)
- Logs (Loki), traces (Tempo), profiles (Pyroscope)
- Incident response and on-call (IRM)
- Free plan with 10k series and 50 GB per signal
- Federal Cloud and bring-your-own-cloud on Enterprise
- Self-hostable open-source components
- Application Observability on OpenTelemetry
- Hosted traces and profiles
Grafana pricing
Free: US$0, 10k active series, 50 GB logs/traces/profiles each, 14-day retention, 3 users. Pro: US$19/month platform fee plus usage; metrics from US$6.50 per 1k series; logs and traces US$0.05/GB processing + US$0.40/GB write + US$0.10/GB retain; extra users US$8 each; 13-month metric and 30-day log retention. Enterprise: from US$25,000/year commitment, metrics as low as US$3 per 1k series.
Grafana strengths and limitations
Strengths
- Generous permanent free tier
- Open-source components limit lock-in
- Prometheus and OpenTelemetry native
- Low entry price for paid tier
- Free tier covers real workloads
- Low per-host price for application observability
Limitations
- Several query languages to learn
- Usage billed on many dimensions (process, write, retain)
- Enterprise overage rates not published
- Less automatic instrumentation than agent-centric vendors
- More assembly than all-in-one suites
- Enterprise minimum of US$25,000 per year
Appears in
- Best Data Visualization Tools in 2026 #11
- Best Observability Tools in 2026 #3
- Best APM Tools in 2026 #7
Grafana alternatives and competitors
Alternatives to Grafana: companies ranked in the same lists.
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Datadog
Dynatrace
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IBM Consulting
Better Stack
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