---
title: "Vendor lock-in | Grafana Labs"
description: "Why Grafana Cloud's open-standards foundation prevents vendor lock-in."
---

> For a curated documentation index, see [llms.txt](/llms.txt). For the complete documentation index, see [llms-full.txt](/llms-full.txt).

## Vendor lock-in

With many observability vendors, moving away means starting from scratch:

- Dashboards stored in proprietary formats
- Queries written in vendor-specific languages
- Data locked behind APIs you don’t control

## The difference with Grafana Cloud

Built on open-source and open-standard foundations, any switching is a migration, not a rewrite. Your dashboards, alert rules, and instrumentation move with you, because they’re built on open formats, not locked to our platform.

- **Dashboard formats**: Cloud uses the same dashboards and alert rules as open source Grafana.
- **Query languages**: Cloud uses the open query languages of Prometheus, Loki, and Tempo: PromQL, LogQL, and TraceQL.
- **Standard APIs**: Cloud exposes open APIs (Prometheus remote write, OTLP, and others) so your tooling isn’t tied to a proprietary integration layer.

## Real results from real teams

- [**Erste Digital**](/success/erste-digital/)
  
  > “We wanted to have a vendor neutral instrumentation and therefore we chose Grafana Cloud.”
- [**Optro**](/success/auditboard/)
  
  > Grafana Cloud’s native support for OpenTelemetry would allow the team to future-proof their stack. Open standards offered greater flexibility around data collection and integration.