---
title: "When Grafana Cloud might not be the right fit | Grafana Labs"
description: "Situations where Grafana Cloud may not be the best choice for your organization."
---

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

## When to look elsewhere

If any of these situations apply to you, consider these suggestions.

- **Your data must stay in a country or region where Grafana Cloud isn’t available**:
  
  Look at self-managed Grafana instead. The hosted version may not be the right fit yet.
- **You only need one signal, like metrics, at a small scale**:
  
  Self-managed Grafana and Prometheus is probably enough. Cloud pays off most when operating the backend, scaling, or controlling cost starts to take real time and money.
- **You’re already on another platform and it’s working fine**:
  
  No reason to switch. Revisit if the pricing changes, the roadmap diverges, or you start feeling locked in.
- **Your compliance rules require you to own and operate all your own infrastructure**:
  
  Self-managed Grafana is the right answer. Hosted Cloud isn’t a fit. If your requirements are about data control rather than fully self-operating, the federal cloud option runs in your own cloud account and may bridge the gap.
- **Your incident management is deeply built into another tool and you’re not looking to change it**:
  
  Keep what you have. Grafana Cloud’s alerting and reliability features can still feed into your existing tool.