Understand your options on Grafana Labs

How the options differ

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How the options differ

Grafana comes in several forms that differ on one core question: how much do you run yourself, and how much does someone else run for you?

This section walks through your options along that spectrum:

Grafana OSS and Grafana Enterprise: you self-host and operate everything
Amazon Managed Grafana and Azure Managed Grafana: AWS or Microsoft runs Grafana for you, focused on dashboards
Grafana Cloud: Grafana Labs runs a full managed observability platform for you

It also clears up a common mix-up: buying Grafana Cloud through a cloud marketplace is a billing choice, not a different product.

Then you’ll compare the options across features, pricing, team requirements, and data residency, work through a decision framework, and leave with a clear next step.

Estimated time

12-15 minutes

What self-hosting means

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What self-hosting means

When you run Grafana OSS or Grafana Enterprise, you’re self-hosting: you install, configure, and maintain the software on your own infrastructure. It’s a fully capable, production-ready way to run Grafana that gives you complete control over your environment.

What you consider here is the operational work you take on:

Infrastructure: servers, operating system, networking
Database: MySQL or PostgreSQL for production, including backups (SQLite is for development only)
Upgrades: planning and executing every version upgrade
Security: OS patches, access controls, network security
High availability (HA): running multiple copies so the system stays up if one fails

The hidden cost is engineering time

These line items are more than infrastructure spend. The larger, easily overlooked cost is the engineering time spent running observability instead of building products. As usage grows, that operational work competes with the projects your team would rather focus on.

How the work scales

What you need grows with the number of people you serve:

Scale	Users	What you need
Small	< 25	Single instance, 2 cores, 2-4 GB RAM
Medium	25-200	2 load-balanced instances, external database, image renderer, 4-8 cores each
Large	200+	3+ instances, HA database cluster, Redis session store, dedicated alert evaluation

Fully managed options, including Amazon Managed Grafana, Azure Managed Grafana, and Grafana Cloud, take on this operational work for you, so you get the benefits of Grafana without the operational burden.

Grafana OSS

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What you get

Grafana OSS is free, open source software that provides:

Dashboards with variables, annotations, and dozens of visualization types
Alerting with notification channels (email, Slack, PagerDuty, and more)
A query editor and Explore mode for ad-hoc data investigation
A plugin framework with hundreds of community data sources and panels
Configuration through files, environment variables, or provisioning scripts

Note: You can also use Grafana Assistant, the purpose-built AI assistant, with self-hosted Grafana OSS. Install the Assistant plugin and connect a free or paid Grafana Cloud account: the assistant runs in your instance while its backend stays in Grafana Cloud.

What you don’t get

The free edition leaves out a few things:

No official support. Community forums are the primary help channel.
No enterprise governance features
No managed infrastructure. You run and operate everything yourself.

The cost of running it yourself

Free to license doesn’t mean free to run. Self-hosting OSS carries real, ongoing costs:

Cost type	What it looks like
Infrastructure	Setup, configuration, scaling, and ongoing maintenance at scale
Engineering	Full-time engineers (FTEs) dedicated to installation, administration, and upgrades, instead of product work
Opportunity	Innovation slows when engineers keep the lights on rather than ship features
Downtime	No guaranteed SLAs or 24/7 support, and the risk of running blind during an incident

Best for

Individuals and small teams comfortable managing infrastructure, with no need for commercial support.

Get started

Download Grafana OSS and follow the installation guide.

Grafana Enterprise

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What Enterprise adds

Grafana Enterprise includes everything in OSS, plus governance features and technical support.

Category	What you get
Access control	Role-based access control (RBAC): granular permissions that control who can view, edit, or administer specific resources
Authentication	SAML single sign-on (SSO): sign in once with a company login instead of managing separate passwords. Team sync: map groups from your identity provider (Okta, Entra ID, LDAP, and others) to Grafana teams so membership updates automatically.
Compliance	Audit logging, data source permissions, reporting with scheduled PDF delivery
Support	24/7 support and training from Grafana Labs
Plugins	Premium data source plugins (Snowflake, Oracle, Splunk, ServiceNow, and more)

Still self-hosted

Enterprise gives you more capabilities and a support team, but you still manage the infrastructure described on the previous slide.

Best for

Organizations that need governance and control but have the operations capacity to self-host.

Get started

Contact the Grafana Labs sales team for a trial license.

Contact sales

Grafana Cloud

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What Grafana Cloud provides

Grafana Cloud is a fully managed service with capabilities beyond what self-hosted Grafana offers.

Grafana Labs runs the backend storage and processing for your metrics, logs, traces, and profiles. You send data in. Grafana Cloud handles scale, retention, and availability.

Capabilities exclusive to Grafana Cloud

Beyond removing operational work, Grafana Cloud adds capabilities the self-hosted options don’t include:

Observability solutions: Kubernetes Monitoring, Application Observability, Database Observability, Frontend Observability, and more
Testing and reliability: Synthetic Monitoring, Grafana Cloud k6 (managed, distributed load testing), service-level objectives (SLOs), and Incident Response and Management
Cost and troubleshooting: Adaptive Telemetry for managing data volume, plus the advanced Grafana Assistant capabilities that require the managed backend, such as infrastructure memory, hosted Cloud MCP connections, and cross-session incident investigations. The core Assistant also runs on self-hosted OSS and Enterprise. Grafana Cloud is where it becomes the most powerful.
Service-level agreement (SLA): Grafana Cloud commits to a 99.5% SLA covering the success of requests and autonomous actions (such as alert evaluation and synthetic checks), not simply uptime.
Instant upgrades: Grafana Labs handles version updates, security patches, and backups automatically.

Best for

Teams who want full observability without managing infrastructure. This is the recommended starting point.

Get started

A free tier lets you start at no cost. You can buy directly or through a cloud marketplace for consolidated billing.

Other ways to buy

Grafana Cloud is also available through these marketplaces for consolidated billing:

Cloud provider marketplaces and managed services

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Two meanings of “Grafana in the cloud”

“Grafana in the cloud” can mean two very different things: buying Grafana Cloud through a cloud marketplace, or using a cloud provider’s own managed Grafana service.

Marketplace purchasing

A cloud provider marketplace is a storefront run by AWS, Azure, or Google Cloud where you can buy software using your existing cloud billing. You can purchase Grafana Cloud through any of these marketplaces.

You get the same Grafana Cloud platform; what changes is how you’re billed. Charges route through your cloud provider account instead of directly through Grafana Labs. In most cases, you can also apply existing cloud spending commitments, such as AWS Enterprise Discount Program credits, toward your Grafana Cloud usage.

Cloud-provider managed Grafana

Amazon Managed Grafana and Azure Managed Grafana are separate services, run by AWS and Microsoft, not Grafana Labs.

	Amazon Managed Grafana	Azure Managed Grafana	Grafana Cloud
Run by	AWS	Microsoft	Grafana Labs
Focus	Managed Grafana for visualization and alerting	Managed Grafana for visualization and alerting	Full observability platform
Cloud integration	Native (AWS IAM Identity Center, CloudWatch, Amazon Managed Service for Prometheus)	Native (Microsoft Entra ID, Azure Monitor)	Via data source plugins
Bundled observability backend	No; connects to AWS-native services	No; connects to Azure-native services	Yes (Mimir, Loki, Tempo, Pyroscope)
Grafana Enterprise	Optional add-on (per-active-user fee)	Base service runs Enterprise; plugins optional	Included on paid plans

Best for

Amazon Managed Grafana: AWS-native teams who want managed dashboards with AWS IAM Identity Center integration and consolidated AWS billing.
Azure Managed Grafana: Azure-native teams who want managed dashboards with Microsoft Entra ID integration and consolidated Azure billing.

Get started

Set up a provider-managed service from its cloud console, or add the optional Grafana Enterprise plugins and support:

Amazon Managed Grafana: set up in the AWS console
Enterprise add-on for Amazon: premium plugins and support
Azure Managed Grafana: set up in the Azure portal
Enterprise add-on for Azure: premium plugins and support

Feature comparison

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How the options compare

With each option covered on its own, here’s how the three line up side by side:

Capability	OSS	Enterprise	Grafana Cloud
Dashboards, alerting, data sources	Yes	Yes	Yes
Governance (RBAC, SAML, audit logging)	Basic permissions only	Yes	Yes
Premium data source plugins	Community only	Yes	Yes
Managed observability stack	No	No	Yes
Observability solutions and tools	No	No	Yes
Infrastructure management	You	You	Grafana Labs
Official support	Community	24/7	By plan

Amazon Managed Grafana and Azure Managed Grafana cover dashboards and visualization with native AWS or Azure integration, but don’t include governance features or the observability stack.

Pricing and cost models

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Three pricing structures

What you pay, and how you pay it, depends on the option you choose:

Option	How you pay	Infrastructure costs
Grafana OSS	Free to download and use	You pay for servers, database, and staff time
Grafana Enterprise	License from Grafana Labs (contact sales)	Same infrastructure costs, plus the license fee
Grafana Cloud	Usage-based tiers: Free, Pro, and contracted plans	Included. Grafana Labs manages infrastructure.

Total cost of ownership

The subscription or license price is only part of the cost. Total cost of ownership (TCO) includes hidden expenses like staff time, infrastructure, upgrades, and incident response.

Self-hosted options have lower subscription costs but higher operational costs. Grafana Cloud has higher subscription costs but eliminates operational overhead. With Enterprise, the support you pay for can reduce the cost of troubleshooting incidents.

Marketplace purchasing (AWS, Azure, or Google Cloud) gives you the same Grafana Cloud platform and routes billing through your existing cloud account. Marketplace listings may present pricing in their own units or currency, so check the listing to confirm the terms.

Cloud-provider managed services (Amazon Managed Grafana and Azure Managed Grafana) are billed separately by the provider, with an optional Grafana Enterprise add-on for premium plugins and support.

Team and skill requirements

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Skills your team needs

Each deployment calls for a different mix of skills:

Deployment	Infrastructure skills	Observability skills
OSS / Enterprise	Linux, networking, upgrades, capacity planning, databases, and object storage for self-hosted metrics, logs, and traces	Building dashboards, alerts, integrations
Grafana Cloud	Reduced: you still deploy and maintain collectors like Grafana Alloy, but Grafana Labs runs the backends	Building dashboards, alerts, integrations

Considerations

Self-hosting requires a team with both infrastructure expertise and observability skills. Grafana Cloud lets a smaller team focus on using the data rather than running the platform.

More team members managing infrastructure means fewer available for building dashboards and analyzing problems.

Data residency and compliance

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Data residency

Data residency means rules about which country or region your data must be stored in.

Requirement	Self-hosted (OSS / Enterprise)	Grafana Cloud
Region choice	Full control (you choose where to deploy)	15+ regions across AWS, Azure, and GCP
Private networking	Your network, your rules	AWS PrivateLink, Azure Private Link, GCP Private Service Connect
Compliance certifications	Your responsibility to achieve and maintain	SOC 2, ISO 27001, PCI DSS, GDPR, CSA

Considerations

Self-hosting gives you complete control over data location and security, but you build and maintain the compliance infrastructure. Grafana Cloud provides certifications and private connectivity options, but within the regions and configurations Grafana Labs offers.

Decision framework

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Start here

Now that you’ve seen what each option requires, provides, and costs, use the following decision tree to find the option that works for you.

Move between options

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Migration paths

If your needs change, you can move between deployment options.

Moving to Grafana Cloud

The most common move is from a self-hosted option to Grafana Cloud:

Method	What it migrates	Availability
Grafana Cloud Migration Assistant	Dashboards, folders, data sources, plugins, alerting resources	Generally available in v12; public preview from v11.2
Manual migration	Everything (full instance)	All versions

Resources

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Get started

Here’s where to start for each option:

Grafana Cloud: Create a free account
Download Grafana OSS: Download and install
Contact Grafana Labs sales: Enterprise trial license
Amazon Managed Grafana: Set up in the AWS console
Azure Managed Grafana: Set up in the Azure portal

Marketplace and add-ons

Prefer to buy through a cloud marketplace, or need the Enterprise add-on? Start here:

Grafana Cloud in AWS Marketplace: Consolidated AWS billing
Grafana Cloud in Azure Marketplace: Consolidated Azure billing
Grafana Cloud for Google Cloud: Consolidated Google Cloud billing
Grafana Enterprise add-on for Amazon: Premium plugins and support for Amazon Managed Grafana
Grafana Enterprise add-on for Azure: Premium plugins and support for Azure Managed Grafana

Documentation

For deeper reading, explore the documentation:

Install Grafana: Self-hosted installation guide
Introduction to Grafana Cloud: Cloud platform overview
Migrate to Grafana Cloud: Migration tools and guide
Grafana Cloud pricing: Current plans and pricing

Community

Connect with other Grafana users:

Grafana Community Forums: Ask questions, share ideas
Grafana Slack: Join the conversation