Comparing Grafana Labs open source projects to Grafana Cloud

Install, administer, and maintain on your own.

Self-managed in your own data center or cloud capacity.

Software is free, but there’s the overhead of setting up, configuring, scaling, and maintaining your stack.

No installation; simply sign up.

Fully managed by Grafana Labs using our cloud-hosted compute, so your team can focus on shipping code instead of maintaining infrastructure.

Generous forever-free plan, then pay-as-you-go pricing.

Easily scale metrics to 1B active series and beyond; get 13-month metrics retention for trend analysis and capacity planning and 30 days of log and trace retention.

Get instant upgrades and automatic security patches and backups.

Uptime SLA of 99.5%.

Security features not included.

Support via Community Forums.

Securely query private data.

SSO/SAML/LDAP for user authentication.

Data source permissions plus role-based access control (RBAC) to control who can access what.

Dedicated support from the Grafana Labs team to provide critical response SLA, help establish best practices, as well as be an on-demand resource for ongoing questions.

Not included.

Full-stack observability with the knowledge graph — See how different services are connected to each other and quickly traverse across these connections for faster root cause analysis.

Performance testing — Get a developer-centric experience to create tests faster and prevent system failures and consistently deliver reliable applications.

Synthetic monitoring — Improve reliability by proactively monitoring the performance of your critical user flows, websites, and APIs from locations around the world.

Frontend observability — Leverage real user monitoring (RUM) for immediate, clear, actionable insights into the end user experience of web applications.

Application observability — Unify signal types across application layers and gain granular, out-of-the-box insights into root causes of modern, complex application problems.

Kubernetes monitoring — Quickly move throughout your Kubernetes setup in a single UI. Start with a cluster view and drill all the way down to specific Kubernetes pods with just a few clicks.

Continuous profiling — Get insight into the resource usage of code to optimize infrastructure spend, simplify debugging, and enhance application performance.

Adaptive Telemetry — Save money and time by dynamically adjusting what metrics, logs, and traces get ingested based on your usage patterns and signals from your infrastructure.

SLO management — Simplify SLO management with a guided UI, auto-generating dashboards, and multi-burn alerts.

Incident response & management — Manage incident response, SLOs, alerting, and post-incident reviews all within your observability platform to reduce noise, accelerate resolution, and turn incidents into continuous learning opportunities.

Cloud integrations — Agent-free monitoring solutions offer tailored Grafana dashboards and alerting defaults for 100+ common observability targets.

Enterprise plugins — Query and visualize disparate data sources – including MongoDB, Splunk, New Relic, Oracle, Salesforce, and more – from within Grafana.

Agentic AI features — Write queries, run investigations, manage dashboards, and resolve incidents while only using natural language.

Usage insights — Get a better understanding of how your Grafana instance is used.