Comparing Grafana open source projects to Grafana Cloud
Open source
We build software in the open, with permissive licenses and thriving communities because we believe investing in open source will help leave the world a little better than we found it. Grafana Labs started with our flagship open source project, Grafana. We’ve also launched Grafana Loki and Grafana Tempo, and contribute to successful projects in this space, such as Graphite and Prometheus.
Grafana Project
Centralize the analysis, visualization, and alerting for all of your data with Grafana.
Grafana Tempo
An open source, easy-to-use and high-scale distributed tracing backend.
Prometheus/Graphite
Centralize the analysis, visualization, and alerting on all of your Prometheus or Graphite metrics with Grafana.
Grafana Loki
An open source, horizontally scalable, highly available, multi-tenant log aggregation system inspired by Prometheus.
Grafana Cloud
Grafana Cloud is a composable observability platform that packages together metrics, logs, and traces with Grafana. It leverages the best open source observability software – including Prometheus, Loki, and Tempo – without the overhead of having to install, maintain, and scale your own observability stack.
Fully-managed Grafana
Dedicated Grafana front-end with enhanced reporting, security, management and more
Grafana Cloud Metrics
Super fast, highly available and long term storage Prometheus compatible backend
Grafana Cloud Traces
Easy-to-operate, highly scalable, and cost effective distributed tracing system with Grafana Tempo
Grafana Cloud Logs
Flexible and powerful logging system for lower TCO at extreme scale
Key differences
Open source
Grafana Cloud
Installation
Install, administer, and maintain on your own
You don’t need to install anything to use Grafana Cloud, simply sign up and you can start using Grafana Cloud right away
Cost and distribution
Free & open source
Offers a generous free plan then pay as you go pricing
Deployment
Self-managed so you can deploy in your own data center or cloud capacity
Fully-managed by Grafana Labs using our cloud-hosted compute means that your team can focus on shipping code instead of maintaining infrastructure
Scale up/out
Scale it yourself.
Easily scale past 100M+ metrics; get 13-month metrics retention for trend analysis and capacity planning and 30 days of log and trace retention.
Maintenance
Run it yourself.
Automatically get security patches and backups, so you can rest easy knowing we are periodically backing up your data.
Upgrades
Run it yourself.
Get instant upgrades as soon as they become available, so you can take advantage of the latest features and always be on the current version.
Uptime SLA
Not included.
99.5%
Advanced security and admin tools
Not included.
Access advanced admin tools to govern, audit, and secure user permissions and data. Includes features like data source permissions, SSO/SAML/LDAP authentication, team sync, and more.
Support
Community forums
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.
Cloud-exclusive features
Not included
Cloud integrations
An agent-free monitoring solution that is easy to configure. It provides insights on how services are behaving from an external point of view
Enterprise plugins
Take your existing data sources and allow you to drop them right into Grafana
Grafana Machine Learning
Create predictions of the future state of systems and alert on unexpected changes or anomalies in behaviour
Explore, visualize, query, and alert on your Datadog metrics
Send metrics from Datadog agents directly to Grafana with Grafana Cloud, removing the need to rewrite instrumentation code
Usage insights
Usage insights give you a better understanding of how your Grafana instance is used