Grafana Cloudvs
Datadog


Datadog: Comprehensive observability platform with unified metrics, logs, traces, and APM at enterprise scale

Composable observability platform
As of 30 August 2026, Grafana Cloud has a free plan and paid plans start at $19/month. Grafana Cloud is a fully managed observability platform that combines Grafana, Prometheus, Loki, and Tempo for metrics, logs, and traces. Softwr lists it under Cloud. Grafana Cloud is made by Grafana Labs, launched in 2014, available on Web, API.
Overview
Grafana Cloud is a fully managed observability platform that combines Grafana, Prometheus, Loki, and Tempo for metrics, logs, and traces.
The honest half
Concrete and checkable, so you can decide whether any of them matter to you. This is the half of a review a vendor will not write about Grafana Cloud.
Cross-shopped
Each pairing was judged by two reviewers asking whether a buyer would genuinely weigh the two against each other. The ones that failed were deleted rather than published.


Datadog: Comprehensive observability platform with unified metrics, logs, traces, and APM at enterprise scale


New Relic: Full-stack observability platform with automatic instrumentation and AI-powered insights for applications


Prometheus: Open-source metrics monitoring system designed for reliability and time-series data collection


Elasticsearch: Distributed search and analytics engine used for logs, metrics, and full-text search at scale
Pricing
Taken from the vendor's own pricing page. Prices move, so check before you buy.
Free
Free
Pro
$19 /mo
Enterprise
$25,000 /yr
Capabilities
Grafana Dashboards
Prometheus Metrics
Loki Logs
Tempo Traces
Alerting
OnCall
Synthetic Monitoring
Incident Management
AWS
Integration with AWS
Azure
Integration with Azure
GCP
Integration with GCP
Kubernetes
Integration with Kubernetes
Answered, with sources
Each answer names the page it came from, so you can check it rather than take our word for it.
Grafana Cloud free tier includes 10,000 active series for metrics, 50GB logs and traces per month, 3 active visualization users, and 14-day retention with community support. No credit card required.
SourceGrafana Cloud Pro tier starts at $19/month platform fee plus usage-based charges. Metrics cost $6.50 per 1,000 active series above free limits, logs and traces are charged per GB ingested, and visualization users are $8 per active user.
SourceGrafana Cloud is the managed cloud service version. Open-source Grafana is free and can be self-hosted indefinitely on your own infrastructure.
SourceGrafana Cloud includes metrics (via Mimir), logs (via Loki), traces (via Tempo), profiles, and synthetics, with unified querying and visualization across all signals.
SourceYes, Grafana Alerting is included at no additional charge across all tiers. Rule storage, evaluation, and notification delivery are covered by the platform fee with no per-alert or per-notification fees.
SourceBehind it
Keep looking
Open-source hypervisor combining KVM and LXC virtualisation
Cloud cost estimates in pull requests, with governance in the paid tier
Softwr does not host reviews and shows no star rating for Grafana Cloud, because a rating we did not collect is not ours to publish. What is here is the pricing and platform detail from the vendor’s own pages, limitations we could state concretely, and alternatives a reviewer confirmed people weigh against it. Tell us if any of it is wrong.
What people switch to, and what they give up
Every tier, and where the cost actually lands
Put it head to head with anything we hold
Its rating, and an embed for your own site
Open source distributed block storage for Kubernetes, incubating at the CNCF
Open source, no licence feeDeployment platform that provisions and operates Kubernetes inside your own cloud account
quoteCloud cost estimates in pull requests, with governance in the paid tier
Free open source tool, then per month by run volumeFree self-hosted platform built on Docker Swarm with a dashboard and automatic certificates
Open source, no licence feeOpen source self-hosted platform that deploys applications and databases to servers you already own
Open source, no licence fee