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Grafana Cloud logo

Grafana Cloud

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

What Grafana Cloud does

Grafana Cloud is a fully managed observability platform that combines Grafana, Prometheus, Loki, and Tempo for metrics, logs, and traces.

What people use it for

  • Infrastructure monitoring
  • Application monitoring
  • Log aggregation
  • Distributed tracing

The honest half

Where it falls short

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.

  • Active Series (AS) billing model is difficult to predict and control; misconfiguration can cause sudden spikes and unexpected bills
  • Reduced control and customization compared to self-hosted Grafana instances
  • Data sovereignty concerns for organizations requiring on-premises data retention
  • Limited reporting types compared to traditional BI tools for compliance and audit requirements

Cross-shopped

What people choose instead of Grafana Cloud

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.

  • Grafana Cloud logo
    Grafana Cloud
    vs
    Datadog logo
    Datadog

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

  • Grafana Cloud logo
    Grafana Cloud
    vs
    New Relic logo
    New Relic

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

  • Grafana Cloud logo
    Grafana Cloud
    vs
    Prometheus logo
    Prometheus

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

Pricing

What Grafana Cloud costs

Taken from the vendor's own pricing page. Prices move, so check before you buy.

Free

Free

  • 10k active series (metrics)
  • 50GB logs/traces per month
  • 3 active users
  • 14-day retention
  • Community support

Pro

$19 /mo

  • Usage-based pricing beyond free tier
  • 8 USD per active visualization user
  • Included Grafana Alerting
  • 8x5 email support

Enterprise

$25,000 /yr

  • Minimum annual commitment
  • Full-service deployment options
  • Premium support
  • Custom retention
  • SSO and advanced security

Capabilities

Features

  • 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

Questions people ask

Each answer names the page it came from, so you can check it rather than take our word for it.

What are the exact limits of Grafana Cloud's free tier?

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.

Source
How is Grafana Cloud billed, and what are the per-unit costs?

Grafana 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.

Source
Can I use Grafana Cloud for open-source Grafana deployments?

Grafana Cloud is the managed cloud service version. Open-source Grafana is free and can be self-hosted indefinitely on your own infrastructure.

Source
What observability signals does Grafana Cloud include?

Grafana Cloud includes metrics (via Mimir), logs (via Loki), traces (via Tempo), profiles, and synthetics, with unified querying and visualization across all signals.

Source
Does Grafana Cloud include alerting and how is it priced?

Yes, 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.

Source

Behind it

Who makes Grafana Cloud

Company
Grafana Labs
Based in
New York, NY
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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.

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