Grafana Cloud
Managed hosting for the open-source observability stack you already know.
- Development
- Analytics
- from $0/mo
Grafana Cloud is the hosted version of Grafana's open-source stack: Grafana dashboards with Mimir for metrics, Loki for logs, Tempo for traces and Pyroscope for profiles. You pay for ingestion and retention rather than per host or per user, and the same components can be self-hosted for free if you would rather run them.
Grafana Cloud: the short answer
Every line below is drawn from facts verified on 9 August 2026.
- What it is
- Managed hosting for the open-source observability stack you already know
- Best for
- Teams already using Prometheus, Loki or Grafana
- Starts at
- Free tier at $0; Pro from $19/month plus usage
- Free option
- Free plan available, no trial
- Biggest strength
- No per-user or per-host charges, so dashboards can be shared freely
- Biggest drawback
- More assembly required than an all-in-one platform
- Closest alternative
- Datadog - One integrated product with far less assembly, at a much higher price
Grafana Cloud at a glance
| Best for | Teams already using Prometheus, Loki or Grafana, Organisations wanting no per-user or per-host licensing, Anyone who wants the option to self-host later |
|---|---|
| Category | Development, Analytics |
| Starting price | Free tier at $0; Pro from $19/month plus usage |
| Free plan | Yes |
| Free trial | No trial offered |
| Pricing model | usage based |
| Company | Grafana Labs |
| Founded | 2014 |
| Headquarters | New York, New York, United States |
| Founders | Torkel Ödegaard, Raj Dutt, Anthony Woods |
| Platforms | Web, CLI |
| Public API | Yes |
| Browser extension | No |
| Mobile apps | None |
| Self-hosting | Yes |
| Affiliate programme | No |
| Data source | Vendor pricing page and public records |
| Last checked | August 2026 |
Grafana Cloud pricing
Prices below were read from the vendor's own pricing page on 9 August 2026. Pricing model: usage based. No free trial is offered.
| Plan | Price | Billing | Notes |
|---|---|---|---|
| Free | $0 | per month | All services with limited usage. 10k metrics series, 14-day retention |
| Pro | From $19 | per month | Plus usage with volume discounts. 13 months metrics retention, 8x5 support |
| Enterprise | From $25,000 | per year | Annual spend commitment. Premium support, custom retention, compliance |
| Metrics | $6.50 | per usage | Per 1k active series from 10k to 100k. Falls to $5.40 at higher volumes |
| Logs | $0.40 | per usage | Per GB written. $0.37 above 1,000 GB and $0.355 above 2,500 GB |
What Grafana Cloud actually costs over a year
A monthly price is not the same thing as a monthly contract. These are the plans above multiplied out to twelve months, per seat or unit where the plan is charged that way.
| Plan | Monthly | Over 12 months |
|---|---|---|
| Pro | $19 | $228 |
Which Grafana Cloud plan should you buy?
| Your situation | Recommended | Why |
|---|---|---|
| You are running personal projects or an early-stage product | Free | All services with 10k metrics series and 14-day retention. Genuinely free rather than a trial. |
| You need real retention and support | Pro | From $19 a month plus usage, with 13 months of metrics retention. |
| You need compliance, custom retention and premium support | Enterprise | From a $25,000 annual spend commitment, which is a procurement conversation. |
| You want everyone to see dashboards | Any tier | There is no per-user charge at all. This is the structural advantage over Datadog and New Relic. |
| You want observability to appear with no assembly | Consider Datadog instead | Grafana Cloud gives you excellent components and expects an opinion about how they fit. |
Verdict by who you are
Team already running PrometheusYes
The natural managed home for PromQL knowledge you already have, with no lock-in worth worrying about.
Organisation wanting dashboards shared widelyYes
No per-user or per-host licensing means giving the whole company real dashboards costs nothing extra.
Team that may self-host laterYes
Mimir, Loki and Grafana are open source, so the escape hatch is real and improves your negotiating position.
Team wanting one predictable monthly numberNo
Usage-based billing across several products is hard to forecast before a full month.
Team with nobody comfortable with the stackNo
This rewards people who enjoy assembling observability. Others should pay Datadog.
Should you buy Grafana Cloud?
Buy Grafana Cloud if…
- Teams already using Prometheus, Loki or Grafana
- Organisations wanting no per-user or per-host licensing
- Anyone who wants the option to self-host later
Do not buy Grafana Cloud if…
- Teams wanting an all-in-one product with no assembly
- Buyers who need one predictable monthly number
- Organisations without anyone comfortable with the stack
Key features
- Grafana dashboards, the de facto standard for visualisation
- Mimir for Prometheus-compatible metrics at scale
- Loki for log aggregation, indexed by labels
- Tempo for distributed tracing
- Pyroscope for continuous profiling
- k6 for load and performance testing
- Adaptive Metrics, which reduces billed series automatically
- No charge per user or per host
Integrations
- Prometheus and OpenTelemetry
- Kubernetes, AWS, Azure and Google Cloud
- Over 150 data source plugins
- PagerDuty, Slack and OpsGenie
- Grafana API and Terraform provider
Grafana Cloud screenshots
Captured by us in August 2026 at 1440px, unedited. Interfaces change, so these show the product as it looked on the date we verified this profile. Vendors localise pricing by visitor region, so a pricing screenshot may display a different currency to the USD figures recorded above.
Our assessment
Grafana Cloud is the pragmatic middle path in observability. The components are open source and widely understood, so knowledge transfers and there is no lock-in worth worrying about, and because billing follows ingestion rather than hosts or users, you can give the whole organisation dashboard access without a licensing conversation. That last point is a genuine structural advantage over Datadog and New Relic. The cost is assembly: Grafana Cloud is a set of excellent components rather than one product that decides things for you, and teams without someone who enjoys that will find Datadog easier. Note also that Grafana Labs is publicly signalling a pricing change, with a banner stating that "send more, charge more is broken", so verify rates before committing.
What works in Grafana Cloud
- No per-user or per-host charges, so dashboards can be shared freely
- Built on open-source components you could self-host instead
- Volume discounts apply automatically as usage grows
- Adaptive Metrics actively reduces the series you are billed for
What doesn't
- More assembly required than an all-in-one platform
- Usage-based billing across several products is hard to forecast
- Enterprise requires a $25,000 annual spend commitment
- Free tier retention is only 14 days
EveryAny Decision Score
Scored by dimension rather than averaged into one number, because the trade-offs are the useful part. 3 of these 8 dimensions are calculated from verified facts by published formula; the rest are editorial judgement, labelled as such. How each score is calculated.
- Cost position10/10
derivedno paid tier required
- Portability9/10
derivedself-hostable, public API, open source
- Subscription flexibility6/10
derivedfree plan, usage based, monthly billing
- Feature depth8/10
editorialeditorial judgement, reviewed at last check
- Ease of learning5/10
editorialeditorial judgement, reviewed at last check
- Collaboration9/10
editorialeditorial judgement, reviewed at last check
- AI capability6/10
editorialeditorial judgement, reviewed at last check
- Professional adoption8/10
editorialeditorial judgement, reviewed at last check
What leaving Grafana Cloud would cost
low lock-in
Calculated as 10 minus a portability score of 9, built from four signals (self-hosting, a public API, open-source licensing and a documented export path) . Grafana Cloud scores on: self-hostable, public API, open source. Formula.
Grafana Cloud competitors and alternatives
| Alternative | Why you might pick it instead |
|---|---|
| Datadog | One integrated product with far less assembly, at a much higher price. |
| New Relic | More generous free tier, but expensive per full platform user. |
| Self-hosted Grafana | The same components, free, if you will run and scale them yourself. |
Datadog
Development
Observability that sees everything, including your budget.
New Relic
Development
Observability billed on two axes: gigabytes ingested and people watching.
They are telling you the model is changing
At the top of the pricing page, Grafana Labs currently displays a banner reading “Send more, charge more is broken. We are changing it.”
We record that because it is unusual for a vendor to say so on its own price list, and because it means the figures below have a stated shelf life. If you are signing an annual commitment, ask what is changing before you do.
What you actually pay for
Billing follows telemetry, not machines or people:
| Resource | Price | Volume behaviour |
|---|---|---|
| Metrics | $6.50 per 1k active series | 10k free, then falls towards $5.40 at scale |
| Logs | $0.40 per GB written | $0.37 above 1,000 GB, $0.355 above 2,500 GB |
| Pro platform fee | From $19/month | Before any usage |
| Enterprise | From $25,000/year | Annual spend commitment |
Grafana’s own calculator illustrates the metrics maths: 30,000 billable active series lands at $195 a month. That is the number worth internalising, because active series counts grow quietly as you add labels, not just as you add servers.
Adaptive Metrics is worth enabling. It identifies series nobody queries and aggregates them away, reducing what you are billed for. It is one of the few cost controls in observability that works without you deciding what to stop collecting.
No per-user charge is the structural advantage
Neither Datadog nor New Relic lets you hand dashboards to everyone without thinking about licences. New Relic charges $349 per full platform user on Pro; Datadog prices largely per host.
Grafana Cloud charges for data. Whether three people or three hundred look at the result costs the same. For an engineering organisation that wants product managers, support staff and executives looking at real dashboards rather than screenshots, that changes what is culturally possible, not just what is affordable.
The self-hosting escape hatch is real
Mimir, Loki, Tempo, Pyroscope and Grafana itself are open source. If Grafana Cloud’s pricing stops working for you, you can run the same components on your own infrastructure and your dashboards, queries and knowledge come with you.
That is a materially better negotiating position than being on a proprietary platform, and it is worth something even if you never exercise it. The honest caveat is that operating Mimir and Loki at scale is real work, and “we could self-host” is easier to say than to staff.
Where Datadog is worth the money
Integration breadth and cohesion. Datadog arrives knowing about hundreds of services and stitches them together with less thought from you. Grafana Cloud gives you excellent parts and expects you to have an opinion about how they fit.
If you already run Prometheus and think in PromQL, Grafana Cloud is the obvious managed home for it. If you want to install an agent and have observability appear, pay Datadog.
Grafana Cloud questions, answered
- Is Grafana Cloud worth it?
- Grafana Cloud is the pragmatic middle path in observability.
- How much does Grafana Cloud cost?
- Free tier at $0; Pro from $19/month plus usage. Verified against the vendor's pricing page.
- Does Grafana Cloud have a free plan or free trial?
- Grafana Cloud has a free plan. No free trial is offered.
- What is the best Grafana Cloud alternative?
- It depends on the job. Datadog: One integrated product with far less assembly, at a much higher price. New Relic: More generous free tier, but expensive per full platform user. Self-hosted Grafana: The same components, free, if you will run and scale them yourself.
- Can I self-host Grafana Cloud?
- Yes. Grafana Cloud can be run on your own infrastructure, so the data stays under your control.
Provenance and freshness
When each fact was last checked
- Pricing ·
- Plans ·
- Free trial
- Features
- Platforms
- Integrations
- Affiliate programme
- Company details
What has changed
-
August 2026
- Metrics and log unit pricing verified, including volume discount bands
- Recorded Grafana's own banner signalling a pricing model change
- Added plan picker and verdicts
Sources & verification
Facts on this page were read from the sources below on the dates shown. Where a vendor does not publish a figure, we record it as not disclosed rather than estimating it.
- Grafana Cloud pricing - checked 9 August 2026
Spotted something out of date? Email [email protected] and we will re-check it. Corrections are logged on the page.
