Head to head
OpenObserve vs Grafana Cloud
Both platforms are scored with the same methodology and the same category rubric. Nothing on this page is influenced by advertising.
42/100 | 60/100Higher score | |
|---|---|---|
| Category rank | #8 | #1 |
| Confidence | Medium confidence | High confidence |
| External Reputation | 70 | 77 |
| AI Authority | 16 | 69 |
| Web Authority | 18 | 23 |
| Expert Assessment | 63 | 61 |
| TOP10 User Score | — | — |
| Pricing | Cloud Professional (Pay As You Go): $0.50 per GB ingested and $0.01 per GB queried · free tier: Open Source self-hosted free forever (unlimited users, dashboards, alerts, logs, metrics, traces, RUM, session replay, error tracking); Self-Hosted Enterprise free up to 50 GB/day including SSO, RBAC, federated search, audit trail and sensitive data redaction; 14-day Cloud free trial with no credit card | Pro from $19/month + usage (8x5 email support; 13-month metrics retention, 30 days logs/traces/profiles/k6) · free tier: Free, "always free": all Grafana Cloud services with limited usage, community support, 14-day retention for metrics, logs, traces, profiles and k6; includes 10k active metric series, 50 GB logs, 50 GB traces, 50 GB profiles, 50k RUM sessions, 100k API + 10k browser synthetic executions, 500 k6 virtual user hours, 3 active users |
| Pricing model | Usage-based (per GB ingested and queried) plus free open-source and free self-hosted enterprise tier; quote-only enterprise | Freemium plus usage-based metering (platform fee + per-meter usage, with tiered volume discounts) |
| Best for | Engineering-led teams of roughly 20–300 with large log and trace volume and a real Datadog/Splunk/Elastic bill problem, already emitting OpenTelemetry, who want to start free self-hosted under 50 GB/day and value unlimited seats for org-wide observability access. | Engineering-led teams already invested in Prometheus, OpenTelemetry, Loki or self-hosted Grafana who want the same stack managed without re-instrumenting, have at least one person fluent in PromQL/LogQL, and either fit the free tier's 14-day retention or want to tune each cost meter individually instead of paying per-host APM pricing. |
| Avoid if | You are a regulated enterprise needing a deep reference base and vendor-diligence evidence, need a firm published enterprise price for a business case, are planning multi-year on a free self-hosted entitlement, require mature APM depth and heavyweight 24/7 support from a large vendor, or cannot control query volume under per-GB query billing. | You are thinly staffed or non-technical and need turnkey monitoring, need enterprise SSO/granular RBAC/a contractual SLA without justifying $25,000 a year, require 24/7 or phone support on a self-serve budget, need predictable flat-rate budgeting, or need long retention on a free or minimal plan. |
| Markets | SMB, Mid-market, Enterprise, Platform/SRE teams, Startups, Non-profits and education (discounted) | Startups, SMB, Mid-Market, Enterprise, Public Sector / Federal |
| Founded | 2022 | 2014 |
| Headquarters | San Francisco, California, USA (corporate address: 3000 Sand Hill Rd, Building 1, Suite 260, Menlo Park, CA 94025) | New York, USA |
A higher TOP SCORE means more of the evidence favours that platform on this methodology — it is not a recommendation, and it does not account for your specific requirements. Advertisers are never declared the winner of a comparison.