Grafana vs Grafana Cloud
Grafana and Grafana Cloud are both monitoring and observability software. Grafana is open source under AGPL-3.0, with 78k GitHub stars. Grafana Cloud is a commercial product from Grafana Labs.
Which to pick
- Pick Grafana when
- You need shared dashboards and alerts across several data sources, self-hosted or on Grafana Cloud.
- Pick Grafana Cloud when
- A team likes Grafana and open-source standards and wants them managed, with the option to self-host later.
Side by side
A dashboard and alerting platform that visualises metrics, logs and traces from Prometheus, Loki, Elasticsearch, SQL databases and many other sources.
Hosted Grafana with Prometheus-compatible metrics (Mimir), logs (Loki), traces (Tempo), profiles and alerting.
AGPL licensed, and some features live only in Grafana Enterprise or Cloud.
Usage-based pricing needs watching, especially for high-cardinality metrics.
Production-ready (both)
Self-hosted server and cloud service
Cloud service
Go, TypeScript and React
Go, Prometheus, Loki and Tempo
Open source, AGPL-3.0 (network copyleft)
Closed source, sold by Grafana Labs
Use inside your business is unrestricted. If you change it and let customers use it over the internet, you must publish your changes.
Closed source: you use it under the maker's terms and cannot change or resell the code.
78k GitHub stars
1.7k Wikipedia readers a month on phones
Established: started 13 years ago, latest release v13.3.0.
Not known
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Both sides were judged on 2026-11-03 from makers' descriptions, Wikipedia, READMEs and GitHub data. License, age and popularity lines are worked out directly.