Detailed comparison across 10 dimensions
Winner: Grafana Cloud
Grafana Cloud clearly comes out ahead of Elastic Observability on Staquest's weighted six-dimension score. Grafana Cloud has a free tier; Elastic Observability does not. Paid plans start at $99/mo for Elastic Observability and $19/mo for Grafana Cloud.
| Overview | ||
|---|---|---|
| Type | hybrid | hybrid |
| Company | Elastic | Grafana Labs |
| Free Tier | ||
| Has API | ||
| Open Source | ||
| Learning Curve | - | - |
| Integration | - | - |
| Trending | Stable | Stable |
| GitHub Stars | - | - |
| Industries | DevelopmentEducation & EdTechAI & Machine LearningSaaS & Cloud | DevelopmentSaaS & Cloud |
| Categories | observability-apm | observability-apm |
| Website | Visit | Visit |
Grafana Cloud
flat
flat
flat
flat
usage based
custom
freemium
usage based
custom
| Feature | elastic-observability | grafana-cloud |
|---|---|---|
| Advanced Elastic Stack Security Features | ||
| 10K Active Series Per Month | ||
| Apps For Apm, Logging, And Metrics | ||
| 13 Months Retention For Metrics | ||
| Complete Data Sovereignty | ||
| 14 Days Retention For Metrics, Logs, Traces, Profiles, & K6 Performance Tests | ||
| Complete Project Tier Includes Ai-Assisted Pipelines, Parsing, And Machine Learning | ||
| 30 Days Retention For Logs, Traces, Profiles, & K6 Performance Tests | ||
| Cross-Cluster Replication | ||
| 8X5 Email Support | ||
| Cross-Cluster Search Es|Ql | ||
| All Grafana Cloud Services With Limited Usage | ||
| Custom Control Over Cluster Capacity And Versions | ||
| Community Support | ||
| Distributed Elasticsearch Platform | ||
| Custom Retention | ||
| Egress: 50 Gb Free, Then $0.05 Per Gb Transferred Per Month | ||
| Deployment Flexibility (Public Cloud, Federal Cloud, Or Bring Your Own Cloud) | ||
| Elastic Ai Assistant | ||
| Everything In Free | ||
| Elastic Maps Server | ||
| Pay As You Go Above The Free Tier | ||
| Elastic Workflows | ||
| Premium Support | ||
| Es|Ql | ||
| Everything In Gold | ||
| Everything In Platinum | ||
| Everything In Standard | ||
| Full Infrastructure Ownership | ||
| Gpu Inference |
Showing 30 of 30 features
Dashes mean the feature isn't listed in our data. The tool may still support it.
On Staquest's weighted six-dimension scoring, Grafana Cloud comes out ahead overall, though Elastic Observability can be the better fit depending on your priorities — see the dimension-by-dimension breakdown above.
Elastic Observability's paid plans start at $99/mo and Grafana Cloud's start at $19/mo, so Grafana Cloud is the lower entry price. Check the pricing comparison for higher tiers and per-seat costs.
Grafana Cloud offers a free tier; Elastic Observability does not currently list one.
Grafana Cloud scores higher on pricing value in Staquest's analysis. It is the highest-weighted dimension in this comparison.
Grafana Cloud is open source. The feature comparison and dimension scores above cover the full breakdown.
