Grafana Cloud vs Better Stack Pricing (2026)
How do these two stack up on price? Here's what each one costs, what you get, and where the value sits.
| Grafana Cloud | Better Stack | |
|---|---|---|
| Starts at | $19/mo | $34/mo |
| Number of plans | 3 | 3 |
| Free plan | ||
| Free trial | — | — |
| Pricing model | usage-based | hybrid |
Free
- All Grafana Cloud services, with limited usage
- Community support
- 14 days retention for metrics, logs, traces, profiles, & k6 performance tests
Pro
- Pay as you go above the Free tier
- 8X5 email support
- 13 months retention for metrics; 30 days retention for logs, traces, profiles, & k6 performance tests
Enterprise
- Premium support
- Custom retention
- Deployment flexibility (Public Cloud, Federal Cloud, or Bring Your Own Cloud)
Free
- 10 monitors & heartbeats, 1 status page
- Slack & e-mail alerts
- 100,000 exceptions per month
- 5,000 session replays
- 3 GB logs retained for 3 days
- 3 GB traces retained for 3 days
- 30 GB metrics
- 3 GB web events retained for 3 days
Team member
- Free access to Telemetry
Responder
- Access to Uptime with incident management, on-call, monitoring and status pages with unlimited phone call and SMS alerts
Grafana Cloud vs Better Stack FAQ
- Which one is cheaper?
- Grafana Cloud starts lower at $19/mo, compared to $34/mo for Better Stack.
- Can I use either one for free?
- Both offer free plans, so you can try each without paying. Start with whichever fits your workflow better and upgrade when you hit the limits.
- How do they charge?
- Different approach here. Grafana Cloud uses usage-based pricing, while Better Stack goes with hybrid. That changes the math depending on your team size and usage.
- Which one is a better deal?
- Depends on what you need. Grafana Cloud: Grafana Cloud undercuts Datadog and New Relic on entry price by giving away a genuinely usable free tier, positioning itself as the open-source-friendly, cost-conscious alternative for teams that already know Grafana's dashboards. It's not chasing the premium observability buyer out of the gate — it's winning teams at the free-to-Pro stage before they're locked into a pricier incumbent. Better Stack: This sits mid-market — not a bargain-bin uptime checker, not an enterprise incident command platform like PagerDuty. The free tier and modular pricing are clearly aimed at scrappy engineering teams who don't want to pay for seats they don't need but will happily pay for the specific features they do.
Still deciding? See the best Grafana Cloud alternatives or the best Better Stack alternatives, ranked with verified pricing.
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