Quick Answer
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Grafana pricing varies by team size and features, ranging from $0 to $0 per month (base) + usage in 2026. Your actual cost depends on the tier you choose, contract length, and negotiated discounts.

Use the interactive pricing calculator to estimate your exact cost based on team size and requirements.

  • Free tier: Yes
  • Billing: Monthly and annual (save 15-20%)
  • Hidden costs: Add ~35% for implementation, support, and training

Grafana offers 4 pricing tiers: Grafana OSS, Grafana Cloud Free, Grafana Cloud Pro, Grafana Cloud Advanced. Standard paid plans include Grafana OSS at $0/free (self-hosted), Grafana Cloud Free at $0/free, Grafana Cloud Pro at $19/$19/month base + usage-based. The Grafana Cloud Free plan is small teams, personal projects, and early-stage startups exploring observability.

Compared to other developer tools software, Grafana is positioned at the budget-friendly price point.

Last verified: February 2026 | Sources: 2 pricing pages and reviews

Grafana is the leading open-source observability and visualization platform, used by thousands of organizations worldwide to monitor infrastructure, applications, and business metrics. Originally created as a fork of Kibana in 2014, Grafana has grown into a comprehensive observability stack including Grafana (dashboards), Prometheus/Mimir (metrics), Loki (logs), Tempo (traces), and k6 (load testing). Grafana Labs, the company behind the project, offers Grafana Cloud as a fully managed SaaS platform alongside the free open-source edition.

Grafana pricing operates on two tracks: Grafana OSS is completely free and open source (Apache 2.0) for self-hosting, while Grafana Cloud offers managed hosting with a generous free tier (10K metrics series, 50 GB logs, 3 users) and usage-based Pro pricing starting at $19/month. The Pro tier charges per metrics series ($6.50/1K), per GB of logs/traces ($0.50), and per active user ($8/month). Enterprise-grade Advanced plans start at $25,000/year with custom SLAs and premium support.

In this guide, we break down Grafana's pricing from free OSS through Cloud Advanced, explain how usage-based billing works for metrics series and log volume, compare Grafana to alternatives like Datadog and New Relic on cost, and reveal hidden costs around cardinality explosion, active user billing, and enterprise plugin fees that can significantly impact your observability budget.

All Grafana Plans & Pricing

Plan Monthly Annual Best For
Grafana OSS Hosting: Self-managed onlySupport: Community only Free Free 0 Teams comfortable self-hosting who want full dashboard flexibility at zero cost
Grafana Cloud Free Metrics series: 10,000Logs: 50 GB Free Free 0 Small teams, personal projects, and early-stage startups exploring observability
Grafana Cloud Pro Base fee: $19/month platform feeMetrics: $6.50 per 1,000 series above free tier $19 /$19/month base + usage-based Custom Growing teams needing extended retention, SLA guarantees, and flexible usage-based billing
Grafana Cloud Advanced Minimum commitment: $25,000/yearDeployment: Public Cloud, Federal Cloud, or Bring Your Own Cloud (BYOC) Contact Contact Enterprises needing premium support, custom deployment options, compliance, and volume discounts
View all features by plan

Grafana OSS

  • Full Grafana dashboard platform
  • Self-hosted on your infrastructure
  • All core visualizations and panels
  • Alert management
  • Data source plugins
  • Community plugins
  • Apache 2.0 license
  • Community support

Grafana Cloud Free

  • Hosted Grafana dashboards
  • 10,000 Prometheus metrics series
  • 50 GB logs ingestion
  • 50 GB traces ingestion
  • 50 GB profiles ingestion
  • 500 VUh k6 performance testing
  • 20+ enterprise data source plugins
  • 100+ pre-built solutions and dashboards
  • 3 active AI users (Grafana Assistant)
  • 14-day data retention
  • 3 active users
  • Community support

Grafana Cloud Pro

  • Everything in Free
  • Pay-as-you-go usage beyond free limits
  • 13-month metrics retention
  • 30-day log/trace/profile retention
  • 99.5% uptime SLA
  • $8/active user/month for Grafana
  • Metrics at $6.50 per 1K series
  • Logs/Traces/Profiles at $0.50 per GB ingested
  • k6 testing at $0.15 per VUh
  • 8x5 email support
  • Enterprise data source plugins available ($55/user/month add-on)

Grafana Cloud Advanced

  • Everything in Pro
  • Premium support with Observability Architect
  • Custom data retention policies
  • Deployment flexibility (Public Cloud, Federal Cloud, or BYOC)
  • Custom uptime SLAs
  • Volume-based pricing discounts
  • Advanced security and compliance
  • Dedicated account management
  • Custom contract terms
  • Adaptive Metrics for cost optimization
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Hidden Costs to Budget For

Watch for 6 hidden costs
  • Usage-based pricing makes bills unpredictable: a spike in log volume during an incident can dramatically increase costs - 1 TB of unexpected logs costs $500 on Pro, and production incidents often generate massive log volumes
  • Active user billing: Grafana Cloud Pro charges $8 per active user per month - any user who logs in during the billing period counts, so granting dashboard access to 50 engineers costs $400/month on top of data costs
  • Metrics series cardinality explosion: each unique label combination creates a new series - Kubernetes environments commonly generate 50,000-100,000+ series, costing $325-$650/month at $6.50 per 1K series on Pro
  • Enterprise data source plugins are a costly add-on at $55/active user/month on Pro - accessing Snowflake, Oracle, MongoDB, or ServiceNow data sources can double your per-user cost
  • Short free-tier retention (14 days) forces upgrade: most compliance and debugging scenarios need longer history, pushing teams to Pro (30 days logs, 13 months metrics) or Advanced for custom retention
  • Grafana Assistant AI features started billing January 1, 2026 - previously free AI-powered investigations and suggestions now incur usage-based charges
Tip

Ask your Grafana sales rep about these costs upfront. Getting them in writing before signing can save you from surprise charges later.

Full hidden costs breakdown →

Frequently Asked Questions

01 How much does Grafana cost?

Grafana OSS is free to self-host. Grafana Cloud Free includes 10K metrics series, 50 GB logs, and 3 users at no cost. Grafana Cloud Pro starts at $19/month plus usage-based charges ($6.50/1K metrics series, $0.50/GB logs, $8/active user). Grafana Cloud Advanced starts at $25,000/year minimum with volume discounts and premium support.

02 Is Grafana free?

Yes, in two ways. Grafana OSS is fully free and open source (Apache 2.0) for self-hosting. Grafana Cloud Free is hosted by Grafana Labs at zero cost with 10K metrics series, 50 GB logs, 50 GB traces, 3 users, and 14-day retention. Both are truly free forever with no credit card required.

03 What is Grafana?

Grafana is an open-source observability and data visualization platform. It provides dashboards for monitoring metrics, logs, traces, and profiles from any data source (Prometheus, Loki, Elasticsearch, CloudWatch, etc.). Grafana Cloud extends this with managed hosting, alerting, synthetic monitoring, k6 load testing, and AI-powered incident investigation.

04 Grafana vs Datadog?

Grafana Cloud uses open-source foundations (Prometheus, Loki, Tempo) with usage-based pricing starting free. Datadog charges per host ($15-23/host/month) with add-on pricing per feature. Grafana is typically 30-50% cheaper for metrics-heavy workloads but requires more setup. Datadog offers a more integrated out-of-box experience with 700+ integrations. Choose Grafana for cost control and open-source flexibility; choose Datadog for all-in-one simplicity.

05 How does Grafana Cloud pricing work?

Grafana Cloud Pro charges a $19/month platform fee plus usage-based rates: $6.50 per 1K active metrics series, $0.50 per GB of logs/traces/profiles ingested, $8 per active Grafana user per month, and $0.15 per VUh for k6 testing. Free tier allowances (10K series, 50 GB logs) are included before usage charges begin. Bills are calculated monthly based on actual consumption.

06 What is an active metrics series in Grafana?

An active metrics series is a unique combination of metric name and label values that has received data points in the billing period. For example, 'http_requests_total{method="GET", status="200", service="api"}' is one series. Kubernetes environments generate many series due to pod labels. Grafana charges $6.50 per 1,000 active series on the Pro plan.

07 Is Grafana Cloud Pro or self-hosted cheaper?

Self-hosted Grafana OSS has zero licensing cost but requires infrastructure ($50-500+/month for servers), engineering time for maintenance, and expertise for scaling Prometheus/Loki/Tempo. Grafana Cloud Pro starts at $19/month plus usage. For small teams (<5 engineers, <50K series), Cloud Pro is often cheaper when you factor in operational overhead. At scale (500K+ series), self-hosted can be 50-70% cheaper.

08 What's included in Grafana Cloud Advanced?

Grafana Cloud Advanced ($25,000+/year) includes everything in Pro plus: premium support with a dedicated Observability Architect, custom data retention policies, deployment flexibility (Public Cloud, Federal Cloud, or Bring Your Own Cloud), custom uptime SLAs, volume-based pricing discounts, Adaptive Metrics for cost optimization, and advanced security and compliance features.