Grafana Cloud is Grafana Labs' hosted service for metrics, logs, traces and dashboards built on its open-source projects; pages here cover running the same stack yourself with Grafana, Prometheus and Loki.
The same open-source projects run in both, so the choice is about who operates them. This page compares Grafana Cloud with running Grafana, Prometheus or Mimir and Loki yourself: retention, scaling, upgrades, features exclusive to the cloud and the staffing it takes.
Grafana's migration assistant only moves into the cloud, so leaving takes manual work: exporting dashboards, folders and alert rules through the HTTP API, repointing Alloy or Prometheus remote write to your own Mimir or Prometheus, moving logs to Loki and cutting over users.
Cost of ownership by component: Grafana Cloud's platform fee, active series, GB processed, written and retained, and per-user charges, against servers, object storage, Mimir and Loki operations, upgrades and on-call for a self-hosted stack.
For teams choosing between Grafana Cloud and a single self-hosted tool: SigNoz keeps logs, metrics and traces in ClickHouse behind one interface, while Grafana Cloud combines separate backends. Covers query languages, OpenTelemetry support, licensing and operating effort.
Grafana OnCall OSS is archived and Grafana points users to Grafana Cloud IRM, billed per active user. This page covers self-hosted on-call with GoAlert or OneUptime, routing Grafana and Prometheus alerts into it, and SMS and voice notification costs.
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