Apache SkyWalking vs Grafana Cloud Application Observability
Apache SkyWalking
skywalking.apache.orgGrafana Cloud Application Observability
grafana.comSide by side
| Figure | Apache SkyWalking | Grafana Cloud Application Observability |
|---|---|---|
| Price from | Free | $0.03/mo |
| Free plan | Yes | Yes |
| Free trial | — | — |
| Open source | — | — |
| Web | Yes | Yes |
| Windows | Yes | Yes |
| macOS | Yes | Yes |
| Linux | Yes | Yes |
| iOS | — | Yes |
| Android | — | Yes |
| API | Yes | Yes |
| Self-hosted | Yes | — |
| Plans published | 1 | 5 |
| Spec score · Application Performance Monitoring | 8.4 (#7) | 9.1 (#1) |
| Spec score · Distributed Tracing Tools | 8.4 (#7) | 9.2 (#1) |
| Spec score · Runtime Monitoring Software | 8.3 (#19) | 9.2 (#3) |
| Integrations | The site identifies OpenTelemetry OTLP, Istio, Envoy, Kubernetes, Grafana, and MCP among its integrations and ecosystem projects. | Grafana Cloud connection tiles support Java, .NET, Beyla, Grafana Alloy, OTLP, and the upstream OpenTelemetry Collector. |
| Purpose | Apache SkyWalking is an observability platform for cloud-native systems and AI workloads. | Grafana Cloud Application Observability provides out-of-the-box application monitoring and uses OpenTelemetry and Prometheus data to support root-cause analysis. |
| Telemetry | The platform brings traces, metrics, logs, and profiling together to help users understand services. | The product brings metrics, logs, traces, and profiles into a unified view and supports drilling from a service into its signals. |
Plans
Grafana Cloud Application Observability
- FreeFree
- Pro$0.03 a month
- FreeFree
- Pro$0.03 a month
- EnterprisePriced on request
In their own words
Apache SkyWalking
Apache SkyWalking is a free, self-hosted observability platform for cloud-native systems and AI workloads. It brings traces, metrics, logs, and profiling together to help users explore services, Kubernetes, and infrastructure through topology, telemetry, profiles, and alerts. For AI workloads, users can inspect model and MCP call latency and token rates, and review agent conversations, tool calls, and recorded file changes. The project lists agents for Java, Python, NodeJS, Go, Rust, PHP, Ruby, Nginx LUA, Kong, and client-side JavaScript. Its integrations and ecosystem include OpenTelemetry OTLP, Istio, Envoy, Kubernetes, Grafana, and MCP. BanyanDB is described as a database for ingesting, analyzing, and storing observability data. Docker installation instructions cover Linux, macOS, WSL, and Windows PowerShell. Horizon UI supports SkyWalking natively since v11 and partially for v10. Its security documentation covers Content-Security-Policy, strict session cookies, no-store API responses, and optional login auditing. Apache source releases are official artifacts, with PGP or SHA512 verification recommended; the GraalVM distribution is marked experimental.
Grafana Cloud Application Observability
Grafana Cloud Application Observability monitors applications and brings OpenTelemetry and Prometheus data together to help software engineers investigate anomalies and their causes. Its knowledge graph discovers services and relationships from telemetry, while the service catalog displays latency, error ratio, and request rate for each service. The RCA workbench and Entity Graph help investigate correlated problems across a stack. Metrics, logs, traces, and profiles share a unified view, with drill-down from a service into its signals. Grafana identifies Alloy as a collector with native pipelines for OpenTelemetry and Prometheus. The free plan includes up to 2,232 host hours per month and community support. Pro is listed at $0.03 a month, with a $19 monthly platform fee and $0.025 per host hour; host hours and application telemetry are billed at standard Grafana Cloud rates. Serverless usage is billed on telemetry ingested instead of host hours. The cloud service runs on Linux, macOS, Windows, and the web.