ClickStack vs Grafana Cloud Application Observability
ClickStack
clickhouse.comGrafana Cloud Application Observability
grafana.comSide by side
| Figure | ClickStack | Grafana Cloud Application Observability |
|---|---|---|
| Price from | $53/mo | $0.03/mo |
| Free plan | Yes | Yes |
| Free trial | Yes | — |
| Open source | Yes | — |
| Web | Yes | Yes |
| Windows | — | Yes |
| macOS | — | Yes |
| Linux | Yes | Yes |
| iOS | — | Yes |
| Android | — | Yes |
| API | Yes | Yes |
| Self-hosted | Yes | — |
| Plans published | 6 | 5 |
| Spec score · Log Monitoring Tools | 9.3 (#1) | 9.2 (#3) |
| Spec score · Log Management Software | 9.3 (#4) | 9.2 (#6) |
| Company legal name | Crunchbase identifies the maker as ClickHouse, Inc., a privately held for-profit company headquartered in Palo Alto, California. | Crunchbase lists Grafana Labs’ legal name as Raintank, Inc. |
| Documentation depth | The documentation navigation covers architecture, deployment, ingestion, configuration, TTLs, search, dashboards, SQL visualization, alerts, service maps, session replay, RBAC, API reference and an MCP server. | The documentation covers setup, instrumentation, pricing, cost optimization, troubleshooting, APIs, SDKs, dashboards, integrations, and signal exploration. |
| Free plan | Yes | Yes |
| Integrations | Documented partners include Bindplane, bitdrift, Odigos and Telflo for collector management, mobile telemetry, eBPF tracing and routing control. | Grafana Cloud connection tiles support Java, .NET, Beyla, Grafana Alloy, OTLP, and the upstream OpenTelemetry Collector. |
| Purpose | ClickStack is an open-source observability stack for OpenTelemetry that unifies logs, metrics, traces, session replays, and errors. | Grafana Cloud Application Observability provides out-of-the-box application monitoring and uses OpenTelemetry and Prometheus data to support root-cause analysis. |
| Security and compliance | ClickHouse’s trust center lists a HIPAA report, PCI DSS SAQ A, penetration test report, and vulnerability assessment report. | Grafana Cloud lists FedRAMP, NATSEC100, PCI DSS, A-LIGN, SOC Type II, and GDPR credentials or compliance claims. |
| What it does | ClickStack is an open-source observability stack for OpenTelemetry data covering logs, metrics, traces, errors and session replay. | Grafana Cloud Application Observability provides managed application performance monitoring by combining OpenTelemetry and Prometheus telemetry with Grafana Cloud insights. |
Plans
ClickStack
- ClickStack Open SourceFree
- ClickStack Open SourceFree
- Managed ClickStack trialFree
- Basic$53 a month
- Scale$437 a month
- Enterprise$571 a month
Grafana Cloud Application Observability
- FreeFree
- Pro$0.03 a month
- FreeFree
- Pro$0.03 a month
- EnterprisePriced on request
In their own words
ClickStack
ClickStack is an open-source observability stack for OpenTelemetry that brings logs, metrics, traces, session replays, and errors into one system. Its HyperDX interface provides Lucene-style search, SQL access, dashboards, alerts, event deltas, and event patterns. A bundled OpenTelemetry Collector handles native collection, while non-OTel wide event data can be used when it has a timestamp field. ClickStack stores data in ClickHouse and is designed for high-cardinality telemetry, with the product site describing sub-second queries even on petabytes of data. It supports self-hosted, hybrid, and cloud deployment. Managed ClickStack runs on ClickHouse Cloud with operations, scaling, upgrades, backups, reliability, authentication, and user management included. The managed offer advertises indefinite retention and storage below one cent per GB. An MCP server connects observability workflows with coding tools, collaboration services, runbooks, and custom agents.
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.