GNU gprof vs Grafana Cloud Application Observability
GNU gprof
sourceware.orgGrafana Cloud Application Observability
grafana.comSide by side
| Figure | GNU gprof | Grafana Cloud Application Observability |
|---|---|---|
| Price from | Free | $0.03/mo |
| Free plan | Yes | Yes |
| Free trial | — | — |
| Open source | — | — |
| Web | — | Yes |
| Windows | — | Yes |
| macOS | — | Yes |
| Linux | Yes | Yes |
| iOS | — | Yes |
| Android | — | Yes |
| API | — | Yes |
| Self-hosted | Yes | — |
| Plans published | 1 | 5 |
| Spec score · Profiling Software | 7.8 (#12) | 9.2 (#1) |
| License | The gprof manual is distributed under the GNU Free Documentation License version 1.3. | The Grafana open-source project is distributed under AGPL-3.0-only, with listed Apache-2.0 exceptions; Grafana Cloud itself is a managed service. |
| Purpose | GNU gprof analyzes profiling data to show which parts of a program take the most execution time. | Grafana Cloud Application Observability provides out-of-the-box application monitoring and uses OpenTelemetry and Prometheus data to support root-cause analysis. |
Plans
Grafana Cloud Application Observability
- FreeFree
- Pro$0.03 a month
- FreeFree
- Pro$0.03 a month
- EnterprisePriced on request
In their own words
GNU gprof
GNU gprof has no write-up on Specifiction yet; its figures are above.
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.